Adlai Stevenson, in a commencement address at Smith College in 1955, reprinted in Woman’s Home Companion (September, 1955), dismissed the desire of educated women to play their own political part in “the crises of the age.” Modern woman’s participation in politics is through her role as wife and mother, said the spokesman of democratic liberalism: “Women, especially educated women, have a unique opportunity to influence us, man and boy.” The only problem is woman’s failure to appreciate that her true part in the political crisis is as wife and mother.
Once immersed in the very pressing and particular problems of domesticity, many women feel frustrated and far apart from the great issues and stirring debate for which their education has given them understanding and relish. Once they wrote poetry. Now it’s the laundry list. Once they discussed art and philosophy until late in the night. Now they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the dishes are finished. There is, often, a sense of contraction, of closing horizons and lost opportunities. They had hoped to play their part in the crises of the age. But what they do is wash the diapers.
The point is that whether we talk of Africa, Islam or Asia, women “never had it so good” as you. In short, far from the vocation of marriage and motherhood leading you away from the great issues of our day, it brings you back to their very center and places upon you an infinitely deeper and more intimate responsibility than that borne by the majority of those who hit the headlines and make the news and live in such a turmoil of great issues that they end by being totally unable to distinguish which issues are really great.
Woman’s political job is to “inspire in her home a vision of the meaning of life and freedom…to help her husband find values that will give purpose to his specialized daily chores…to teach her children the uniqueness of each individual human being.”
This assignment for you, as wives and mothers, you can do in the living room with a baby in your lap or in the kitchen with a can opener in your hand. If you’re clever, maybe you can even practice your saving arts on that unsuspecting man while he’s watching television. I think there is much you can do about our crisis in the humble role of housewife. I could wish you no better vocation than that.
Thus the logic of the feminine mystique redefined the very nature of woman’s problem. When woman was seen as a human being of limitless human potential, equal to man, anything that kept her from realizing her full potential was a problem to be solved: barriers to higher education and political participation, discrimination or prejudice in law or morality. But now that woman is seen only in terms of her sexual role, the barriers to the realization of her full potential, the prejudices which deny her full participation in the world, are no longer problems. The only problems now are those that might disturb her adjustment as a housewife. So career is a problem, education is a problem, political interest, even the very admission of women’s intelligence and individuality is a problem. And finally there is the problem that has no name, a vague undefined wish for “something more” than washing dishes, ironing, punishing and praising the children. In the women’s magazines, it is solved either by dyeing one’s hair blonde or by having another baby. “Remember, when we were all children, how we all planned to ‘be something’?” says a young housewife in the Ladies’ Home Journal (February, 1960). Boasting that she has worn out six copies of Dr. Spock’s baby-care book in seven years, she cries, “I’m lucky! Lucky! I’M SO GLAD TO BE A WOMAN!”
In one of these stories (“Holiday,” Mademoiselle, August, 1949) a desperate young wife is ordered by her doctor to get out of the house one day a week. She goes shopping, tries on dresses, looks in the mirror wondering which one her husband, Sam, will like.
Always Sam, like a Greek chorus in the back of her head. As if she herself hadn’t a definiteness of her own, a clarity that was indisputably hers…. Suddenly she couldn’t make the difference between pleated and gored skirts of sufficient importance to fix her decision. She looked at herself in the full-length glass, tall, getting thicker around the hips, the lines of her face beginning to slip. She was twenty-nine, but she felt middle-aged, as if a great many years had passed and there wasn’t very much yet to come…which was ridiculous, for Ellen was only three. There was her whole future to plan for, and perhaps another child. It was not a thing to be put off too long.
When the young housewife in “The Man Next to Me” (Redbook, November, 1948) discovers that her elaborate dinner party didn’t help her husband get a raise after all, she is in despair. (“You should say I helped. You should say I’m good for something…Life was like a puzzle with a piece missing, and the piece was me, and I couldn’t figure my place in it at all.”) So she dyes her hair blonde, and when her husband reacts satisfactorily in bed to the new “blonde me,” she “felt a new sense of peace, as if I’d answered the question within myself.”
Over and over again, stories in women’s magazines insist that woman can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats that act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no way she can even dream about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife. And the documentary articles play back new young housewives, grown up under the mystique, who do not have even that “question within myself.” Says one, described in “How America Lives” (Ladies’ Home Journal, June, 1959): “If he doesn’t want me to wear a certain color or a certain kind of dress, then I truly don’t want to, either. The thing is, whatever he has wanted is what I also want…. I don’t believe in fifty-fifty marriages.” Giving up college and job to marry at eighteen, with no regrets, she “never tried to enter into the discussion when the men were talking. She never disputed her husband in anything…. She spent a great deal of time looking out the window at the snow, the rain, and the gradual emergence of the first crocuses. One great time-passer and consolation was…embroidery: tiny stitches in gold-metal or silken thread which require infinite concentration.”
