The Feminine Mystique (36 page)

It is the mystique of feminine fulfillment, and the immaturity it breeds, that prevents women from doing the work of which they are capable. It is not strange that women who have lived for ten or twenty years within the mystique, or who adjusted to it so young that they have never experienced being on their own, should be afraid to face the test of real work in the world and cling to their identity as housewives—even if, thereby, they doom themselves to feeling “empty, useless, as if I do not exist.” That housewifery can, must, expand to fill the time available when there is no other purpose in life seems fairly evident. After all, with no other purpose in her life, if the housework were done in an hour, and the children off to school, the bright, energetic housewife would find the emptiness of her days unbearable.

So a Scarsdale woman fired her maid, and even doing her own housework and the usual community work, could not use up all her energy. “We solved the problem,” she said, speaking of herself and a friend who had tried to commit suicide. “We go bowling three mornings a week. Otherwise, we’d go out of our minds. At least, now we can sleep at night.” “There’s always some way you can get rid of it,” I heard one woman saying to another over lunch at Schrafft’s, debating somewhat listlessly what to do with the “afternoon off” from housewifery that their doctors had ordered. Diet foods and exercise salons have become a lucrative business in that futile battle to take off the fat that cannot be turned into human energy by the American housewife. It is slightly shocking to think that intelligent, educated American women are forced to “get rid of” their creative human energy by eating a chalky powder and wrestling with a machine. But no one is shocked to realize that getting rid of women’s creative energy, rather than using it for some larger purpose in society, is the very essence of being a housewife.

To live according to the feminine mystique depends on a reversal of history, a devaluation of human progress. To get women back into the home again, not like the Nazis, by ordering them there, but by “propaganda with a view to restoring woman’s sense of prestige and self-esteem as women, actual or potential mothers…women who live as women,” meant that women had to resist their own “technological unemployment.” The canning plants and bakeries did not close down, but even the mystique makers felt the need to defend themselves against the question, “are we, in suggesting that women might, of their own volition, recapture some of their functions around the home, such as cooking, preserving and decorating, trying to turn back the clock of progress?”
¹⁰

Progress is not progress, they argued; in theory, the freeing of women from household drudgery liberates them for the cultivation of higher aims, but “as such aims are understood, many are called and few are chosen, among men no less than among women.” Therefore, let all women recapture that work in the home which all women can do easily—and let society stage-manage it so that prestige for women “be shifted emphatically to those women recognized as serving society most fully as women.”

For fifteen years and longer, there has been a propaganda campaign, as unanimous in this democratic nation as in the most efficient of dictatorships, to give women “prestige” as housewives. But can the sense of self in woman, which once rested on necessary work and achievement in the home, be re-created by housework that is no longer really necessary or really uses much ability—in a country and at a time when women can be free, finally, to move on to something more. It is wrong for a woman, for whatever reason, to spend her days in work that is not moving as the world around her is moving, in work that does not truly use her creative energy. Women themselves are discovering that though there is always “some way you can get rid of it,” they can have no peace until they begin to
use
their abilities.

Surely there are many women in America who are happy at the moment as housewives, and some whose abilities are fully used in the housewife role. But happiness is not the same thing as the aliveness of being fully used. Nor is human intelligence, human ability, a static thing. Housework, no matter how it is expanded to fill the time available, can hardly use the abilities of a woman of average or normal human intelligence, much less the fifty per cent of the female population whose intelligence, in childhood, was above average.

Some decades ago, certain institutions concerned with the mentally retarded discovered that housework was peculiarly suited to the capacities of feeble-minded girls. In many towns, inmates of institutions for the mentally retarded were in great demand as houseworkers, and housework was much more difficult then than it is now.

Basic decisions as to the upbringing of children, interior decoration, menu-planning, budget, education, and recreation do involve intelligence, of course. But as it was put by one of the few home-and-family experts who saw the real absurdity of the feminine mystique, most housework, the part that still takes the most time, “can be capably handled by an eight-year-old child.”

A number of the more disagreeable sexual phenomena of this era can be seen now as the inevitable result of that ludicrous consignment of millions of women to spend their days at work an eight-year-old could do. For no matter how much the “home-and-family career” is rationalized to justify such appalling waste of able womanpower; no matter how ingeniously the manipulators coin new scientific sounding words, “lubrilator” and the like, to give the illusion that dumping the clothes in the washing machines is an act akin to deciphering the genetic code; no matter how much housework is expanded to fill the time available, it still presents little challenge to the adult mind. Into this mental vacuum have flooded an endless line of books on gourmet cooking, scientific treatises on child care, and above all, advice on the techniques of “married love,” sexual intercourse. These, too, offer little challenge to the adult mind. The results could almost have been predicted. To the great dismay of men, their wives suddenly became “experts,” know-it-alls, whose unshakable superiority at home, a domain they both occupied, was impossible to compete with, and very hard to live with. As Russell Lynes put it, wives began to treat their husbands as part-time servants—or the latest new appliance.
¹²
With a snap course in home economics or marriage and family under her belt and copies of Dr. Spock and Dr. Van de Velde side by side on the shelf; with all that time, energy and intelligence directed on husband, children, and house, the young American wife—easily, inevitably, disastrously—began to dominate the family even more completely than her “mom.”

