The Feminine Mystique

  You do want something more, only you don’t know what it is. So you put even more into housekeeping. It’s not challenging enough, just ironing dresses for your little girls, so you go in for ruffly dresses that need more ironing, and bake your own bread, and refuse to get a dishwasher. You think if you make a big enough challenge out of it, then somehow it will be satisfying. And still it wasn’t.

  I almost had an affair. I used to feel so discontented with my husband. I used to feel outraged if he didn’t help with the housework. I insisted that he do dishes, scrub floors, everything. We wouldn’t quarrel, but you can’t deceive yourself sometimes in the middle of the night.

  I couldn’t seem to control this feeling that I wanted something more from life. So I went to a psychiatrist. He kept trying to make me enjoy being feminine, but it didn’t help. And then I went to one who seemed to make me find out who I was, and forget about this beautiful feminine picture. I realized I was furious at myself, furious at my husband, because I’d left school.

  I used to put the kids in the car and just drive because I couldn’t bear to be alone in the house. I kept wanting to do something, but I was afraid to try. One day on a back road I saw an artist painting, and it was like a voice I couldn’t control saying “Do you give lessons?”

  I’d take care of the house and kids all day, and after I finished the dishes at night, I’d paint. Then I took the bedroom we were going to use for another baby—five children was part of my beautiful picture—and used it for a studio for myself. I remember one night working and working and suddenly it was 2 A.M. and I was finished. I looked at the picture, and it was like finding myself.

  I can’t think what I was trying to do with my life before, trying to fit some picture of an oldtime woman pioneer. I don’t have to prove I’m a woman by sewing my own clothes. I am a woman, and I am myself, and I buy clothes and love them. I’m not such a darned patient, loving, perfect mother anymore. I don’t change the kids’ clothes top to bottom every day, and no more ruffles. But I seem to have more time to enjoy them. I don’t spend much time on housework now, but it’s done before my husband gets home. We bought a dishwasher.

  The longer it takes to wash dishes, the less time you have for anything else. It’s not creative, doing the same thing over and over. Why should a woman feel guilty at getting rid of this repetitive work. There’s no virtue in dishwashing, scrubbing floors. Dacron, dishwashers, drip dry—this is fine, this is the direction physical life should take. This is our time, our only time on earth. We can’t keep throwing it away. My time is all I’ve got, and this is what I want to do with it.

  I don’t need to make such a production of my marriage now because it’s real. Somehow, once I began to have the sense of myself, I became aware of my husband. Before, it was like he was part of me, not a separate human being. I guess it wasn’t till I stopped trying to be feminine that I began to enjoy being a woman.

  And then, there were others, teetering back and forth, aware of the problem but not yet quite sure what to do about it. The chairman of a suburban fund-raising committee said:

  I envy Jean who stays at home and does the work she wants to do. I haven’t opened my easel in two months. I keep getting so involved in committees I don’t care about. It’s the thing to do to get in with the crowd here. But it doesn’t make me feel quiet inside, the way I feel when I paint. An artist in the city told me, “You should take yourself more seriously. You can be an artist and a housewife and a mother—all three.” I guess the only thing that stops me is that it’s hard work.

  A young Ohio woman told me:

  Lately, I’ve felt this need. I felt we simply had to have a bigger house, put on an addition, or move to a better neighborhood. I went on a frantic round of entertaining but that was like living for the interruptions of your life.

  My husband thinks that being a good mother is the most important career there is. I think it’s even more important than a career. But I don’t think most women are all mother. I enjoy my kids, but I don’t like spending all my time with them. I’m just not their age. I could make housework take up more of my time. But the floors don’t need vacuuming more than twice a week. My mother swept them every day.

  I always wanted to play the violin. When I went to college, girls who took music seriously were peculiar. Suddenly, it was as if some voice inside me said, now is the time, you’ll never get another chance. I felt embarrassed, practicing at forty. It exhausts me and hurts my shoulder, but it makes me feel at one with something larger than myself. The universe suddenly becomes real, and you’re part of it. You feel as if you really exist.

  It would be quite wrong for me to offer any woman easy how to answers to this problem. There are no easy answers, in America today; it is difficult, painful, and takes perhaps a long time for each woman to find her own answer. First, she must unequivocally say “no” to the housewife image. This does not mean, of course, that she must divorce her husband, abandon her children, give up her home. She does not have to choose between marriage and career; that was the mistaken choice of the feminine mystique. In actual fact, it is not as difficult as the feminine mystique implies, to combine marriage and motherhood and even the kind of lifelong personal purpose that once was called “career.” It merely takes a new life plan—in terms of one’s whole life as a woman.

  The first step in that plan is to see housework for what it is—not a career, but something that must be done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Once a woman stops trying to make cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, “something more,” she can say “no, I don’t want a stove with rounded corners, I don’t want four different kinds of soap.” She can say “no” to those mass daydreams of the women’s magazines and television, “no” to the depth researchers and manipulators who are trying to run her life. Then, she can use the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher and all the automatic appliances, and even the instant mashed potatoes for what they are truly worth—to save time that can be used in more creative ways.

