The Feminine Mystique

  The women I found who had made and kept alive such long-term commitments did not suffer the problem that has no name. Nor did they live in the housewife image. But music or art or politics offered no magic solution for the women who did not, or could not, commit themselves seriously. The “arts” seem, at first glance, to be the ideal answer for a woman. They can, after all, be practiced in the home. They do not necessarily imply that dreaded professionalism, they are suitably feminine, and seem to offer endless room for personal growth and identity, with no need to compete in society for pay. But I have noticed that when women do not take up painting or ceramics seriously enough to become professionals—to be paid for their work, or for teaching it to others, and to be recognized as a peer by other professionals—sooner or later, they cease dabbling; the Sunday painting, the idle ceramics do not bring that needed sense of self when they are of no value to anyone else. The amateur or dilettante whose own work is not good enough for anyone to want to pay to hear or see or read does not gain real status by it in society, or real personal identity. These are reserved for those who have made the effort, acquired the knowledge and expertise to become professionals.

  There are, of course, a number of practical problems involved in making a serious professional commitment. But somehow those problems only seem insurmountable when a woman is still half-submerged in the false dilemmas and guilts of the feminine mystique—or when her desire for “something more” is only phantasy, and she is unwilling to make the necessary effort. Over and over, women told me that the crucial step for them was simply to take the first trip to the alumnae employment agency, or to send for the application for teacher certification, or to make appointments with former job contacts in the city. It is amazing how many obstacles and rationalizations the feminine mystique can throw up to keep a woman from making that trip or writing that letter.

  One suburban housewife I knew had once been a newspaper woman, but she was sure she could never get that kind of job again; she had been away too long. And, of course, she couldn’t really leave her children (who, by then, were all in school during the day). As it turned out, when she finally decided to do something about it, she found an excellent job in her old field after only two trips into the city. Another woman, a psychiatric social worker, said that she could not take a regular agency job, only volunteer jobs without deadlines that she could put down when she felt like it, because she could not count on a cleaning woman. Actually, if she had hired a cleaning woman, which many of her neighbors were doing for much less reason, she would have had to commit herself to the kind of assignments that would have been a real test of her ability. Obviously she was afraid of such a test.

  A great many suburban housewives today step back from, or give up, volunteer activity, art, or job at the very point when all that is needed is a more serious commitment. The PTA leader won’t run for the school board. The League of Women Voters’ leader is afraid to move on into the rough mainstream of her political party. “Women can’t get a policy-making role,” she says. “I’m not going to lick stamps.” Of course, it would require more effort for her to win a policy-making role in her party against the prejudices and the competition of the men.

  Some women take the jobs but do not make the necessary new life plan. I interviewed two women of ability, both of whom were bored as housewives and both of whom got jobs in the same research institute. They loved the increasingly challenging work, and were quickly promoted. But, in their thirties, after ten years as housewives, they earned very little money. The first woman, clearly recognizing the future this work held for her, spent virtually her entire salary on a three-day-a-week cleaning woman. The second woman, who felt her work was justified only if it “helped out with family expenses,” would not spend any money for cleaning help. Nor did she consider asking her husband and children to help out with household chores, or save time by ordering groceries by phone and sending the laundry out. She quit her job after a year from sheer exhaustion. The first woman, who made the necessary household changes and sacrifices, today, at thirty-eight, has one of the leading jobs at the institute and makes a substantial contribution to her family’s income, over and above what she pays for her part-time household help. The second, after two weeks of “rest,” began to suffer the old desperation. But she persuaded herself that she will “cheat” her husband and children less by finding work she can do at home.

  The picture of the happy housewife doing creative work at home—painting, sculpting, writing—is one of the semi-delusions of the feminine mystique. There are men and women who can do it; but when a man works at home, his wife keeps the children strictly out of the way, or else. It is not so easy for a woman; if she is serious about her work she often must find some place away from home to do it, or risk becoming an ogre to her children in her impatient demands for privacy. Her attention is divided and her concentration interrupted, on the job and as a mother. A no-nonsense nine-to-five job, with a clear division between professional work and housework, requires much less discipline and is usually less lonely. Some of the stimulation and the new friendships that come from being part of the professional world can be lost by the woman who tries to fit her career into the physical confines of her housewife life.

  A woman must say “no” to the feminine mystique very clearly indeed to sustain the discipline and effort that any professional commitment requires. For the mystique is no mere intellectual construct. A great many people have, or think they have, a vested interest in “Occupation: housewife.” However long it may take for women’s magazines, sociologists, educators, and psychoanalysts to correct the mistakes that perpetuate the feminine mystique, a woman must deal with them now, in the prejudices, mistaken fears, and unnecessary dilemmas voiced by her husband; her friends and neighbors; perhaps her minister, priest, or rabbi; or her child’s kindergarten teacher; or the well-meaning social worker at the guidance clinic; or her own innocent little children. But resistance, from whatever source, is better seen for what it is.

