The Feminine Mystique

by Friedan, Betty

  Other clues to the real problem of the mother-child relationship in America have been seen by social scientists without ever penetrating the mystique. A sociologist named Arnold Green almost by accident discovered another dimension to the relationship between nurturing mother love, or its lack, and neurosis.

  It seems that in the Massachusetts industrial town where Green grew up an entire generation was raised under psychological conditions which should have been traumatic: conditions of irrational, vengeful, even brutal parental authority, and a complete lack of “love” between parent and child. The parents, Polish immigrants, tried to enforce rigid old-world rules which their American children did not respect. The children’s ridicule, anger, contempt made the bewildered parents resort to a “vengeful, personal, irrational authority which no longer finds support in the future hopes and ambitions of the children.”

  In exasperation and fear of losing all control over their Americanized youngsters, parents apply the fist and whip rather indiscriminately. The sound of blows, screams, howls, vexations, wails of torment and hatred are so commonplace along the rows of dilapidated millhouses that the passersby pay them scant attention.13

  Surely, here were the seeds of future neuroses, as all good post-Freudian parents in America understand them. But to Green’s amazement, when he went back and checked as a sociologist on the neuroses which according to the book must surely be flourishing, he found no known case of Army rejection because of psychoneurosis in the local Polish community, and in the overt behavior of an entire generation in the village “no expression of anxiety, guilty feelings, rigidity of response, repressed hostility—the various symptoms described as characteristic of the basic neurotic character.” Green wondered. Why didn’t those children become neurotic, why weren’t they destroyed by that brutal, irrational parental authority?

  They had none of that constant and watchful nurturing love that is urged on middle-class mothers by the child psychologizers; their mothers, like their fathers, worked all day in the factory; they had been left in the care of older sisters or brothers, had run free in fields and woods, had avoided their parents wherever possible. In these families, stress was placed upon work, rather than personal sentiment: “respect, not love is the tie that binds.” Demonstrations of affection were not altogether lacking, Green said, “but they had little in common with the definitions of parent-child love found in the middle-class women’s magazines.”

  It occurred to the sociologist that perhaps the very absence of this omnipresent nurturing mother love might explain why these children did not suffer the neurotic symptoms so commonly found in the sons of middle-class parents. The Polish parents’ authority, however brutal and irrational, was “external to the core of the self,” as Green put it. The Polish parents did not have the technique or opportunity to “absorb the personality of the child.” Perhaps, Green suggested, “lack of love” and “irrational authority” do not in themselves cause neurosis, but only within a certain context of “personality absorption”—the physical and emotional blanketing of the child which brings about that slavish dependence upon the parents found among children of the native white American urban college-educated middle class.

  Is “lack of love” the cause of neurosis, or the middle-class parental nurturing which “absorbs” the child’s independent self, and creates in him an excessive need for love? Psychoanalysts had always concentrated on the seeds of neuroses; Green wanted to “find out what there is to being a modern middle-class parent that fertilizes the soil of the child’s neurosis, however the individual seed is planted.”

  As usual, the arrow pointed unerringly to the mother. But Green was not concerned with helping the modern American mother adjust to her role; on the contrary, he found that she lacked any real “role” as a woman in modern society.

  She enters marriage and perhaps bears a child with no definite role and series of functions, as formerly…. She feels inferior to man because comparatively she has been and is more restricted. The extent of the actual emancipation of women has been commonly exaggerated….

  Through a “good” marriage the middle-class girl attains far more status than is possible through a career of her own. But the period of phantom dalliance with a career, or an embarkation upon one, leave her ill-fitted for the drudgery of housecleaning, diapers, and the preparation of meals…. The mother has little to do, in or out of the home; she is her single child’s sole companion. Modern “scientific child care” enforces a constant supervision and diffused worrying over the child’s health, eating spinach, and ego development; this is complicated by the fact that much energy is spent forcing early walking, toilet-training, talking, because in an intensively competitive milieu middle-class parents from the day of birth are constantly comparing their own child’s development with that of the neighbors’ children.

  Perhaps, Green speculates, middle-class mothers

  …have made “love” of supreme importance in their relation to the child, theirs for him and his for them, partly because of the love-complex of our time, which is particularly ramified within the middle class, and partly as a compensation for the many sacrifices they have made for the child. The child’s need for love is experienced precisely because he has been conditioned to need it…conditioned to a slavish emotional dependence…. Not the need for parental love, but the constant threat of its withdrawal after the child has been conditioned to the need, lies at the root of the most characteristic modern neuroses; Mamma won’t like you if you don’t eat your spinach, or stop dribbling your milk, or get down from that davenport. To the extent that a child’s personality has been absorbed, he will be thrown into a panic by this sort of treatment…. In such a child, a disapproving glance may produce more terror—than a twenty-minute lashing in little Stanislaus Wojcik.

