Apparently in the case of wives, the traits that make for success in the business world as measured by monthly income are the traits that make for success in marriage. The point, of course, may be made that income indirectly measures education since the amount of educational training influences income.29
Among 526 couples, less than 10 per cent showed “low” marital adjustment where the wife had been employed seven or more years, had completed college or professional training, and had not married before twenty-two. Where wives had been educated beyond college, less than 5 per cent of marriages scored “low” in happiness. The following table shows the relationship between the marriage and the educational achievement of the wife.
Marriage Adjustment Scores at Different Educational Levels
One might have predicted from such evidence a relatively poor chance of married happiness, or of sexual fulfillment, or even of orgasm, for the women whom the mystique encouraged to marry before twenty, to forgo higher education, careers, independence, and equality with men in favor of femininity. And, as a matter of fact, the youngest group of wives studied by Kinsey—the generation born between 1920 and 1929 who met the feminine mystique head-on in the 1940’s when the race back home began—showed, by the fifth year of marriage, a sharp reversal of that trend toward increased sexual fulfillment in marriage which had been manifest in every decade since women’s emancipation in the 1920’s.
The percentage of women enjoying orgasm in all or nearly all of their married sex life in the fifth year of marriage had risen from 37% of women in the generation born before 1900 to 42% in the generations born in the next two decades. The youngest group, whose fifth year of marriage was in the late 1940’s, enjoyed full orgasm in even less cases (36%) than women born before 1900.30
Would a new Kinsey study find the young wives who are products of the feminine mystique enjoying even less sexual fulfillment than their more emancipated, more independent, more educated, more grownup-when-married forebears? Only fourteen per cent of Kinsey’s women had married by twenty; a bare majority—fifty-three per cent—had married by twenty-five, though most did marry. This is quite a difference from the America of the 1960’s, when fifty per cent of women marry in their teens.
Recently, Helene Deutsch, the eminent psychoanalyst who went even further than Freud in equating femininity with masochistic passivity and, in warning women that “outward-directed activity” and “masculinizing” intellectuality might interfere with a fully feminine orgasm, threw a psychoanalytic conference into an uproar by suggesting that perhaps too much emphasis had been put on “the orgasm” for women. In the 1960’s, she was suddenly not so sure that women had to have, or could have, a real orgasm. Perhaps a more “diffuse” fulfillment was all that could be expected. After all, she had women patients who were absolutely psychotic who seemed to have orgasms; but most women she saw now did not seem to have them at all.
What did it mean? Could women, then, not experience orgasm? Or had something happened, during this time when so much emphasis has been placed on sexual fulfillment, to keep women from experiencing orgasm? The experts did not all agree. But in other contexts, not concerned with women, analysts reported that passive people who “psychologically feel empty”—who fail to “develop adequate egos,” have “little sense of their own identity”—cannot submit to the experience of sexual orgasm for fear of their own non-existence.31 Fanned into an all-consuming sexual search by the popularizers of Freudian “femininity,” many women had, in effect, renounced everything for the orgasm that was supposed to be at the end of the rainbow. To say the least, they directed quite a lot of their emotional energies and needs toward the sexual act. As somebody said about a truly beautiful woman in America, her image has been so overexposed in the ads, television, movies, that when you see the real thing, you’re disappointed. Without even delving into the murky depths of the unconscious, one might assume it was asking a lot of the beautiful orgasm, not only to live up to its overadvertised claims, but to constitute the equivalent of an A in sex, a salary raise, a good review on opening night, promotion to senior editor or associate professor, much less the basic “experience of oneself,” the sense of identity.32 As one psychotherapist reported:
One of the major reasons, ironically, why so many women are not achieving full-flowering sexuality today is because they are so over determined to achieve it. They are so ashamed if they do not reach the heights of expressive sensuality that they tragically sabotage their own desires. That is to say, instead of focusing clearly on the real problem at hand, these women are focusing on quite a different problem, namely, “Oh, what an idiot and an incompetent person I am for not being able to achieve satisfaction without difficulty.” Today’s women are often obsessed with the notion of how, rather than what, they are doing when they are having marital relations. That is fatal.
If sex itself, as another psychoanalyst put it, is beginning to have a “depressive” quality in America, it is perhaps because too many Americans—especially the women sex-seekers—are putting into the sexual search all their frustrated needs for self-realization. American women are suffering, quite simply, a massive sickness of sex without self. No one has warned them that sex can never be a substitute for personal identity; that sex itself cannot give identity to a woman, any more than to a man; that there may be no sexual fulfillment at all for the woman who seeks her self in sex.