  The second step, and perhaps the most difficult for the products of sex-directed education, is to see marriage as it really is, brushing aside the veil of over-glorification imposed by the feminine mystique. Many women I talked to felt strangely discontented with their husbands, continually irritated with their children, when they saw marriage and motherhood as the final fulfillment of their lives. But when they began to use their various abilities with a purpose of their own in society, they not only spoke of a new feeling of “aliveness” or “completeness” in themselves, but of a new, though hard to define, difference in the way they felt about their husbands and children. Many echoed this woman’s words:

  The funny thing is, I enjoy my children more now that I’ve made room for myself. Before, when I was putting my whole self into the children, it was as if I was always looking for something through them. I couldn’t just enjoy them as I do now, as though they were a sunset, something outside me, separate. Before, I felt so tied down by them, I’d try to get away in my mind. Maybe a woman has to be by herself to be really with her children.

  A New England lawyer’s wife told me:

  I thought I had finished. I had come to the end of childhood, had married, had a baby, and I was happy with my marriage. But somehow I was disconsolate, because I assumed this was the end. I would take up upholstery one week, Sunday painting the next. My house was spotless. I devoted entirely too much time to entertaining my child. He didn’t need all that adult companionship. A grown woman playing with a child all day, disintegrating herself in a hundred directions to fill the time, cooking fancy food when no one needs it, and then furious if they don’t eat it—you lose your adult common sense, your whole sense of yourself as a human being.

  Now I’m studying history, one course a year. It’s work, but I haven’t missed a night in 2 1/2 years. Soon I’ll be teaching. I love being a wife and mother, but I know now that when marriage is the end of your life, because you have no other mission, it becomes a miserable, tawdry thing
. Who said women have to be happy, to be amused, to be entertained? You have to work. You don’t have to have a job. But you have to tackle something yourself, and see it through, to feel alive.

  An hour a day, a weekend, or even a week off from motherhood is not the answer to the problem that has no name. That “mother’s hour off,”1 as advised by child-and-family experts or puzzled doctors as the antidote for the housewife’s fatigue or trapped feeling, assumes automatically that a woman is “just a housewife,” now and forever a mother. A person fully used by his work can enjoy “time off.” But the mothers I talked to did not find any magical relief in an “hour off” in fact, they often gave it up on the slightest pretext, either from guilt or from boredom. A woman who has no purpose of her own in society, a woman who cannot let herself think about the future because she is doing nothing to give herself a real identity in it, will continue to feel a desperation in the present—no matter how many “hours off” she takes. Even a very young woman today must think of herself as a human being first, not as a mother with time on her hands, and make a life plan in terms of her own abilities, a commitment of her own to society, with which her commitments as wife and mother can be integrated.

  A woman I interviewed, a mental-health educator who was for many years “just a housewife” in her suburban community, sums it up: “I remember my own feeling that life wasn’t full enough for me. I wasn’t using myself in terms of my capacities. It wasn’t enough making a home. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You can’t just deny your intelligent mind; you need to be part of the social scheme.”

  And looking over the trees of her garden to the quiet, empty suburban street, she said:

  If you knock on any of these doors, how many women would you find whose abilities are being used? You’d find them drinking, or sitting around talking to other women and watching children play because they can’t bear to be alone, or watching TV or reading a book. Society hasn’t caught up with women yet, hasn’t found a way yet to use the skills and energies of women except to bear children. Over the last fifteen years, I think women have been running away from themselves. The reason the young ones have swallowed this feminine business is because they think if they go back and look for all their satisfaction in the home, it will be easier. But it won’t be. Somewhere along the line a woman, if she is going to come to terms with herself, has to find herself as a person.

  The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way. But a job, any job, is not the answer—in fact, it can be part of the trap. Women who do not look for jobs equal to their actual capacity, who do not let themselves develop the lifetime interests and goals which require serious education and training, who take a job at twenty or forty to “help out at home” or just to kill extra time, are walking, almost as surely as the ones who stay inside the housewife trap, to a nonexistent future.

  If a job is to be the way out of the trap for a woman, it must be a job that she can take seriously as part of a life plan, work in which she can grow as part of society. Suburban communities, particularly the new communities where social, cultural, educational, political, and recreational patterns are not as yet firmly established, offer numerous opportunities for the able, intelligent woman. But such work is not necessarily a “job.” In Westchester, on Long Island, in the Philadelphia suburbs, women have started mental-health clinics, art centers, day camps. In big cities and small towns, women all the way from New England to California have pioneered new movements in politics and education. Even if this work was not thought of as “job” or “career,” it was often so important to the various communities that professionals are now being paid for doing it.

