The Feminine Mystique

  I have called the major crisis of adolescence the identity crisis; it occurs in that period of the life cycle when each youth must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity, out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood; he must detect some meaningful resemblance between what he has come to see in himself and what his sharpened awareness tells him others judge and expect him to be…. In some people, in some classes, at some periods in history, the crisis will be minimal; in other people, classes and periods, the crisis will be clearly marked off as a critical period, a kind of “second birth,” apt to be aggravated either by widespread neuroticisms or by pervasive ideological unrest.1

  In this sense, the identity crisis of one man’s life may reflect, or set off, a rebirth, or new stage, in the growing up of mankind. “In some periods of his history, and in some phases of his life cycle, man needs a new ideological orientation as surely and sorely as he must have air and food,” said Erikson, focusing new light on the crisis of the young Martin Luther, who left a Catholic monastery at the end of the Middle Ages to forge a new identity for himself and Western man.

  The search for identity is not new, however, in American thought—though in every generation, each man who writes about it discovers it anew. In America, from the beginning, it has somehow been understood that men must thrust into the future; the pace has always been too rapid for man’s identity to stand still. In every generation, many men have suffered misery, unhappiness, and uncertainty because they could not take the image of the man they wanted to be from their fathers. The search for identity of the young man who can’t go home again has always been a major theme of American writers. And it has always been considered right in America, good, for men to suffer these agonies of growth, to search for and find their own identities. The farm boy went to the city, the garment-maker’s son became a doctor, Abraham Lincoln taught himself to read—these were more than rags-to-riches stories. They were an integral part of the American dream. The problem for many was money, race, color, class, which barred them from choice—not what they would be if they were free to choose.

  Even today a young man learns soon enough that he must decide who he wants to be. If he does not decide in junior high, in high school, in college, he must somehow come to terms with it by twenty-five or thirty, or he is lost. But this search for identity is seen as a greater problem now because more and more boys cannot find images in our culture—from their fathers or other men—to help them in their search. The old frontiers have been conquered, and the boundaries of the new are not so clearly marked. More and more young men in America today suffer an identity crisis for want of any image of man worth pursuing, for want of a purpose that truly realizes their human abilities.

  But why have theorists not recognized this same identity crisis in women? In terms of the old conventions and the new feminine mystique women are not expected to grow up to find out who they are, to choose their human identity. Anatomy is woman’s destiny, say the theorists of femininity; the identity of woman is determined by her biology.

  But is it? More and more women are asking themselves this question. As if they were waking from a coma, they ask, “Where am I…what am I doing here?” For the first time in their history, women are becoming aware of an identity crisis in their own lives, a crisis which began many generations ago, has grown worse with each succeeding generation, and will not end until they, or their daughters, turn an unknown corner and make of themselves and their lives the new image that so many women now so desperately need.

  In a sense that goes beyond any one woman’s life, I think this is the crisis of women growing up—a turning point from an immaturity that has been called femininity to full human identity. I think women had to suffer this crisis of identity, which began a hundred years ago, and have to suffer it still today, simply to become fully human.

  The Passionate Journey

  It was the need for a new identity that started women, a century ago, on that passionate journey, that vilified, misinterpreted journey away from home.

  It has been popular in recent years to laugh at feminism as one of history’s dirty jokes: to pity, sniggering, those old-fashioned feminists who fought for women’s rights to higher education, careers, the vote. They were neurotic victims of penis envy who wanted to be men, it is said now. In battling for women’s freedom to participate in the major work and decisions of society as the equals of men, they denied their very nature as women, which fulfills itself only through sexual passivity, acceptance of male domination, and nurturing motherhood.

  But if I am not mistaken, it is this first journey which holds the clue to much that has happened to women since. It is one of the strange blind spots of contemporary psychology not to recognize the reality of the passion that moved these women to leave home in search of new identity, or, staying home, to yearn bitterly for something more. Theirs was an act of rebellion, a violent denial of the identity of women as it was then defined. It was the need for a new identity that led those passionate feminists to forge new trails for women. Some of those trails were unexpectedly rough, some were dead ends, and some may have been false, but the need for women to find new trails was real.

  The problem of identity was new for women then, truly new. The feminists were pioneering on the front edge of woman’s evolution. They had to prove that women were human. They had to shatter, violently if necessary, the decorative Dresden figurine that represented the ideal woman of the last century. They had to prove that woman was not a passive, empty mirror, not a frilly, useless decoration, not a mindless animal, not a thing to be disposed of by others, incapable of a voice in her own existence, before they could even begin to fight for the rights women needed to become the human equals of men.

