I used to let them turn over all the furniture and build houses in the living room that would stay up for days, so there was no place for me even to sit and read. I couldn’t bear to make them do what they didn’t want to do, even take medicine when they were sick. I couldn’t bear for them to be unhappy, or fight, or be angry at me. I couldn’t separate them from myself somehow. I was always understanding, patient. I felt guilty leaving them even for an afternoon. I worried over every page of their homework; I was always concentrating on being a good mother. I was proud that Steve didn’t get in fights with other kids in the neighborhood. I didn’t even realize anything was wrong until he started doing so badly in school, and having nightmares about death, and didn’t want to go to school because he was afraid of the other boys.
Another woman said:
I thought I had to be there every afternoon when they got home from school. I read all the books they were assigned so I could help them with their schoolwork. I haven’t been as happy and excited for years as the weeks I was helping Mary get her clothes ready for college. But I was so upset when she wouldn’t take art. That had been my dream, before I got married, of course. Maybe it’s better to live your own dreams.
I do not think it is a coincidence that the increasing passivity—and dreamlike unreality—of today’s children has become so widespread in the same years that the feminine mystique encouraged the great majority of American women—including the most able, and the growing numbers of the educated—to give up their own dreams, and even their own education, to live through their children. The “absorption” of the child’s personality by the middle-class mother—already apparent to a perceptive sociologist in the 1940’s—has inevitably increased during these years. Without serious interests outside the home, and with housework routinized by appliances, women could devote themselves almost exclusively to the cult of the child from cradle to kindergarten. Even when the children went off to school their mothers could share their lives, vicariously and sometimes literally. To many, their relationship with their children became a love affair, or a kind of symbiosis.
“Symbiosis” is a biological term; it refers to the process by which, to put it simply, two organisms live as one. With human beings, when the fetus is in the womb, the mother’s blood supports its life; the food she eats makes it grow, its oxygen comes from the air she breathes, and she discharges its wastes. There is a biological oneness in the beginning between mother and child, a wonderful and intricate process. But this relationship ends with the severing of the umbilical cord and the birth of the baby into the world as a separate human being.
At this point, child psychologists construe a psychological or emotional “symbiosis” between mother and child in which mother love takes the place of the amniotic fluid which perpetually bathed and fed the fetus in the womb. This emotional symbiosis feeds the psyche of the child until he is ready to be psychologically born, as it were. Thus the psychological writers—like the literary and religious eulogists of mother-love before the psychological era—depict a state in which mother and baby still retain a mystical oneness; they are not really separate beings. “Symbiosis,” in the hands of the psychological popularizers, strongly implied that the constant loving care of the mother was absolutely necessary for the child’s growth, for an indeterminate number of years.
But in recent years the “symbiosis” concept has crept with increasing frequency into the case histories of disturbed children. More and more of the new child pathologies seem to stem from that very symbiotic relationship with the mother, which has somehow kept children from becoming separate selves. These disturbed children seem to be “acting out” the mother’s unconscious wishes or conflicts—infantile dreams she had not outgrown or given up, but was still trying to gratify for herself in the person of her child.
The term “acting out” is used in psychotherapy to describe the behavior of a patient which is not in accord with the reality of a given situation, but is the expression of unconscious infantile wishes or phantasy. It sounds mystical to say that the unconscious infantile wishes the disturbed child is “acting out” are not his own but his mother’s. But therapists can trace the actual steps whereby the mother, who is using the child to gratify her own infantile dreams, unconsciously pushes him into the behavior which is destructive to his growth. The Westchester executive’s wife who had pushed her daughter at thirteen into sexual promiscuity had not only been grooming her in the development of her sexual charms—in a way that completely ignored the child’s own personality—but, even before her breasts began to develop, had implanted, by warnings and by a certain intensity of questioning, her expectation that the child would act out in real life her mother’s phantasies of prostitution.
It has never been considered pathological for mothers or fathers to act out their dreams through their children, except when the dream ignores and distorts the reality of the child. Novels, as well as case histories, have been written about the boy who became a bad businessman because that was his father’s dream for him, when he might have been a good violinist; or the boy who ends up in the mental hospital to frustrate his mother’s dream of him as a great violinist. If in recent years the process has begun to seem pathological, it is because the mothers’ dreams which the children are acting out have become increasingly infantile. These mothers have themselves become more infantile, and because they are forced to seek more and more gratification through the child, they are incapable of finally separating themselves from the child. Thus, it would seem, it is the child who supports life in the mother in that “symbiotic” relationship, and the child is virtually destroyed in the process.
This destructive symbiosis is literally built into the feminine mystique. And the process is progressive. It begins in one generation, and continues into the next, roughly as follows:
1. By permitting girls to evade tests of reality, and real commitments, in school and the world, by the promise of magical fulfillment through marriage, the feminine mystique arrests their development at an infantile level, short of personal identity, with an inevitably weak core of self.