  Green was only concerned with mothers in terms of their effect on their sons. But it occurred to him that “personality absorption” alone cannot, after all, explain neurosis. Because otherwise, he says, middle-class women of the previous generation would all have suffered such neuroses—and nobody recorded such suffering in those women. Certainly the personality of the middle-class girl of the late nineteenth century was “absorbed” by her parents, by the demands of “love” and unquestioning obedience. However, “the rate of neurosis under those conditions was probably not too high,” the sociologist concludes, because even though the woman’s own personality was “absorbed,” it was consistently absorbed “within a role which changed relatively slightly from childhood into adolescence, courtship, and finally into marriage” she never could be her own person.

  The modern middle-class boy, on the other hand, is forced to compete with others, to achieve—which demands a certain degree of independence, firmness of purpose, aggressiveness, self-assertion. Thus, in the boy, the mother-nourished need for everyone to love him, the inability to erect his own values and purposes is neurotic, but not in the girl.

  It is provocative, this speculation made by a sociologist in 1946, but it never penetrated far beyond the inner circles of social theory, never permeated the bulwarks of the feminine mystique, despite increasing national awareness that something was wrong with American mothers. Even this sociologist, who managed to get behind the mystique and see children in terms other than their need for more mother love, was concerned only with the problem of the sons. But was not the real implication that the role of the middle-class American housewife forces many a mother to smother, absorb, the personality of both her sons and daughters? Many saw the tragic waste of American sons who were made incapable of achievement, individual values, independent action; but they did not see as tragic the waste of the daughters, or of the mothers to whom it happened generations earlier. If a culture does not expect human maturity from its women, it does not see its lack as a waste, or as a possible cause of neurosis or conflict. The insult, the real reflection on our culture’s definition of the role of women, is that as a nation we only noticed that something was wrong with women wh
en we saw its effects on their sons.

  Is it surprising that we misunderstood what was really wrong? How could we understand it, in the static terms of functionalism and adjustment? Educators and sociologists applauded when the personality of the middle-class girl was “consistently” absorbed from childhood through adulthood by her “role as woman.” Long live the role, if adjustment is served. The waste of a human self was not considered a phenomenon to be studied in women—only the frustration caused by “cultural inconsistencies in role-conditioning,” as the great social scientist Ruth Benedict described the plight of American women. Even women themselves, who felt the misery, the helplessness of their lack of self, did not understand the feeling; it became the problem that has no name. And in their shame and guilt they turned again to their children to escape the problem. So the circle completes itself, from mother to sons and daughters, generation after generation.

  The unremitting attack on women which has become an American preoccupation in recent years might also stem from the same escapist motives that sent men and women back to the security of the home. Mother love is said to be sacred in America, but with all the reverence and lip service she is paid, mom is a pretty safe target, no matter how correctly or incorrectly her failures are interpreted. No one has ever been blacklisted or fired for an attack on “the American woman.” Apart from the psychological pressures from mothers or wives, there have been plenty of nonsexual pressures in the America of the last decade—the compromising, never-ceasing competition, the anonymous and often purposeless work in the big organization—that also kept a man from feeling like a man. Safer to take it out on his wife and his mother than to recognize a failure in himself or in the sacred American way of life. The men were not always kidding when they said their wives were lucky to be able to stay home all day. It was also soothing to rationalize the rat race by telling themselves that they were in it “for the wife and kids.” And so men re-created their own childhood in suburbia, and made mothers of their wives. Men fell for the mystique without a murmur of dissent. It promised them mothers for the rest of their lives, both as a reason for their being and as an excuse for their failures. Is it so strange that boys who grow up with too much mother love become men who can never get enough?

  But why did women sit still for this barrage of blame? When a culture has erected barrier after barrier against women as separate selves; when a culture has erected legal, political, social, economic and educational barriers to women’s own acceptance of maturity—even after most of those barriers are down it is still easier for a woman to seek the sanctuary of the home. It is easier to live through her husband and children than to make a road of her own in the world. For she is the daughter of that same mom who made it so hard for girl as well as boy to grow up. And freedom is a frightening thing. It is frightening to grow up finally and be free of passive dependence. Why should a woman bother to be anything more than a wife and mother if all the forces of her culture tell her she doesn’t have to, will be better off not to, grow up?