  Changeless woman, childish woman, a woman’s place is in the home, they were told. But man was changing; his place was in the world and his world was widening. Woman was being left behind. Anatomy was her destiny; she might die giving birth to one baby, or live to be thirty-five, giving birth to twelve, while man controlled his destiny with that part of his anatomy which no other animal had: his mind.

  Women also had minds. They also had the human need to grow. But the work that fed life and moved it forward was no longer done at home, and women were not trained to understand and work in the world. Confined to the home, a child among her children, passive, no part of her existence under her own control, a woman could only exist by pleasing man. She was wholly dependent on his protection in a world that she had no share in making: man’s world. She could never grow up to ask the simple human question, “Who am I? What do I want?”

  Even if man loved her as a child, a doll, a decoration; even if he gave her rubies, satin, velvets; even if she was warm in her house, safe with her children, would she not yearn for something more? She was, at that time, so completely defined as object by man, never herself as subject, “I,” that she was not even expected to enjoy or participate in the act of sex. “He took his pleasure with her…he had his way with her,” as the sayings went. Is it so hard to understand that emancipation, the right to full humanity, was important enough to generations of women, still alive or only recently dead, that some fought with their fists, and went to jail and even died for it? And for the right to human growth, some women denied their own sex, the desire to love and be loved by a man, and to bear children.

  It is a strangely unquestioned perversion of history that the passion and fire of the feminist movement came from man-hating, embittered, sex-starved spinsters, from castrating, unsexed non-women who burned with such envy for the male organ that they wanted to take it away from all men, or destroy them, demanding rights only because they lacked the power to love as women. Mary Wollstonecraft, Angelina Grimké, Ernestine Rose, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Julia Ward Howe, Margaret Sanger all loved, were loved, and married; many seem to have been as passionate in their relations with lover and husband, in an age when passion in
woman was as forbidden as intelligence, as they were in their battle for woman’s chance to grow to full human stature. But if they, and those like Susan Anthony, whom fortune or bitter experience turned away from marriage, fought for a chance for woman to fulfill herself, not in relation to man, but as an individual, it was from a need as real and burning as the need for love. (“What woman needs,” said Margaret Fuller, “is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely, and unimpeded to unfold such powers as were given her.”)

  The feminists had only one model, one image, one vision, of a full and free human being: man. For until very recently, only men (though not all men) had the freedom and the education necessary to realize their full abilities, to pioneer and create and discover, and map new trails for future generations. Only men had the vote: the freedom to shape the major decisions of society. Only men had the freedom to love, and enjoy love, and decide for themselves in the eyes of their God the problems of right and wrong. Did women want these freedoms because they wanted to be men? Or did they want them because they also were human?

  That this is what feminism was all about was seen symbolically by Henrik Ibsen. When he said in the play “A Doll’s House,” in 1879, that a woman was simply a human being, he struck a new note in literature. Thousands of women in middle-class Europe and America, in that Victorian time, saw themselves in Nora. And in 1960, almost a century later, millions of American housewives, who watched the play on television, also saw themselves as they heard Nora say:

  You have always been so kind to me. But our home has been nothing but a playroom. I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Papa’s doll child; and here the children have been my dolls. I thought it great fun when you played with me, just as they thought it fun when I played with them. That is what our marriage has been, Torvald…

  How am I fitted to bring up the children?…There is another task I must undertake first. I must try and educate myself—you are not the man to help me in that. I must do that for myself. And that is why I am going to leave you now…I must stand quite alone if I am to understand myself and everything about me. It is for that reason that I cannot remain with you any longer…

  Her shocked husband reminds Nora that woman’s “most sacred duties” are her duties to her husband and children. “Before all else, you are a wife and mother,” he says. And Nora answers:

  I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are—or, at all events, that I must try and become one. I know quite well, Torvald, that most people would think you right, and that views of that kind are to be found in books; but I can no longer content myself with what most people say or with what is found in books. I must think over things for myself and get to understand them…

  It is a cliché of our own time that women spent half a century fighting for “rights,” and the next half wondering whether they wanted them after all. “Rights” have a dull sound to people who have grown up after they have been won. But like Nora, the feminists had to win those rights before they could begin to live and love as human beings. Not very many women then, or even now, dared to leave the only security they knew—dared to turn their backs on their homes and husbands to begin Nora’s search. But a great many, then as now, must have found their existence as housewives so empty that they could no longer savor the love of husband and children.

