The Feminine Mystique

  The fact remains that the girl who wastes—as waste she does—her college years without acquiring serious interests, and wastes her early job years marking time until she finds a man, gambles with the possibilities for an identity of her own, as well as the possibilities for sexual fulfillment and wholly affirmed motherhood. The educators who encourage a woman to postpone larger interests until her children are grown make it virtually impossible for her ever to acquire them. It is not that easy for a woman who has defined herself wholly as wife and mother for ten or fifteen or twenty years to find new identity at thirty-five or forty or fifty. The ones who are able to do it are, quite frankly, the ones who made serious commitments to their earlier education, the ones who wanted and once worked at careers, the ones who bring to marriage and motherhood a sense of their own identity—not those who somehow hope to acquire it later on. A recent study of fifty women college graduates in an eastern suburb and city, the year after the oldest child had left home, showed that, with very few exceptions, the only women who had any interests to pursue—in work, in community activities, or in the arts—had acquired them in college. The ones who lacked such interests were not acquiring them now; they slept late, in their “empty nests,” and looked forward only to death.6

  Educators at every women’s college, at every university, junior college, and community college, must see to it that women make a lifetime commitment (call it a “life plan,” a “vocation,” a “life purpose” if that dirty word career has too many celibate connotations) to a field of thought, to work of serious importance to society. They must expect the girl as well as the boy to take some field seriously enough to want to pursue it for life. This does not mean abandoning liberal education for women in favor of “how to” vocational courses. Liberal education, as it is given at the best of colleges and universities, not only trains the mind but provides an ineradicable core of human values. But liberal education must be planned for serious use, not merely dilettantism or passive appreciation. As boys at Harvard or Yale or Columbia or Chicago go on from the liberal arts core to study architecture, medicine, law, science, girls must be encouraged to go on, to make a life plan. It has been shown that girls with this kind of a commitment are less eager to rush into early marriage, less panicky about finding a man, more responsible for their sexual behavior.7 Most of them marry, of course, but on a much more mature basis. Their marriages then are not an escape but a commitment shared by two people that becomes part of their commitment to themselves and society. If, in fact, girls are educated to make such commitments, the question of sex and when they marry will lose its overwhelming importance.8 It is the fact that women have no identity of their own that makes sex, love, marriage, and children seem the only and essential facts of women’s life.

  In the face of the feminine mystique with its powerful hidden deterrents, educators must realize that they cannot inspire young women to commit themselves seriously to their education without taking some extraordinary measures. The few so far attempted barely come to grips with the problem. Mary Bunting’s new Institute for Independent Study at Radcliffe is fine for women who already know what they want to do, who have pursued their studies to the Ph.D. or are already active in the arts, and merely need some respite from motherhood to get back in the mainstream. Even more important, the presence of these women on the campus, women who have babies and husbands and who are still deeply committed to their own work, will undoubtedly help dispel the image of the celibate career woman and fire some of those Radcliffe sophomores out of the “climate of unexpectation” that permits them to meet the nation’s highest standard of educational excellence to use it later only in marriage and motherhood. This is what Mary Bunting had in mind. And it can be done elsewhere, in even simpler ways.

  It would pay every college and university that wants to encourage women to take education seriously to recruit for their faculties all the women they can find who have combined marriage and motherhood with the life of the mind—even if it means concessions for pregnancies or breaking the old rule about hiring the wife of the male associate professor who has her own perfectly respectable M.A. or Ph.D. As for the unmarried woman scholars, they must no longer be treated like lepers. The simple truth is that they have taken their existence seriously, and have fulfilled their human potential. They might well be, and often are, envied by women who live the very image of opulent togetherness, but have forfeited themselves. Women, as well as men, who are rooted in human work are rooted in life.

  It is essential, above all, for educators themselves to say “no” to the feminine mystique and face the fact that the only point in educating women is to educate them to the limit of their ability. Women do not need courses in “marriage and the family” to marry and raise families; they do not need courses in homemaking to make homes. But they must study science—to discover in science; study the thought of the past—to create new thought; study society—to pioneer in society. Educators must also give up these “one thing at a time” compromises. That separate layering of “education,” “sex,” “marriage,” “motherhood,” “interests for the last third of life,” will not solve the role crisis. Women must be educated to a new integration of roles. The more they are encouraged to make that new life plan—integrating a serious, lifelong commitment to society with marriage and motherhood—the less conflicts and unnecessary frustrations they will feel as wives and mothers, and the less their daughters will make mistaken choices for lack of a full image of woman’s identity.