2. The greater her own infantilism, and the weaker her core of self, the earlier the girl will seek “fulfillment” as a wife and mother and the more exclusively will she live through her husband and children. Thus, her links to the world of reality, and her own sense of herself, will become progressively weaker.
3. Since the human organism has an intrinsic urge to grow, a woman who evades her own growth by clinging to the childlike protection of the housewife role will—insofar as that role does not permit her own growth—suffer increasingly severe pathology, both physiological and emotional. Her motherhood will be increasingly pathological, both for her and for her children. The greater the infantilization of the mother, the less likely the child will be able to achieve human selfhood in the real world. Mothers with infantile selves will have even more infantile children, who will retreat even earlier into phantasy from the tests of reality.
4. The signs of this pathological retreat will be more apparent in boys, since even in childhood boys are expected to commit themselves to tests of reality which the feminine mystique permits the girls to evade in sexual phantasy. But these very expectations ultimately make the boys grow further toward a strong self and make the girls the worst victims, as well as the “typhoid Marys” of the progressive dehumanization of their own children.
From psychiatrists and suburban clinicians, I learned how this process works. One psychiatrist, Andras Angyal, describes it, not necessarily in relation to women, as “neurotic evasion of growth.” There are two key methods of evading growth. One is “noncommitment”: a man lives his life—school, job, marriage—“going through the motions without ever being wholeheartedly committed to any actions.” He vaguely experiences himself as “playing a role.” On the surface, he may appear to be moving normally through life, but what he is actually doing is “going through the motions.”
The other method of evading grow
th Angyal called the method of “vicarious living.” It consists in a systematic denial and repression of one’s own personality, and an attempt to substitute some other personality, an “idealized conception, a standard of absolute goodness by which one tries to live, suppressing all those genuine impulses that are incompatible with the exaggerated and unrealistic standard,” or simply taking the personality that is “the popular cliché of the time.”
The most frequent manifestation of vicarious living is a particularly structured dependence on another person, which is often mistaken for love. Such extremely intense and tenacious attachments, however, lack all the essentials of genuine love—devotion, intuitive understanding, and delight in the being of the other person in his own right and in his own way. On the contrary, these attachments are extremely possessive and tend to deprive the partner of a “life of his own.”…The other person is needed not as someone to relate oneself to; he is needed for filling out one’s inner emptiness, one’s nothingness. This nothingness originally was only a phantasy, but with the persistent self-repression it approaches the state of being actual.
All these attempts at gaining a substitute personality by vicarious living fail to free the person from a vague feeling of emptiness. The repression of genuine, spontaneous impulses leaves the person with a painful emotional vacuousness, almost with a sense of nonexistence…8
“Noncommitment” and “vicarious living,” Angyal concludes, “can be understood as attempted solutions of the conflict between the impulse to grow and the fear of facing new situations”—but, though they may temporarily lessen the pressure, they do not actually resolve the problem; “their result, even if not their intent, is always an evasion of personal growth.”
Noncommitment and vicarious living are, however, at the very heart of our conventional definition of femininity. This is the way the feminine mystique teaches girls to seek “fulfillment as women” this is the way most American women live today. But if the human organism has an innate urge to grow, to expand and become all it can be, it is not surprising that the bodies and the minds of healthy women begin to rebel as they try to adjust to a role that does not permit this growth. Their symptoms which so puzzle the doctors and the analysts are a warning sign that they cannot forfeit their own existence, evade their own growth, without a battle.
I have seen this battle being fought by women I interviewed and by women of my own community, and unfortunately, it is often a losing battle. One young girl, first in high school and later in college, gave up all her serious interests and ambitions in order to be “popular.” Married early, she played the role of the conventional housewife, in much the same way as she played the part of a popular college girl. I don’t know at what point she lost track of what was real and what was façade, but when she became a mother, she would sometimes lie down on the floor and kick her feet in the kind of tantrum she was not able to handle in her three-year-old daughter. At the age of thirty-eight, she slashed her wrists in attempted suicide.
Another extremely intelligent woman, who gave up a challenging career as a cancer researcher to become a housewife, suffered a severe depression just before her baby was born. After she recovered she was so “close” to him that she had to stay with him at nursery school every morning for four months, or else he went into a violent frenzy of tears and tantrums. In first grade, he often vomited in the morning when he had to leave her. His violence on the playground approached danger to himself and others. When a neighbor took away from him a baseball bat with which he was about to hit a child on the head, his mother objected violently to the “frustration” of her child. She found it extremely difficult to discipline him herself.
Over a ten-year period, as she went correctly through all the motions of motherhood in suburbia, except for this inability to deal firmly with her children, she seemed visibly less and less alive, less and less sure of her own worth. The day before she hung herself in the basement of her spotless split-level house, she took her three children for a checkup by the pediatrician, and made arrangements for her daughter’s birthday party.