  Even the traditional resistance of religious orthodoxy is masked today with the manipulative techniques of psychotherapy. Women of orthodox Catholic or Jewish origin do not easily break through the housewife image; it is enshrined in the canons of their religion, in the assumptions of their own and their husbands’ childhoods, and in their church’s dogmatic definitions of marriage and motherhood. The ease with which dogma can be dressed in the psychological tenets of the mystique can be seen in this “Suggested Outline for Married Couples’ Discussions” from the Family Life Bureau of the Archdiocese of New York. A panel of three or four married couples, after rehearsal by a “priest-moderator,” are instructed to raise the question: “Can a working wife be a challenge to the authority of the husband?”

  Most of the engaged couples are convinced that there is nothing unusual or wrong in the wife working.…Don’t antagonize. Be suggestive, rather than dogmatic…. The panel couples should point out that the bride who is happy at a 9-to-5 o’clock job has this to think about:

  a. She may be subtly undermining her husband’s sense of vocation as the bread-winner and head of the house. The competitive business world can inculcate in the working bride attitudes and habits which may make it difficult for her to adjust to her husband’s leadership….

  c. At the end of a working day, she presents her husband with a tired mind and body at a time when he looks forward to the cheerful encouragement and fresh enthusiasm of his spouse….

  d. For some brides, the tension of doubling as business woman and part-time housewife may be one of several factors contributing to sterility…

  One Catholic women I interviewed withdrew from the state board of the League of Women Voters, when, in addition to the displeasure of the priest and her own husband, the school psychologist claimed that her daughter’s difficulties at school were due to her political activity. “It is more difficult for a Catholic woman to stay emancipated,” she told me. “I have retired. It will be better for everyone concerned if I a
m just a housewife.” At this point the telephone rang, and I eavesdropped with interest on a half-hour of high political strategy, evidently not of the League but of the local Democratic Party. The “retired” politician came back into the kitchen to finish preparing dinner, and confessed that she now hid her political activity at home “like an alcoholic or a drug addict, but I don’t seem to be able to give it up.”

  Another woman, of Jewish tradition, gave up her profession as a doctor when she became a doctor’s wife, devoting herself to bringing up their four children. Her husband was not overjoyed when she began brushing up to retake her medical exams after her youngest reached school age. An unassertive, quiet woman, she exerted almost unbelievable effort to obtain her license after fifteen years of inactivity. She told me apologetically: “You just can’t stop being interested. I tried to make myself, but I couldn’t.” And she confessed that when she gets a night call, she sneaks out as guiltily as if she were meeting a lover.

  Even to a woman of less orthodox tradition, the most powerful weapon of the feminine mystique is the argument that she rejects her husband and her children by working outside the home. If, for any reason, her child becomes ill or her husband has troubles of his own, the feminine mystique, insidious voices in the community, and even the woman’s own inner voice will blame her “rejection” of the housewife role. It is then that many a woman’s commitment to herself and society dies aborning or takes a serious detour.

  One woman told me that she gave up her job in television to become “just a housewife” because her husband suddenly decided his troubles in his own profession were caused by her failure to “play the feminine role” she was trying to “compete” with him; she wanted “to wear the pants.” She, like most women today, was vulnerable to such charges—one psychiatrist calls it the “career woman’s guilt syndrome.” And so she began to devote all the energies she had once put into her work to running her family—and to a nagging critical interest in her husband’s career.

  In her spare time in the suburbs, however, she rather absentmindedly achieved flamboyant local success as the director of a little-theater group. This, on top of her critical attention to her husband’s career, was far more destructive to his ego and a much more constant irritation to him and to her children than her professional work in which she had competed impersonally with other professionals in a world far away from home. One day, when she was directing a little-theater rehearsal, her son was hit by an automobile. She blamed herself for the accident, and so she gave up the little-theater group, resolving this time, cross her heart, that she would be “just a housewife.”

  She suffered, almost immediately, a severe case of the problem that has no name; her depression and dependence made her husband’s life hell. She sought analytic help, and in a departure from the nondirective approach of orthodox analysts, her therapist virtually ordered her to get back to work. She started writing a serious novel with finally the kind of commitment she had evaded, even when she had a job. In her absorption, she stopped worrying about her husband’s career; imperceptibly, she stopped phantasying another accident every time her son was out of her sight. And still, though she was too far along to retreat, she sometimes wondered if she were putting her marriage on the chopping block.

  Contrary to the mystique, her husband—reacting either to the contagious example of her commitment, or to the breathing space afforded by the cessation of her hysterical dependence, or for independent reasons of his own—buckled down to the equivalent of that novel in his own career. There were still problems, of course, but not the old ones; when they broke out of their own traps, somehow their relationship with each other began growing again.

  Still, with every kind of growth, there are risks. I encountered one woman in my interviews whose husband divorced her shortly after she went to work. Their marriage had become extremely destructive. The sense of identity that the woman achieved from her work may have made her less willing to accept the destructiveness, and perhaps precipitated the divorce, but it also made her more able to survive it.

