The Feminine Mystique

  The new sex-direction of women’s education was not, however, confined to any specific course or academic department. It was implicit in all the social sciences; but more than that, it became a part of education itself, not only because the English professor, or the guidance counselor, or the college president read Freud and Mead, but because education was the prime target of the new mystique—the education of American girls with, or like, boys. If the Freudians and the functionalists were right, educators were guilty of defeminizing American women, of dooming them to frustration as housewives and mothers, or to celibate careers, to life without orgasm. It was a damning indictment; many college presidents and educational theorists confessed their guilt without a murmur and fell into the sex-directed line. There were a few cries of outrage, of course, from the old-fashioned educators who still believed the mind was more important than the marriage bed, but they were often near retirement and soon to be replaced by younger, more thoroughly sex-indoctrinated teachers, or they were so wrapped up in their special subjects that they had little say in over-all school policies.

  The general educational climate was ripe for the new sex-directed line, with its emphasis on adjustment. The old aim of education, the development of intelligence through vigorous mastery of the major intellectual disciplines, was already in disfavor among the child-centered educators. Teachers College at Columbia was the natural breeding ground for educational functionalism. As psychology and anthropology and sociology permeated the total scholarly atmosphere, education for femininity also spread from Mills, Stephens and the finishing schools (where its basis was more traditional than theoretical) to the proudest bastions of the women’s Ivy League, the colleges which pioneered higher education for women in America, and were noted for their uncompromising intellectual standards.

  Instead of opening new horizons and wider worlds to able women, the sex-directed educator moved in to teach them adjustment within the world of home and children. Instead of teaching truths to counter the popular prejudices of the past, or critical ways of thinking against which prejudice cannot survive, the sex-directed educator handed girls a sophisticated soup of uncritical prescriptions and presentiments, far more binding on the mind and prejudicial to the future than all the traditional do’s and don’ts. Most of it was done consciously and for the best of helpful reasons by educators who really believed the mystique as the social scientists handed it to them. If a male professor or college president did not find this mystique a positive comfort, a confirmation of his own prejudices, he still had no reason not to believe it.

  The few college presidents and professors who were women either fell into line or had their authority—as teachers and as women—questioned. If they were spinsters, if they had not had babies, they were forbidden by the mystique to speak as women. (Modern Woman: The Lost Sex would forbid them even to teach.) The brilliant scholar, who did not marry but inspired many generations of college women to the pursuit of truth, was sullied as an educator of women. She was not named president of the women’s college whose intellectual tradition she carried to its highest point; the girls’ education was put in the hands of a handsome, husbandly man, more suitable to indoctrinating girls for their proper feminine role. The scholar often left the women’s college to head a department in a great university, where the potential Ph.D.’s were safely men, for whom the lure of scholarship, the pursuit of truth, was not deemed a deterrent to sexual fulfillment.

  In terms of the new mystique, the woman scholar was suspect, simply by virtue of being one. She was not just working to support her home; she must have been guilty of an unfeminine commitment, to have kept working in her field all those hard, grinding, ill-paid years to the Ph.D. In self-defense she sometimes adopted frilly blouses or another innocuous version of the feminine protest. (At psychoanalytic conventions, an observer once noticed, the lady analysts camouflage themselves with pretty, flowery, smartly feminine hats that would make the casual suburban housewife look positively masculine.) M.D. or Ph.D., those hats and frilly blouses say, let nobody question our femininity. But the fact is, their femininity was questioned. One famous women’s college adopted in defense the slogan, “We are not educating women to be scholars; we are educating them to be wives and mothers.” (The girls themselves finally got so tired of repeating this slogan in full that they abbreviated it to “WAM.”)

  In building the sex-directed curriculum, not everyone went as far as Lynn White, former president of Mills College, but if you started with the premise that women should no longer be educated like men, but for their role as women, you almost had to end with his curriculum—which amounted to replacing college chemistry with a course in advanced cooking.

  The sex-directed educator begins by accepting education’s responsibility for the frustration, general and sexual, of American women.

  On my desk lies a letter from a young mother, a few years out of college:

  “I have come to realize that I was educated to be a successful man and must now learn by myself to be a successful woman.” The basic irrelevance of much of what passes as women’s education in America could not be more compactly phrased…. The failure of our educational system to take into account these simple and basic differences between the life patterns of average men and women is at least in part responsible for the deep discontent and restlessness which affects millions of women….