  I could see this in investigating college girls’ rush to early marriage. The few who were not in such a desperate hurry to “get a man” and who committed themselves to serious long-range interests—evidently not worried that they would thereby lose their “femininity”—almost all had mothers, or other private images of women, who were committed to some serious purpose. (“My mother happens to be a teacher.” “My best friend’s mother is a doctor; she always seems so busy and happy.”)

  Education itself can help provide that new image—and the spark in girls to create their own—as soon as it stops compromising and temporizing with the old image of “woman’s role.” For women as well as men, education is and must be the matrix of human evolution. If today American women are finally breaking out of the housewife trap in search of new identity, it is quite simply because so many women have had a taste of higher education—unfinished, unfocused, but still powerful enough to force them on.

  For that last and most important battle can be fought in the mind and spirit of woman herself. Even without a private image, many girls in America who have been educated simply as people were given a strong enough sense of their human possibility to carry them past the old femininity, past that search for security in man’s love, to find a new self. A Swarthmore graduate, entering her internship, told me that at first, as she felt herself getting more and more “independent” in college, she worried a lot about having dates and getting married, wanted to “latch on to a boy.” “I tried to beat myself down to be feminine. Then I got interested in what I was doing and stopped worrying,” she said.

  It’s as if you’ve made some kind of shift. You begin to feel your competence in doing things. Like a baby learning to walk. Your mind begins to expand. You find your own field. And that’s a wonderful thing. The love of doing the work and the feeling there’s something there and you can trust it. It’s worth the unhappiness. They say a man has to suffer to grow, maybe something like that has to happen to women too. You begin not to be afraid to be yourself.

  Drastic steps must now be taken to re-educate the women who were deluded or cheated by the feminine mystique. Many of the women I interviewed who felt “trapped” as housewives have in the last few years started to move out of the trap. But there are as many others who are sinking back again, because they did not find out in time what they wanted to do, or because they were not able to find a way to do it. In almost every case, it took too much time, too much money, using existing educational facilities. Few house
wives can afford full-time study. Even if colleges admit them on a part-time basis—and many will not—few women can endure the slow-motion pace of usual undergraduate college education stretched over ten or more years. Some institutions are now willing to gamble on housewives, but will they be as willing when the flood of their college-bound offspring reaches its full height? The pilot programs that have been started at Sarah Lawrence and the University of Minnesota begin to show the way, but they do not face the time-money problem which is, for so many women, the insurmountable one.

  What is needed now is a national educational program, similar to the GI bill, for women who seriously want to continue or resume their education—and who are willing to commit themselves to its use in a profession. The bill would provide properly qualified women with tuition fees, plus an additional subsidy to defray other expenses—books, travel, even, if necessary, some household help. Such a measure would cost far less than the GI bill. It would permit mothers to use existing educational facilities on a part-time basis and carry on individual study and research projects at home during the years when regular classroom attendance is impossible. The whole concept of women’s education would be regeared from four-year college to a life plan under which a woman could continue her education, without conflict with her marriage, her husband and her children.

  The GI’s, matured by war, needed education to find their identity in society. In no mood for time-wasting, they astonished their teachers and themselves by their scholastic performance. Women who have matured during the housewife moratorium can be counted on for similar performance. Their desperate need for education and the desperate need of this nation for the untapped reserves of women’s intelligence in all the professions justify these emergency measures.9

  For those women who did not go to college, or quit too soon, for those who are no longer interested in their former field, or who never took their education seriously, I would suggest first of all an intensive concentrated re-immersion in, quite simply, the humanities—not abridgments and selections like the usual freshman or sophomore survey, but an intensive study like the educational experiments attempted by the Bell Telephone Company or the Ford Foundation for young executives who had conformed so completely to the role of organization man that they were not capable of the initiative and vision required in top executive ranks. For women, this could be done by a national program, along the lines of the Danish Folk-High-School movement, which would first bring the housewife back into the mainstream of thought with a concentrated six-week summer course, a sort of intellectual “shock therapy.” She would be subsidized so that she could leave home and go to a resident college, which is not otherwise used during the summer. Or she could go to a metropolitan center on an equally intensive basis, five days a week for six or eight weeks during the summer, with a day camp provided for the children.

  Assume that this educational shock treatment awakens able women to purposes requiring the equivalent of a four-year college program for further professional training. That college program could be completed in four years or less, without full-time classroom attendance, by a combination of these summer institutes, plus prescribed reading, papers, and projects that could be done during the winter at home. Courses taken on television or at local community colleges and universities on an extension basis, could be combined with tutorial conferences at midyear or every month. The courses would be taken for credit, and the customary degrees would be earned. Some system of “equivalents” would have to be worked out, not to give a woman credit for work that does not meet requirements, but to give her credit for truly serious work, even if it is done at times, places, and in ways that violate conventional academic standards.