  In some suburbs and communities there is now little work left for the nonprofessional that requires intelligence—except for the few positions of leadership which most women, these days, lack the independence, the strength, the self-confidence to take. If the community has a high proportion of educated women, there simply are not enough such posts to go around. As a result, community work often expands in a kind of self-serving structure of committees and red tape, in the purest sense of Parkinson’s law, until its real purpose seems to be just to keep women busy. Such busywork is not satisfying to mature women, nor does it help the immature to grow. This is not to say that being a den mother, or serving on a PTA committee, or organizing a covered-dish supper is not useful work; for a woman of intelligence and ability, it is simply not enough.

  One woman I interviewed had involved herself in an endless whirl of worthwhile community activities. But they led in no direction for her own future, nor did they truly utilize her exceptional intelligence. Indeed, her intelligence seemed to deteriorate; she suffered the problem that has no name with increasing severity until she took the first step toward a serious commitment. Today she is a “master teacher,” a serene wife and mother.

  At first, I took on the hospital fund-raising committee, the clerical volunteers committee for the clinic. I was class mother for the children’s field trips. I was taking piano lessons to the tune of $30 a week, paying baby sitters so I could play for my own amusement. I did the Dewey decimal system for the library we started, and the usual den mother and PTA. The financial outlay for all these things which were only needed to fill up my life was taking a good slice out of my husband’s income. And it still didn’t fill up my life. I was cranky and moody. I would burst into tears for no reason. I couldn’t even concentrate to finish a detective story.

  I was so busy, running from morning till night, and yet I never had any real feeling of satisfaction. You raise your kids, sure, but how can that justify your life? You have to have some ultimate objective, some long-term goal to keep you going. Community activities are short-term goals; you do a project; it’s done; then you have to hunt for another one. In community work, they say you mustn’t bother the young mothers with little children. This is the job of the middle-aged ones whose kids are grown. But it’s just the ones who are tied down with the kids who need to do this. When you’re not tied down by kids, drop that stuff—you need real work.

  Because of the feminine mystique (and perhaps because of the simple human fear of failure, when one does compete, without sexual privilege or excuse), it is the jump from amateur to professional that is often hardest for a woman on her way out of the trap. But even if a woman does not have to work to eat, she can find identity only in work that is of real value to society2—work for which, usually, our society pays. Being paid is, of course, more than a reward—it implies a definite commitment. For fear of that commitment, hundreds of able, educated suburban housewives today fool themselves about the writer or actress they might have been, or dabble at art or music in the dilettante’s limbo of “self-enrichment,” or apply for jobs as receptionists or saleswomen, jobs well below their actual abilities. These are also ways of evading growth.

  The growing boredom of American women with volunteer work, and their preference for paid jobs, no matter how low-level, has been attributed to the fact that professionals have taken over most of the posts in the community requiring intelligence. But the fact that women did not become professionals themselves, the reluctance of women in the last twenty years to commit themselves to work, paid or unpaid, requiring initiative, leadership and responsibility is due to the feminine mystique. This attitude of noncommitment among young housewives was confirmed by a recent study done in Westchester County.3 In an upper-income suburb, more than 50% of a group of housewives between 25 and 35, with husbands in the over-$25,000-a-year income group, wanted to go to work: 13% immediately, the rest in 5 to 15 years. Of those who planned to go to work, 3 out of 4 felt inadequately prepared. (All of these women had some college education but only one a graduate degree; a third had married at twenty or before.) These women were not driven to go to work by economic need but by what the anthropologist who made the survey called “the psychological need to be economically productive.” Evidently, volu
nteer work did not meet this need; though 62% of these women were doing volunteer work, it was of the “one-day and under” variety. And though they wanted jobs and felt inadequately prepared, of the 45% taking courses, very few were working toward a degree. The element of phantasy in their work plans was witnessed by “the small businesses that open and close with sad regularity.” When an alumnae association sponsored a two-session forum in the suburb on “How Women in the Middle Years Can Return to Work,” twenty-five women attended. As a beginning step, each woman was asked to come to the second meeting with a résumé. The résumé took some thought, and, as the researcher put it, “sincerity of purpose.” Only one woman was serious enough to write the résumé.

  In another suburb, there is a guidance center which in the early years of the mental-health movement gave real scope to the intelligence of college-educated women of the community. They never did therapy, of course, but in the early years they administered the center and led the educational parent-discussion groups. Now that “education for family living” has become professionalized, the center is administered and the discussion groups led by professionals, often brought in from the city, who have M.A.’s or doctorates in the field. In only a very few cases did the women who “found themselves” in the work of the guidance center go on in the new profession, and get their own M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s. Most backed off when to continue would have meant breaking away from the housewife role, and becoming seriously committed to a profession.

  Ironically, the only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society in a life plan that can encompass marriage and motherhood, is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique; the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession. Such a commitment is not tied to a specific job or locality. It permits year-to-year variation—a full-time paid job in one community, part-time in another, exercise of the professional skill in serious volunteer work or a period of study during pregnancy or early motherhood when a full-time job is not feasible. It is a continuous thread, kept alive by work and study and contacts in the field, in any part of the country.