There is no problem, in the logic of the feminine mystique, for such a woman who has no wishes of her own, who defines herself only as wife and mother. The problem, if there is one, can only be her children’s, or her husband’s. It is the husband who complains to the marriage counselor (Redbook, June, 1955): “The way I see it, marriage takes two people, each living his own life and then putting them together. Mary seems to think we both ought to live one life: mine.” Mary insists on going with him to buy shirts and socks, tells the clerk his size and color. When he comes home at night, she asks with whom he ate lunch, where, what did he talk about? When he protests, she says, “But darling, I want to share your life, be part of all you do, that’s all.…I want us to be one, the way it says in the marriage service…” It doesn’t seem reasonable to the husband that “two people can ever be one the way Mary means it. It’s just plain ridiculous on the face of it. Besides, I wouldn’t like it. I don’t want to be so bound to another person that I can’t have a thought or an action that’s strictly my own.”
The answer to “Pete’s problem,” says Dr. Emily Mudd, the famous marriage counsellor, is to make Mary feel she is living his life: invite her to town to lunch with the people in his office once in a while, order his favorite veal dish for her and maybe find her some “healthy physical activity,” like swimming, to drain off her excess energy. It is not Mary’s problem that she has no life of her own.
The ultimate, in housewife happiness, is finally achieved by the Texas housewife, described in “How America Lives” (Ladies’ Home Journal, October, 1960), who “sits on a pale aqua satin sofa gazing out her picture window at the street. Even at this hour of the morning (it is barely nine-o’clock), she is wearing rouge, powder and lipstick, and her cotton dress is immaculately fresh.” She says proudly: “By 8:30 A.M., when my youngest goes to school, my whole house is clean and neat and I am dressed for the day. I am free to play bridge
, attend club meetings, or stay home and read, listen to Beethoven, and just plain loaf.
“Sometimes, she washes and dries her hair before sitting down at a bridge table at 1:30. Mornings she is having bridge at her house are the busiest, for then she must get out the tables, cards, tallies, prepare fresh coffee and organize lunch…. During the winter months, she may play as often as four days a week from 9:30 to 3 P.M…. Janice is careful to be home, before her sons return from school at 4 P.M.”
She is not frustrated, this new young housewife. An honor student at high school, married at eighteen, remarried and pregnant at twenty, she has the house she spent seven years dreaming and planning in detail. She is proud of her efficiency as a housewife, getting it all done by 8:30. She does the major housecleaning on Saturday, when her husband fishes and her sons are busy with Boy Scouts. (“There’s nothing else to do. No bridge games. It’s a long day for me.”)
“’I love my home,’ she says…. The pale gray paint in her L-shaped living and dining room is five years old, but still in perfect condition…. The pale peach and yellow and aqua damask upholstery looks spotless after eight years’ wear. ‘Sometimes, I feel I’m too passive, too content,’ remarks Janice, fondly, regarding the wristband of large family diamonds she wears even when the watch itself is being repaired.…Her favorite possession is her four-poster spool bed with a pink taffeta canopy. ‘I feel just like Queen Elizabeth sleeping in that bed,’ she says happily. (Her husband sleeps in another room, since he snores.)
“‘I’m so grateful for my blessings,’ she says. ‘Wonderful husband, handsome sons with dispositions to match, big comfortable house.…I’m thankful for my good health and faith in God and such material possessions as two cars, two TV’s and two fireplaces.’”
Staring uneasily at this image, I wonder if a few problems are not somehow better than this smiling empty passivity. If they are happy, these young women who live the feminine mystique, then is this the end of the road? Or are the seeds of something worse than frustration inherent in this image? Is there a growing divergence between this image of woman and human reality?
Consider, as a symptom, the increasing emphasis on glamour in the women’s magazines: the housewife wearing eye makeup as she vacuums the floor—“The Honor of Being a Woman.” Why does “Occupation: housewife” require such insistent glamorizing year after year? The strained glamour is in itself a question mark: the lady doth protest too much.
The image of woman in another era required increasing prudishness to keep denying sex. This new image seems to require increasing mindlessness, increasing emphasis on things: two cars, two TV’s, two fireplaces. Whole pages of women’s magazines are filled with gargantuan vegetables: beets, cucumbers, green peppers, potatoes, described like a love affair. The very size of their print is raised until it looks like a first-grade primer. The new McCall’s frankly assumes women are brainless, fluffy kittens, the Ladies’ Home Journal, feverishly competing, procures rock-and-roller Pat Boone as a counselor to teenagers; Redbook and the others enlarge their own type size. Does the size of the print mean that the new young women, whom all the magazines are courting, have only first-grade minds? Or does it try to hide the triviality of the content? Within the confines of what is now accepted as woman’s world, an editor may no longer be able to think of anything big to do except blow up a baked potato, or describe a kitchen as if it were the Hall of Mirrors; he is, after all, forbidden by the mystique to deal with a big idea. But does it not occur to any of the men who run the women’s magazines that their troubles may stem from the smallness of the image with which they are truncating women’s minds?