  And so the American woman made her mistaken choice. She ran back home again to live by sex alone, trading in her individuality for security. Her husband was drawn in after her, and the door was shut against the outside world. They began to live the pretty lie of the feminine mystique, but could either of them really believe it? She was, after all, an American woman, an irreversible product of a culture that stops just short of giving her a separate identity. He was, after all, an American man whose respect for individuality and freedom of choice are his nation’s pride. They went to school together; he knows who she is. Does his meek willingness to wax the floor and wash the dishes when he comes home tired on the 6:55 hide from both their guilty awareness of the reality behind the pretty lie? What keeps them believing it, in spite of the warning signs that have cropped up all over the suburban lot? What keeps the women home? What force in our culture is strong enough to write “Occupation: housewife” so large that all the other possibilities for women have been almost obscured?

  Powerful forces in this nation must be served by those pretty domestic pictures that stare at us everywhere, forbidding a woman to use her own abilities in the world. The preservation of the feminine mystique in this sense could have implications that are not sexual at all. When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women’s passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.

  The Sexual Sell

  Some months ago, as I began to fit together the puzzle of women’s retreat to home, I had the feeling I was missing something. I could trace the routes by which sophisticated thought circled back on itself to perpetuate an obsolete image of femininity; I could see how that image meshed with prejudice and misinterpreted frustrations to hide the emptiness of “Occupation: housewife” from women themselves.

  But what powers it all? If, despite the nameless desperation of so many American housewives, despite the opportunities open to all women now, so few have any purpose in life other than to be a wife and mother, somebody, something pretty powerful must be at work. The energy behind the feminist movement was too dynamic merely to have trickled dry; it must have been turned off, diverted, by something more powerful than that underestimated power of women.

  There are certain facts of life so obvious and mundane that one never talks about them. Only the child blurts out: “Why do people in books never go to the toilet?” Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house. In all the talk of femininity and woman’s role, one forgets that the real business of America is business. But the perpetuation of housewifery, the growth of the feminine mystique, makes sense (and dollars) when one realizes that women are the chief customers of American business. Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives.

  I have no idea how it happened. Decision-making in industry is not as simple, as rational, as those who believe the conspiratorial theories of history would have it. I am sure the heads of General Foods, and General Electric, and General Motors, and Macy’s and Gimbel’s and the assorted directors of all the companies that make detergents and electric mixers, and red stoves with rounded corners, and synthetic furs, and waxes, and hair coloring, and patterns for home sewing and home carpentry, and lotions for detergent hands, and bleaches to keep the towels pure white, never sat down around a mahogany conference table in a board room on Madison Avenue or Wall Street and voted on a motion: “Gentlemen, I move, in the interests of all, that we begin a concerted fifty-billion-dollar campaign to stop this dangerous movement of American women out of the home. We’ve got to keep them housewives, and let’s not forget it.”

  A thinking vice-president says: “Too many women getting educated. Don’t want to stay home. Unhealthy. If they all get to be scientists and such, they won’t have time to shop. But how can we keep them home? They want careers now.”

  “We’ll liberate them to have careers at home,” the new executive with horn-rimmed glasses and the Ph.D. in psychology suggests. “We’ll make home-making creative.”

  Of course, it didn’t happen quite like that. It was not an economic conspiracy directed against women. It was a byproduct of our general confusion lately of means with ends; just something that happened to women when the business of producing and selling and investing in business for profit—which is merely the way our economy is organized to serve man’s needs efficiently—began to be confused with the purpose of our nation, the end of life itself. No more surprising, the subversion of women’s lives in America to the ends of business, than the subversion of the sciences of human behavior to the business of deluding women about their real needs. It would take a clever economist to figure out what would keep our affluent economy going if the housewife market began to fall of
f, just as an economist would have to figure out what to do if there were no threat of war.

  It is easy to see why it happened. I learned how it happened when I went to see a man who is paid approximately a million dollars a year for his professional services in manipulating the emotions of American women to serve the needs of business. This particular man got in on the ground floor of the hidden-persuasion business in 1945 and kept going. The headquarters of his institute for motivational manipulation is a baronial mansion in upper Westchester. The walls of a ballroom two stories high are filled with steel shelves holding a thousand-odd studies for business and industry, 300,000 individual “depth interviews,” mostly with American housewives.1

  He let me see what I wanted, said I could use anything that was not confidential to a specific company. Nothing there for anyone to hide, to feel guilty about—only, in page after page of those depth studies, a shrewd cheerful awareness of the empty, purposeless, uncreative, even sexually joyless lives that most Amercan housewives lead. In his own unabashed terms, this most helpful of hidden persuaders showed me the function served by keeping American women housewives—the reservoir that their lack of identity, lack of purpose, creates, to be manipulated into dollars at the point of purchase.