  It would seem that if women are to restore their self-respect they must reverse the tactics of the older feminism which indignantly denied inherent differences in the intellectual and emotional tendencies of men and women. Only by recognizing and insisting upon the importance of such differences can women save themselves, in their own eyes, of conviction as inferiors.4

  The sex-directed educator equates as masculine our “vastly overrated cultural creativity,” “our uncritical acceptance of ‘progress’ as good in itself,” “egotistic individualism,” “innovation,” “abstract construction,” “quantitative thinking”—of which, of course, the dread symbol is either communism or the atom bomb. Against these, equated as feminine, are “the sense of persons, of the immediate, of intangible qualitative relationships, an aversion for statistics and quantities,” “the intuitive,” “the emotional,” and all the forces that “cherish” and “conserve” what is “good, true, beautiful, useful, and holy.”

  A feminized higher education might include sociology, anthropology, psychology. (“These are studies little concerned with the laurel-crowned genius of the strong man,” praises the educational protector of femininity. “They are devoted to exploring the quiet and unspectacular forces of society and of the mind…. They embrace the feminine preoccupation with conserving and cherishing.”) It would hardly include either pure science (since abstract theory and quantitative thinking are unfeminine) or fine art, which is masculine, “flamboyant and abstract.” The applied or minor arts, however, are feminine: ceramics, textiles, work shaped more by the hand than the brain. “Women love beauty as much as men do but they want a beauty connected with the processes of living…the hand is as remarkable and as worthy of respect as the brain.”

  The sex-directed educator cites approvingly Cardinal Tisserant’s saying, “Women should be educated so that they can argue with their husbands.” Let us stop altogether professional training for women, he insists: all women must be educated to be housewives. Even home economics and domestic science, as they are now taught at college, are masculine because “they have been pitched at the level of professional training.”5

  Here is a truly feminine education:

  One may prophesy with confidence that as women begin to make their distinctive wishes felt in curricular terms, not merely will every women’s college and coeducational institution offer a firm nuclear course in the Family, but from it will radiate curricular series dealing with food and nutrition, textiles and clothing, health and nursing, house planning and interior decoration, garden design and applied botany, and child-development…. Would it be impossible to present a
beginning course in foods as exciting and as difficult to work up after college, as a course in post-Kantian philosophy would be?…Let’s abandon talk of proteins, carbohydrates and the like, save inadvertently, as for example, when we point out that a British hyper-boiled Brussel sprout is not merely inferior in flavor and texture, but in vitamine content. Why not study the theory and preparation of a Basque paella, of a well-marinated shish kebob, lamb kidneys sauteed in sherry, an authoritative curry, the use of herbs, even such simple sophistications as serving cold artichokes with fresh milk.6

  The sex-directed educator is hardly impressed by the argument that a college curriculum should not be contaminated or diluted with subjects like cooking or manual training, which can be taught successfully at the high-school level. Teach them to the girls in high school, and “with greater intensity and imagination” again in college. Boys, also, should get some “family-minded” education, but not in their valuable college time; early high-school manual training is enough to “enable them, in future years to work happily at a bench in the garage or in the garden, surrounded by an admiring circle of children…or at the barbecue.”7

  This kind of education, in the name of life-adjustment, became a fact on many campuses, high-school as well as college. It was not dreamed up to turn back the growth of women, but it surely helped. When American educators finally began to investigate the waste of our national resources of creative intelligence, they found that the lost Einsteins, Schweitzers, Roosevelts, Edisons, Fords, Fermis, Frosts were feminine. Of the brightest forty per cent of U.S. high-school graduates, only half went on to college: of the half who stopped, two out of three were girls.8 When Dr. James B. Conant went across the nation to find out what was wrong with the American high school, he discovered too many students were taking easy how-to courses which didn’t really stretch their minds. Again, most of those who should have been studying physics, advanced algebra, analytic geometry, four years of language—and were not—were girls. They had the intelligence, the special gift which was not sex-directed, but they also had the sex-directed attitude that such studies were “unfeminine.”

  Sometimes a girl wanted to take a hard subject, but was advised by a guidance counselor or teacher that it was a waste of time—as, for instance, the girl in a good Eastern high school who wanted to be an architect. Her counselor strongly advised her against applying for admission anywhere in architecture, on the grounds that women are rare in that profession, and she would never get in anyhow. She stubbornly applied to two universities who give degrees in architecture; both, to her amazement, accepted her. Then her counselor told her that even though she had been accepted, there was really no future for women in architecture; she would spend her life in a drafting room. She was advised to go to a junior college where the work would be much easier than in architecture and where she would learn all she needed to know when she married.9

  The influence of sex-directed education was perhaps even more insidious on the high-school level than it was in the colleges, for many girls who were subjected to it never got to college. I picked up a lesson plan for one of these life-adjustment courses now taught in junior high in the suburban county where I live. Entitled “The Slick Chick,” it gives functional “do’s and don’ts for dating” to girls of eleven, twelve, thirteen—a kind of early or forced recognition of their sexual function. Though many have nothing yet with which to fill a brassiere, they are told archly not to wear a sweater without one, and to be sure to wear slips so boys can’t see through their skirts. It is hardly surprising that by the sophomore year, many bright girls in this high school are more than conscious of their sexual function, bored with all the subjects in school, and have no ambition other than to marry and have babies. One cannot help wondering (especially when some of these girls get pregnant as high-school sophomores and marry at fifteen or sixteen) if they have not been educated for their sexual function too soon, while their other abilities go unrecognized.