  In other instances, however, women told me that the violent objections of their husbands disappeared when they finally made up their own minds and went to work. Had they magnified their husband’s objections to evade decision themselves? Husbands I have interviewed in this same context were sometimes surprised to find it “a relief” to be no longer the only sun and moon in their wives’ world; they were the object of less nagging and fewer insatiable demands and they no longer had to feel guilt over their wives’ discontent. As one man put it: “Not only is the financial burden lighter—and frankly, that is a relief—but the whole burden of living seems easier since Margaret went to work.”

  There are husbands, however, whose resistance is not so easily dispelled. The husband who is unable to bear his wife’s saying “no” to the feminine mystique often has been seduced himself by the infantile phantasy of having an ever-present mother, or is trying to relive that phantasy through his children. It is difficult for a woman to tell such a husband that she is not his mother and that their children will be better off without her constant attention. Perhaps if she becomes more truly herself and refuses to act out his phantasy any longer, he will suddenly wake up and see her again. And then again, perhaps he will look for another mother.

  Another hazard a woman faces on her way out of the housewife trap is the hostility of other housewives. Just as the man evading growth in his own work resents his wife’s growth, so women who are living vicariously through their husbands and children resent the woman who has a life of her own. At dinner parties, the nursery school affair, the PTA open house, a woman who is more than just a housewife can expect a few barbs from her suburban neighbors. She no longer has the time for idle gossip over endless cups of coffee in the breakfast nook; she can no longer share with other wives that cozy “we’re all in the same boat” illusion; her very presence rocks that boat. And she can expect her home, her husband, and her children to be scrutinized with more than the usual curiosity for the slightest sign of a “problem.” This kind of hostility, however, sometimes masks a secret envy. The most hostile of the “happy housewives” may be the first to ask her neighbor with the new career for advice about moving on herself.

  For the woman who moves on, there is always the sense of loss that accompanies change: old friends, familiar and reassuring routines lost, the new ones not yet clear. It is so much easier for a woman to say “yes” to the feminine mystique, and not risk the pains of moving on, that the will to make the effort—“ambition”—is as necessary as ability itself, if she is going to move out of the housewife trap. “Ambition,” like “career,” has been made a dirty word by the feminine mystique. When Polly Weaver, “College and Careers” editor of Mademoiselle, surveyed 400 women in 1956 on the subject of “ambition” and “competition,”4 most of them had “guilty feelings” about being ambitious. They tried, in Miss Weaver’s words, to “make it uplifting, not worldly and selfish like eating. We were surprised…at the number of women who drive themselves from morning to night for a job or the community or church, for example, but don’t want a nickel’s worth out of it for themselves. They don’t want money, social position, power, influence, recognition…. Are these women fooling themselves?”

  The mystique would have women renounce ambition for themselves. Marriage and motherhood is the end; after that, women are supposed to be ambitious only for their husbands and their children. Many women who indeed “fool themselves” push husband and children to fulfill that unadmitted ambition of their own. There were, however, many frankly ambitious women among those who responded to the Mademoiselle survey—and they did not seem to suffer from it.

  The ambitious women who answered our questionnaire had few regrets over sacrifices of sweet old friends, family picnics, and time for reading books no one talks about. They got more than they gave up, they said, and cited new friends, the larger world they move in, the great spurts of growth they had when they worked wi
th the brilliant and talented—and most of all the satisfaction of working at full steam, putt-putting along like a pressure cooker. In fact, some happy ambitious women make the people around them happy—their husbands, children, their colleagues…. A very ambitious woman is not happy, either, leaving her prestige entirely to her husband’s success…. To the active, ambitious woman, ambition is the thread that runs through her life from beginning to end, holding it together and enabling her to think of her life as a work of art instead of a collection of fragments…

  For the women I interviewed who had suffered and solved the problem that has no name, to fulfill an ambition of their own, long buried or brand new, to work at top capacity, to have a sense of achievement, was like finding a missing piece in the puzzle of their lives. The money they earned often made life easier for the whole family, but none of them pretended this was the only reason they worked, or the main thing they got out of it. That sense of being complete and fully a part of the world—“no longer an island, part of the mainland”—had come back. They knew that it did not come from the work alone, but from the whole—their marriage, homes, children, work, their changing, growing links with the community. They were once again human beings, not “just housewives.” Such women are the lucky ones. Some may have been driven to that ambition by childhood rejection, by an ugly-duckling adolescence, by unhappiness in marriage, by divorce or widowhood. It is both an irony and an indictment of the feminine mystique that it often forced the unhappy ones, the ugly ducklings, to find themselves, while girls who fitted the image became adjusted “happy” housewives and have never found out who they are. But to say that “frustration” can be good for a girl would be to miss the point; such frustration should not have to be the price of identity for a woman, nor is it in itself the key. The mystique has kept both pretty girls and ugly ones, who might have written poems like Edith Sitwell, from discovering their own gifts; kept happy wives and unhappy ones who might have found themselves as Ruth Benedict did in anthropology, from even discovering their own field. And suddenly the final piece of the puzzle fits into place.