  Some of them—and even a few men who realized that half the human race was denied the right to become fully human—set out to change the conditions that held women in bondage. Those conditions were summed up by the first Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, as woman’s grievances against man:

  He has compelled her to submit to laws in the formation of which she has no voice…. He has made her, if married, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right to property, even to the wages she earns…In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming to all intents and purposes her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement…. He closes against her all the avenues of wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine or law, she is not known. He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her…. He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account to man. He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God. He has endeavored in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

  It was these conditions, which the feminists set out to abolish a century ago, that made women what they were—“feminine,” as it was then, and is still, defined.

  It is hardly a coincidence that the struggle to free woman began in America on the heels of the Revolutionary War, and grew strong with the movement to free the slaves.1 Thomas Paine, the spokesman for the Revolution, was among the first to condemn in 1775 the position of women “even in countries where they may be esteemed the most happy, constrained in their desires in the disposal of their goods, robbed of freedom and will by the laws, the slaves of opinion…” During the Revolution, some ten years before Mary Wollstonecraft spearheaded the feminist movement in England, an American woman, Judith Sargent Murray, said woman needed knowledge to envision new goals and grow by reaching for them. In 1837, the year Mount Holyoke opened its doors to give women their first chance at education equal to man’s, American women were also holding their first national anti-slavery convention in New York. The women who formally launched the women’s rights movement at Seneca Falls met each other when they were refused seats at an anti-slavery convention in London. Shut off behind a curtain in the gallery, Elizabeth Stanton, on her honeymoon, and Lucretia Mott, demure mother of five, decided that it was not only the slaves who needed to be liberated.

  Whenever, wherever in the world there has been an upsurge of human freedom, women have won a share of it for themselves. Sex did not fight the French Revolution, free the slaves in America, overthrow the Russian Czar, drive the British out of India; but when the idea of human freedom moves the minds of men, it also moves the minds of women. The cadences of the Seneca Falls Declaration came straight from the Declaration of Independence:

  When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that they have hitherto occupied…. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.

  Feminism was not a dirty joke. The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a stage of evolution far short of their human capacity. “The domestic function of woman does not exhaust her powers,” the Rev. Theodore Parker preached in Boston in 1853. “To make one half the human race consume its energies in the functions of housekeeper, wife and mother is a monstrous waste of the most precious material God ever made.” And running like a bright and sometimes dangerous thread through the history of the feminist movement was also the idea that equality for woman was necessary to free both man and woman for true sexual fulfillment.2 For the degradation of woman also degraded marriage, love, all relations between man and woman. After the sexual revolution, said Robert Dale Owen, “then will the monopoly of sex perish with other unjust monopolies; and women will not be restricted to one virtue, and one passion, and one occupation.”3

  The women and men who started that revolution anticipated “no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation and ridicule.” And they got it. The first to speak out in public for women’s rights in America—Fanny Wright, daughter of a Scotc
h nobleman, and Ernestine Rose, daughter of a rabbi—were called respectively, “red harlot of infidelity” and “woman a thousand times below a prostitute.” The declaration at Seneca Falls brought such an outcry of “Revolution,” “Insurrection Among Women,” “The Reign of Petticoats,” “Blasphemy,” from newspapers and clergymen that the faint-hearted withdrew their signatures. Lurid reports of “free love” and “legalized adultery” competed with phantasies of court sessions, church sermons and surgical operations interrupted while a lady lawyer or minister or doctor hastily presented her husband with a baby.

  At every step of the way, the feminists had to fight the conception that they were violating the God-given nature of woman. Clergymen interrupted women’s-rights conventions, waving Bibles and quoting from the Scriptures: “Saint Paul said…and the head of every woman is man”…“Let your women be silent in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak”…“And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home; for it is a shame for women to speak in the church”…“But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence; for Adam was first formed, then Eve”…“Saint Peter said: likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands”…

  To give women equal rights would destroy that “milder gentler nature, which not only makes them shrink from, but disqualifies them for the turmoil and battle of public life,” a Senator from New Jersey intoned piously in 1866. “They have a higher and a holier mission. It is in retiracy to make the character of coming men. Their mission is at home, by their blandishments, and their love, to assuage the passions of men as they come in from the battle of life, and not themselves by joining in the contest to add fuel to the very flames.”