I
did not do a Kinsey study. But when I was on the trail of the problem that has no name, the suburban housewives I interviewed would often give me an explicitly sexual answer to a question that was not sexual at all. I would ask about their personal interests, ambitions, what they did, or would like to do, not necessarily as wives or mothers, but when they were not occupied with their husbands or their children or their housework. The question might even be what they were doing with their education. But some of these women simply assumed that I was asking about sex. Was the problem that has no name a sexual problem, after all? I might have thought so, except that when these women spoke of sex, there was a false note, a strange unreal quality about their words. They made mysterious allusions or broad hints; they were eager to be asked about sex; even if I did not ask, they often took pride in recounting the explicit details of some sexual adventure. They were not making them up; these adventures were real enough. But what made them sound unsexual, so unreal?

A thirty-eight-year-old mother of four told me sex was the only thing that made her “feel alive.” But something had gone wrong; her husband did not give her that feeling anymore. They went through the motions, but he was not really interested. She was beginning to feel contemptuous of him in bed. “I need sex to feel alive, but I never really feel him,” she said.

In a flat, matter-of-fact tone that added to the unreality, a thirty-year-old mother of five, calmly knitting a sweater, said she was thinking of going away, to Mexico perhaps, to live with a man with whom she was having an affair. She did not love him, but she thought if she gave herself to him “completely” she might find the feeling that she knew now was “the only important thing in life.” What about the children? Vaguely, she guessed she would take them along—he wouldn’t mind. What was the feeling she was looking for? She had found it at first with her husband, she supposed. At least she remembered that when she
married
him—she was eighteen—she had “felt so happy I wanted to die.” But he did not “give himself completely” to her; he gave so much of himself to his work. So she found that feeling for a while, she thought, with her children. Shortly after she weaned her fifth baby from the breast, at three, she had her first affair. She discovered “it gave me that wonderful feeling again, to give my whole self to someone else.” But that affair could not last; he had too many children, so did she. He said when they broke up, “You’ve given me such a feeling of identity.” And she wondered, “what about my own identity?” So she went off by herself for a month that summer, leaving the children with her husband. “I was looking for something, I’m not sure what, but the only way I get that feeling is when I’m in love with someone.” She had another affair, but that time the feeling did not appear. So with this new one, she wanted to go away completely. “Now that I know how to get that feeling,” she said, knitting calmly, “I will simply keep trying until I find it again.”

She did take off for Mexico with that shadowy, faceless man, taking her five children with her; but six months later, she was back, children and all. Evidently she did not find her phantom “feeling.” And whatever happened, it was not real enough to affect her marriage, which went on as before. Just what was the feeling she expected to get from sex? And why was it, somehow, always out of reach? Does sex become unreal, a phantasy, when a person needs it to feel “alive,” to feel “my own identity”?

In another suburb, I spoke to an attractive woman in her late thirties who had “cultural” interests, though they were rather vague and unfocused. She started paintings which she did not finish, raised money for concerts she did not listen to, said she had not “found her medium yet.” I discovered that she engaged in a sort of sexual status-seeking which had the same vague, unfocused pretentions as her cultural dabblings, and in fact, was part of it. She boasted of the intellectual prowess, the professional distinction, of the man who, she hinted, wanted to sleep with her. “It makes you feel proud, like an achievement. You don’t want to hide it. You want everyone to know, when it’s a man of his stature,” she told me. How much she really wanted to sleep with this man, professional stature or no, was another question. I later learned from her neighbors that she was a community joke. Everyone did indeed “know,” but her sexual offerings were so impersonal and predictable that only a newcomer husband would take them seriously enough to respond.

But the evidently insatiable sexual need of a slightly younger mother of four in that same suburb was hardly a joke. Her sex-seeking, somehow never satisfied despite affair after affair, mixed with much indiscriminate “extramarital petting,” as Kinsey would have put it, had real and disastrous consequences on at least two other marriages. These women and others like them, the suburban sex-seekers, lived literally within the narrow boundaries of the feminine mystique. They were intelligent, but strangely “incomplete.” They had given up attempts to make housework or community work expand to fill the time available; they turned instead to sex. But still they were unfulfilled. Their husbands did not satisfy them, they said, extramarital affairs were no better. In terms of the feminine mystique, if a woman feels a sense of personal “emptiness,” if she is unfulfilled, the cause must be sexual. But why, then, doesn’t sex ever satisfy her?