The question of how a person can most fully realize his own capacities and thus achieve identity has become an important concern of the philosophers and the social and psychological thinkers of our time—and for good reason. Thinkers of other times put forth the idea that people were, to a great extent, defined by the work they did. The work that a man had to do to eat, to stay alive, to meet the physical necessities of his environment, dictated his identity. And in this sense, when work is seen merely as a means of survival, human identity was dictated by biology.
But today the problem of human identity has changed. For the work that defined man’s place in society and his sense of himself has also changed man’s world. Work, and the advance of knowledge, has lessened man’s dependence on his environment; his biology and the work he must do for biological survival are no longer sufficient to define his identity. This can be most clearly seen in our own abundant society; men no longer need to work all day to eat. They have an unprecedented freedom to choose the kind of work they will do; they also have an unprecedented amount of time apart from the hours and days that must actually be spent in making a living. And suddenly one realizes the significance of today’s identity crisis—for women, and increasingly, for men. One sees the human significance of work—not merely as the means of biological survival, but as the giver of self and the transcender of self, as the creator of human identity and human evolution.
For “self-realization” or “self-fulfillment” or “identity” does not come from looking into a mirror in rapt contemplation of one’s own image. Those who have most fully realized themselves, in a sense that can be recognized by the human mind even though it cannot be clearly defined, have done so in the service of a human purpose larger than themselves. Men from varying disciplines have used different words for this mysterious process from which comes the sense of self. The religious mystics, the philosophers, Marx, Freud—all had different names for it: man finds himself by losing himself; man is defined by his relation to the means of production; the ego, the self, grows through understanding and mastering reality—through work and love.
The identity crisis, which has been noted by Erik Erikson and others in recent years in the American man, seems to occur for lack of, and be cured by finding, the work, or cause, or purpose that evokes his own creativity.33 Some never find it, for it does not come from busy-work or punching a time clock. It does not come from just making a living, working by formula, finding a secure spot as an organization man. The very argument, by Riesman and others, that man no longer finds identity in the work defined as a paycheck job, assumes that i
dentity for man comes through creative work of his own that contributes to the human community: the core of the self becomes aware, becomes real, and grows through work that carries forward human society.
Work, the shopworn staple of the economists, has become the new frontier of psychology. Psychiatrists have long used “occupational therapy” with patients in mental hospitals; they have recently discovered that to be of real psychological value, it must be not just “therapy,” but real work, serving a real purpose in the community. And work can now be seen as the key to the problem that has no name. The identity crisis of American women began a century ago, as more and more of the work important to the world, more and more of the work that used their human abilities and through which they were able to find self-realization, was taken from them.
Until, and even into, the last century, strong, capable women were needed to pioneer our new land; with their husbands, they ran the farms and plantations and Western homesteads. These women were respected and self-respecting members of a society whose pioneering purpose centered in the home. Strength and independence, responsibility and self-confidence, self-discipline and courage, freedom and equality were part of the American character for both men and women, in all the first generations. The women who came by steerage from Ireland, Italy, Russia, and Poland worked beside their husbands in the sweatshops and the laundries, learned the new language, and saved to send their sons and daughters to college. Women were never quite as “feminine,” or held in as much contempt, in America as they were in Europe. American women seemed to European travelers, long before our time, less passive, childlike, and feminine than their own wives in France or Germany or England. By an accident of history, American women shared in the work of society longer, and grew with the men. Grade-and high-school education for boys and girls alike was almost always the rule; and in the West, where women shared the pioneering work the longest, even the universities were coeducational from the beginning.
The identity crisis for women did not begin in America until the fire and strength and ability of the pioneer women were no longer needed, no longer used, in the middle-class homes of the Eastern and Midwestern cities, when the pioneering was done and men began to build the new society in industries and professions outside the home. But the daughters of the pioneer women had grown too used to freedom and work to be content with leisure and passive femininity.34
It was not an American, but a South African woman, Mrs. Olive Schreiner, who warned at the turn of the century that the quality and quantity of women’s functions in the social universe were decreasing as fast as civilization was advancing; that if women did not win back their right to a full share of honored and useful work, woman’s mind and muscle would weaken in a parasitic state; her offspring, male and female, would weaken progressively, and civilization itself would deteriorate.35
The feminists saw clearly that education and the right to participate in the more advanced work of society were women’s greatest needs. They fought for and won the rights to new, fully human identity for women. But how very few of their daughters and granddaughters have chosen to use their education and their abilities for any large creative purpose, for responsible work in society? How many of them have been deceived, or have deceived themselves, into clinging to the outgrown, childlike femininity of “Occupation: housewife”?