They are all in trouble today, the mass-circulation magazines, vying fiercely with each other and television to deliver more and more millions of women who will buy the things their advertisers sell. Does this frantic race force the men who make the images to see women only as thing-buyers? Does it force them to compete finally in emptying women’s minds of human thought? The fact is, the troubles of the image-makers seem to be increasing in direct proportion to the increasing mindlessness of their image. During the years in which that image has narrowed woman’s world down to the home, cut her role back to housewife, five of the mass-circulation magazines geared to women have ceased publication; others are on the brink.
The growing boredom of women with the empty, narrow image of the women’s magazines may be the most hopeful sign of the image’s divorce from reality. But there are more violent symptoms on the part of women who are committed to that image. In 1960, the editors of a magazine specifically geared to the happy young housewife—or rather to the new young couples (the wives are not considered separate from their husbands and children)—ran an article asking, “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped” (Redbook, September, 1960). As a promotion stunt, they invited young mothers with such a problem to write in the details, for $500. The editors were shocked to receive 24,000 replies. Can an image of woman be cut down to the point where it becomes itself a trap?
At one of the major women’s magazines, a woman editor, sensing that American housewives might be desperately in need of something to enlarge their world, tried for some months to convince her male colleagues to introduce a few ideas outside the home into the magazine. “We decided against it,” the man who makes the final decisions said. “Women are so completely divorced from the world of ideas in their lives now, they couldn’t take it.” Perhaps it is irrelevant to ask, who divorced them? Perhaps these Frankensteins no longer have the power to stop the feminine monster they have created.
I helped create this image. I have watched American women for fifteen years try to conform to it. But I can no longer deny my own knowledge of its terrible implications. It is not a harmless image. There may be no psychological terms for the harm it is doing. But what happens when women try to live according to an image that makes them deny their minds? What happens when women grow up in an image that makes them deny the reality of the changing world?
The material details of life, the daily burden of cooking and cleaning, of taking care of the physical needs of husband and children—these did indeed define a woman’s world a century ago when Americans were pioneers, and the American frontier lay in conquering the land. But the women who went west with the wagon trains also shared the pioneering purpose. Now the American frontiers are of the mind, and of the spirit. Love and children and home are good, but they are not the whole world, even if most of the words now written for women pretend they are. Why should women accept this picture of a half-life, instead of a share in the whole of human destiny? Why should women try to make housework “something more,” instead of moving on the frontiers of their own time, as American women moved beside their husbands on the old frontiers?
A baked potato is not as big as the world, and vacuuming the living room floor—with or without makeup—is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman’s full capacity. Women are human beings, not stuffed dolls, not animals. Down through the ages man has known that he was set apart from other animals by his mind’s power to have an idea, a vision, and shape the future to it. He shares a need for food and sex with other animals, but when he loves, he loves as a man, and when he discovers and creates and shapes a future different from his past, he is a man, a human being.
This is the real mystery: why did so many American women, with the ability and education to discover and create, go back home again, to look for “something more” in housework and rearing children? For, paradoxically, in the same fifteen years in which the spirited New Woman was replaced by the Happy Housewife, the boundaries of the human world have widened, the pace of world change has quickened, and the very nature of human reality has become increasingly free from biological and material necessity. Does the mystique keep American woman from growing with the world? Does it force her to deny reality, as a woman in a mental hospital must deny reality to believe she is a queen? Does it doom women to be displaced persons, if not virtual schizophrenics, in our
complex, changing world?
It is more than a strange paradox that as all professions are finally open to women in America, “career woman” has become a dirty word; that as higher education becomes available to any woman with the capacity for it, education for women has become so suspect that more and more drop out of high school and college to marry and have babies; that as so many roles in modern society become theirs for the taking, women so insistently confine themselves to one role. Why, with the removal of all the legal, political, economic, and educational barriers that once kept woman from being man’s equal, a person in her own right, an individual free to develop her own potential, should she accept this new image which insists she is not a person but a “woman,” by definition barred from the freedom of human existence and a voice in human destiny?
The feminine mystique is so powerful that women grow up no longer knowing that they have the desires and capacities the mystique forbids. But such a mystique does not fasten itself on a whole nation in a few short years, reversing the trends of a century, without cause. What gives the mystique its power? Why did women go home again?
The Crisis in Woman’s Identity
I discovered a strange thing, interviewing women of my own generation over the past ten years. When we were growing up, many of us could not see ourselves beyond the age of twenty-one. We had no image of our own future, of ourselves as women.
I remember the stillness of a spring afternoon on the Smith campus in 1942, when I came to a frightening dead end in my own vision of the future. A few days earlier, I had received a notice that I had won a graduate fellowship. During the congratulations, underneath my excitement, I felt a strange uneasiness; there was a question that I did not want to think about.