Few suburban housewives resort to suicide, and yet there is other evidence that women pay a high emotional and physical price for evading their own growth. They are not, as we now know, the biologically weaker of the species. In every age group, fewer women die than men. But in America, from the time when women assume their feminine sexual role as housewives, they no longer live with the zest, the enjoyment, the sense of purpose that is characteristic of true human health.
During the 1950’s, psychiatrists, analysts, and doctors in all fields noted that the housewife’s syndrome seemed to become increasingly pathological. The mild undiagnosable symptoms—bleeding blisters, malaise, nervousness, and fatigue of young housewives—became heart attacks, bleeding ulcers, hypertension, bronchopneumonia; the nameless emotional distress became a psychotic breakdown. Among the new housewife-mothers, in certain sunlit suburbs, this single decade saw a fantastic increase in “maternal psychoses,” mild-to-suicidal depressions or hallucinations over childbirth. According to medical records compiled by Dr. Richard Gordon and his wife, Katherine (psychiatrist and social psychologist, respectively), in the suburbs of Bergen County, N.J., during the 1950’s, approximately one out of three young mothers suffered depression or psychotic breakdown over childbirth. This compared to previous medical estimates of psychotic breakdown in one out of 400 pregnancies, and less severe depressions in one out of 80.
In Bergen County during 1953–57 one out of 10 of the 746 adult psychiatric patients were young wives who broke down over childbirth. In fact, young housewives (18 to 44) suffering not only childbirth depression, but all psychiatric and psychosomatic disorders with increasing severity, became during the fifties by far the predominant group of adult psychiatric patients. The number of disturbed young wives was more than half again as big as the number of young husbands, and three times as big as any other group. (Other surveys of both private and public patients in the suburbs have turned up similar findings.) From the beginning to the end of the fifties, the young housewives also increasingly displaced men as the main sufferers of coronary attack, ulcers, hypertension and bronchial pneumonia. In the hospital serving this suburban county, women now make up 40 per cent of the ulcer patients.9
I went to see the Gordons, who had attributed the increased pathologies of these new young housewives—not found among women in comparable rural areas, or older suburbs and cities—to the “mobility” of the new suburban population. But the “mobile” husbands were not breaking down as were their wives and their children. Previous studies of childbirth depression had indicated that successful professional or career women sometimes suffered “role-conflict” when they became housewife-mothers. But these new victims, whose rate of childbirth depression or breakdown was so much greater than all previous estimates, had never wanted to be anything more than housewife-mothers; that was all that was expected of them. The Gordons pointed out that their findings do not indicate that the young housewives are necessarily subjected to more stress than their husbands; for some reason the women simply show an increased tendency to succumb to stress. Could that mean that the role of housewife-mother was too much for them; or could it mean that it was not enough?
These women did not share the same childhood seeds of neurosis; some, in fact, showed none. But a striking similarity that emerged in their case histories was the fact that they had abandoned their education below the level of their ability. The sufferers were the ones who quit high school or college; more often than comparable women their age, they had started college—and left, usually after a year.10 Many also had come from “the more restrictive ethnic groups” (Italian or Jewish) or from small towns in the South where “women were protected and kept dependent.” Most had not pursued either education or job, nor moved in the world on their own in any capacity. A few who broke down had held relatively unskilled jobs, or had the beginnings of interests which they gave up when they became suburban house
wife-mothers. But most had had no ambition other than that of marrying an up-and-coming man; many were fulfilling not only their own dreams but also the frustrated status dreams of their mothers, in marrying ambitious, capable men. As Dr. Gordon described them to me: “They were not capable women. They had never done anything. They couldn’t even organize the committees which needed to be organized in these places. They had never been required to apply themselves, learn how to do a job and then do it. Many of them quit school. It’s easier to have a baby than get an A. They never learned to take stresses, pain, hard work. As soon as the going was tough, they broke down.”
Perhaps because these girls were more passive, more dependent than other women, walled up in the suburbs, they sometimes seemed to become as infantile as their children. And their children showed a passivity and infantilism that seemed pathological—very early in the sons. One finds in the suburban mental-health clinics today, the overwhelming majority of the child patients are boys, in dramatic and otherwise inexplicable reversal of the fact that most of the adult patients in all clinics and doctors’ offices today are women—that is, housewives. Putting aside the theoretical terms of his profession a Boston analyst who has many women patients told me:
It is true, there are too many more women patients than men. Their complaints are varied, but if you look underneath, you find this underlying feeling of emptiness. It is not inferiority. It is almost like nothingness. The situation is that they are not pursuing any goals of their own.
Another doctor, in a suburban mental-health clinic, told me of the young mother of a sixteen-year-old girl who, since their move to the suburb seven years ago, has been completely preoccupied with her children except for a little “do good” work in the community. Despite this mother’s constant anxiety about her daughter (“I think about her all day—she doesn’t have any friends and will she get into college?”), she forgot the day her daughter was to take her college entrance exams.