It was not a minor matter, their mistaken choice. We now know that the same range of potential ability exists for women as for men. Women, as well as men, can only find their identity in work that uses their full capacities. A woman cannot find her identity through others—her husband, her children. She cannot find it in the dull routine of housework. As thinkers of every age have said, it is only when a human being faces squarely the fact that he can forfeit his own life, that he becomes truly aware of himself, and begins to take his existence seriously. Sometimes this awareness comes only at the moment of death. Sometimes it comes from a more subtle facing of death: the death of self in passive conformity, in meaningless work. The feminine mystique prescribes just such a living death for women. Faced with the slow death of self, the American woman must begin to take her life seriously.
“We measure ourselves by many standards,” said the great American psychologist William James, nearly a century ago. “Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things, and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth.”36
If women do not put forth, finally, that effort to become all that they have it in them to become, they will forfeit their own humanity. A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide. For that future half a century after the child-bearing years are over is a fact that an American woman cannot deny. Nor can she deny that as a housewife, the world is indeed rushing past her door while she just sits and watches. The terror she feels is real, if she has no place in that world.
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. There is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps except by finally putting forth an effort—that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the narrow walls of home, to help shape the future. Only by such a personal commitment to the future can American women break out of the housewife trap and truly find fulfillment as wives and mothers—by fulfilling their own unique possibilities as separate human beings.
14
A New Life Plan for Women
“Easy enough to say,” the woman inside the housewife’s trap remarks, “but what can I do, alone in the house, with the children yelling and the laundry to sort and no grandmother to babysit?” It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question “who am I” except the voice inside herself. She may spend years on the analyst’s couch, working out her “adjustment to the feminine role,” her blocks to “fulfillment as a wife and mother. And still the voice inside her may say, “That’s not it.” Even the best psychoanalyst can only give her the courage to listen to her own voice. When society asks so little of women, every woman has to listen to her own inner voice to find her identity in the changing world. She must create, out of her own needs and abilities, a new life plan, fitting in the love and children and home that have defined femininity in the past with the work toward a greater purpose that shapes the future.
To face the problem is not to solve it. But once a woman faces it, as women are doing today all over America without much help from the experts, once she asks herself “What do I want to do?” she begins to find her own answers. Once she begins to see through the delusions of the feminine mystique—and realizes that neither her husband nor her children, nor the things in her house, nor sex, nor being like all the other women, can give her a self—she often finds the solution much easier than she anticipated.
Of the many women I talked to in the suburbs and cities, some were just beginning to face the problem, others were well on their way to solving it, and for still others it was no longer a problem. In the stillness of an April afternoon with all her children in school, a woman told me:
I put all my energies into the children, carting them around, worrying about them, teaching them things. Suddenly, there was this terrible feeling of emptiness. All that volunteer work I’d taken on—Scouts, PTA, the League, just didn’t seem worth doing all of a sudden. As a girl, I wanted to be an actress. It was too late to go back to that. I stayed in the house all day, cleaning things I hadn’t cleaned in years. I spent a lot of time just crying. My husband and I talked about its being an American woman’s problem, how you giv
e up a career for the children, and then you reach a point where you can’t go back. I felt so envious of the few women I know who had a definite skill and kept working at it. My dream of being an actress wasn’t real—I didn’t work at it. Did I have to throw my whole self into the children? I’ve spent my whole life just immersed in other people, and never even knew what kind of a person I was myself. Now I think even having another baby wouldn’t solve that emptiness long. You can’t go back—you have to go on. There must be some real way I can go on myself.
This woman was just beginning her search for identity. Another woman had made it to the other side, and could look back now and see the problem clearly. Her home was colorful, casual, but technically she was no longer “just a housewife.” She was paid for her work as a professional painter. She told me that when she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman. She said:
I used to work so hard to maintain this beautiful picture of myself as a wife and mother. I had all of my children by natural childbirth. I breastfed them all. I got mad once at an older woman at a party when I said childbirth is the most important thing in life, the basic animal, and she said, “Don’t you want to be more than an animal?”