  This stunting of able girls from nonsexual growth is nationwide. Of the top ten per cent of graduates of Indiana high schools in 1955, only fifteen per cent of the boys did not continue their education: thirty-six per cent of the girls did not go on.10 In the very years in which higher education has become a necessity for almost everyone who wants a real function in our exploding society, the proportion of women among college students has declined, year by year. In the fifties, women also dropped out of college at a faster rate than the men: only thirty-seven per cent of the women graduated, in contrast to fifty-five per cent of the men.11 By the sixties, an equal proportion of boys was dropping out of college.12 But, in this era of keen competition for college seats, the one girl who enters college for every two boys is “more highly selected,” and less likely to be dropped from college for academic failure. Women drop out, as David Riesman says, either to marry or because they fear too much education is a “marriage bar.” The average age of first marriage, in the last fifteen years, has dropped to the youngest in the history of this country, the youngest in any of the countries of the Western world, almost as young as it used to be in the so-called underdeveloped countries. In the new nations of Asia and Africa, with the advent of science and education, the marriage age of women is now rising. Today, thanks in part to the functional sex-direction of women’s education, the annual rate of population increase in the United States is among the highest in the world—nearly three times that of the Western European nations, nearly double Japan’s, and close on the heels of Africa and India.13

  The sex-directed educators have played a dual role in this trend: by actively educating girls to their sexual function (which perhaps they would fulfill without such education, in a way less likely to prevent their growth in other directions); and by abdicating their responsibility for the education of women, in the strict intellectual sense. With or without education, women are likely to fulfill their biological role, and experience sexual love and motherhood. But without education, women or men are not likely to develop deep interests that go beyond biology.

  Education should, and can, make a person “broad in outlook, and open to new experience, independent and disciplined in his thinking, deeply committed to some productive activity, possessed of convictions based on understanding of the world and on his own integration of personality.”14 The main barrier to such growth in girls is their own rigid preconception of woman’s role, which sex-directed educators reinforce, either explicitly or by not facing their own ability, and responsibility, to break through it.

  Such a sex-directed impasse is revealed in the massive depths of that thousand-page study, The American College, when “motivational factors in college entrance” are analyzed from research among 1,045 boys and 1,925 girls. The study recognizes that it is the need to be independent, and find identity in society not primarily through the sex role but through work, which makes boys grow in college. The girl’s evasion of growth in college is explained by the fact that for a girl, identity is exclusively sexual; for the girl, college itself is seen even by these scholars not as the key to larger identity but as a disguised “outlet for sexual impulses.”

  The identity issue for the boy is primarily an occupational-vocational question, while self-definition for the girl depends more directly on marriage. A number of differences follow from this distinction. The girl’s identity centers more exclusively on her sex-role—whose wife will I be, what kind of a family will we have; while the boy’s self-definition forms about two nuclei; he will be a husband and father (his sex-role identity) but he will also and centrally be a worker. A related difference follows and has particular importance at adolescence: the occupational identity is by and large an issue of personal choice that can begin early and to which all of the resources of rational and thoughtful planning can be directed. The boy can begin to think and plan for this aspect of identity early…. The sexual identity, so critical for feminine development, permits no such conscious or orderly effort. It is a mysterious and romantic issue, freighted with fiction,
mystique, illusion. A girl may learn certain surface skills and activities of the feminine role, but she will be thought ungraceful and unfeminine if her efforts toward femininity are too clearly conscious. The real core of feminine settlement—living in intimacy with a beloved man—is a future prospect, for which there is no rehearsal. We find that boys and girls in adolescence have different approaches to the future; boys are actively planning and testing for future work identities, apparently sifting alternatives in an effort to find the role that will fit most comfortably their particular skills and interests, temperamental characteristics and needs. Girls, in contrast, are absorbed much more in phantasy, particularly phantasy about boys and popularity, marriage and love.

  The dream of college apparently serves as a substitute for more direct preoccupation with marriage: girls who do not plan to go to college are more explicit in their desire to marry, and have a more developed sense of their own sex role. They are more aware of and more frankly concerned with sexuality.…The view of phantasy as an outlet for sexual impulses follows the general psychoanalytic conception that impulses denied direct expression will seek some disguised mode of gratification.15