  A number of universities automatically bar housewives by barring part-time undergraduate or graduate work. Perhaps they have been burned by dilettantes. But part-time college work, graduate or undergraduate, geared to a serious plan, is the only kind of education that can prevent a housewife from becoming a dilettante; it is the only way a woman with husband and children can get, or continue, an education. It could also be the most practical arrangement from the university’s point of view. With their facilities already overtaxed by population pressures, universities and women alike would benefit from a study program that does not require regular classroom attendance. While it makes a great deal of sense for the University of Minnesota to work out its excellent Plan for Women’s Continuing Education10 in terms of the regular university facilities, such a plan will not help the woman who must begin her education all over again to find out what she wants to do. But existing facilities, in any institution, can be used to fill in the gaps once a woman is under way on her life plan.

  Colleges and universities also need a new life plan—to become lifetime institutions for their students; offer them guidance, take care of their records, and keep track of their advanced work or refresher courses, no matter where they are taken. How much greater that allegiance and financial support from their alumnae if, instead of the teaparties to raise funds and a sentimental reunion every fifth June, a woman could look to her college for continuing education and guidance. Barnard alumnae can, and do, come back and take, free, any course at any time, if they meet the qualifications for it. All colleges could conduct summer institutes to keep alumnae abreast of developments in their fields during the years of young motherhood. They could accept part-time students and offer extension courses for the housewife who could not attend classes regularly. They could advise her on reading programs, papers, or projects that could be done at home. They could also work out a system whereby projects done by their alumnae in education, mental health, sociology, political science in their own communities could be counted as equivalent credits toward a degree. Instead of collecting dimes, let women volunteers serve supervised professional apprenticeships and collect the credits that are recognized in lieu of pay for medical internes. Similarly, when a woman has taken courses at a number of different institutions, perhaps due to her husband’s geographical itinerary, and has earned her community credits from agency, hospital, library or laboratory, her college of origin, or some national center set up by several colleges, could give her the orals, the comprehensives, and the appropriate examinations for a degree. The concept of “continuing education” is already a reality for men in many fields. Why not for women? Not education for careers instead of motherhood, not education for temporary careers before motherhood, not education to make them “better wives and mothers,” but an education they will use as full members of society.

  “But how many American women really want to do more with their lives?” the cynic asks. A fantastic number of New Jersey housewives responded to an offer of intensive retraining in mathematics for former college women willing to commit themselves to becoming mathematics teachers. In January, 1962, a simple news story in the New York Times announced that Sarah Lawrence’s Esther Raushenbush had obtained a grant to help mature women finish their education or work for graduate degrees on a part-time basis that could be fitted in with their obligations as mothers. The response literally put the small Sarah Lawrence switchboard out of commission. Within twenty-four hours, Mrs. Raushenbush had taken over 100 telephone calls. “It was like bank night,” the operator said. “As if they had to get in there right away, or they might miss the chance.” Interviewing the women who applied for the program, Mrs. Raushenbush, like Virginia Senders at Minnesota, was convinced of the reality of their need. They were not “neurotically rejecting” their husbands and children; they did not need psychotherapy, but they did need more education—in a hurry—and in a form they could get without neglecting their husbands and families.

  Education and re-education of American women for a serious purpose cannot be effected by one or two far-sighted institutions; it must be accomplished on a much wider scale. And no one serves this end who repeats, even for expedience or tact, the clichés of the feminine mystique. It is quite wrong to say, as some of the leading women educators are saying today, that w
omen must of course use their education, but not, heaven forbid, in careers that will compete with men.11 When women take their education and their abilities seriously and put them to use, ultimately they have to compete with men. It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all. Consider this recent news item about America’s latest occupational therapy for the pent-up feminine need to compete:

  It is a typical weekday in Dallas. Daddy is at work. Baby is having his morning nap. In an adjoining room, Brother (age 3) is riding a new rocking horse and Sis (5) is watching TV cartoons. And Mommy? Mommy is just a few feet away, crouching over the foul line on Lane 53, her hip twisted sharply to the left to steer the blue-white-marbled ball into the strike pocket between the one and three pins. Mommy is bowling. Whether in Dallas or Cleveland or Albuquerque or Spokane, energetic housewives have dropped dustcloth and vacuum and hauled the children off to the new alleys, where fulltime nurses stand ready to babysit in the fully equipped nurseries.