Just as college girls used the sexual phantasy of married life to protect them from the conflicts and growing pains and work of a personal commitment to science, or art, or society, are these married women putting into their insatiable sexual search the aggressive energies which the feminine mystique forbids them to use for larger human purposes? Are they using sex or sexual phantasy to fill needs that are not sexual? Is that why their sex, even when it is real, seems like phantasy? Is that why, even when they experience orgasm, they feel “unfulfilled”? Are they driven to this never-satisfied sexual seeking because, in their marriages, they have not found the sexual fulfillment which the feminine mystique promises? Or is that feeling of personal identity, of fulfillment, they seek in sex something that sex alone cannot give?

Sex is the only frontier open to women who have always lived within the confines of the feminine mystique. In the past fifteen years, the sexual frontier has been forced to expand perhaps beyond the limits of possibility, to fill the time available, to fill the vacuum created by denial of larger goals and purposes for American women. The mounting sex-hunger of American women has been documented ad nauseam—by Kinsey, by the sociologists and novelists of suburbia, by the mass media, ads, television, movies, and women’s magazines that pander to the voracious female appetite for sex phantasy. It is not an exaggeration to say that several generations of able American women have been successfully reduced to sex creatures, sex-seekers. But something has evidently gone wrong.

Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgastic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery. The sex-glutted novels become increasingly explicit and increasingly dull; the sex kick of the women’s magazines has a sickly sadness; the endless flow of manuals describing new sex techniques hint at an endless lack of excitement. This sexual boredom is betrayed by the ever-growing size of the Hollywood starlet’s breasts, by the sudden emergence of the male phallus as an advertising “gimmick.” Sex has become depersonalized, seen in terms of these exaggerated symbols. But of all the strange sexual phenomena that have appeared in the era of the feminine mystique, the most ironic are these—the frustrated sexual hunger of American women has increased, and their conflicts over femininity have intensified, as they have reverted from independent activity to search for their sole fulfillment through their sexual role in the home. And as American women have turned their attention to the exclusive, explicit, and aggressive pursuit of sexual fulfillment, or the acting-out of sexual phantasy, the sexual disinterest of American men and their hostility toward women, have also increased.

I found evidence of these phenomena everywhere. There is, as I have said, an air of exaggerated unreality about sex today, whether it is pictured in the frankly lascivious pages of a popular novel or in the curious, almost asexual bodies of the women who pose for fashion photographs. According to Kinsey, there has been no increase in sexual “outlet” in recent decades. But in the past decade there has been an enormous increase in the American preoccupation with sex and sexual phantasy.
¹

In January, 1950, and again in January, 1960, a psychologist studied every reference to sex in American newspapers, magazines, television and radio programs, plays, popular songs, best-selling novels and nonfiction books. He found an enormous increase in explicit references to sexual desires and expressions (including “nudity, sex organs, scatology, ‘obscenity,’ lasciviousness and sexual intercourse”). These constituted over fifty per cent of the observed references to human sexuality, with “extramarital coitus” (including “fornication, adultery, sexual promiscuity, prostitution and venereal disease”) in second place. In American media there were more than 2 1/2 times as many references to sex in 1960 as in 1950, an increase from 509 to 1,341 “permissive” sex references in the 200 media studied. The so-called “men’s magazines” not only reached new excesses in their preoccupation with specific female sex organs, but a rash of magazines blossomed frankly geared to homosexuality. The most striking new sexual phenomenon, however, was the increased and evidently “insatiable” lasciviousness of best-selling novels and periodical fiction, whose audience is primarily women.

Despite his professional approval of the “permissive” attitude to sex compared to its previous hypocritical denial, the psychologist was moved to speculate:

From 1950 to 1960 the interest of men in the details of intercourse paled before the avidity of women—both as depicted in these media, and as its audience. Already by 1950 the salacious details of the sex act to be found in men’s magazines were outnumbered by those in fiction best-sellers sold mainly to women.

During this same period, the women’s magazines displayed an increased preoccupation with sex in a rather sickly disguise.
³
Such “health” features as “Making Marriage Work,” “Can This Marriage Be Saved,” “Tell Me, Doctor,” described the most intimate sexual details in moralistic guise as “problems,” and women read about them in much the same spirit as they had read the case histories in their psychology texts. Movies and the theater betrayed a growing preoccupation with diseased or perverted sex, each new film and each new play a little more sensational than the last in its attempt to shock or titillate.

At the same time one could see, almost in parallel step, human sexuality reduced to its narrowest physiological limits in the numberless sociological studies of sex in the suburbs and in the Kinsey investigations. The two Kinsey reports, in 1948 and 1953, treated human sexuality as a status-seeking game in which the goal was the greatest number of “outlets,” orgasms achieved equally by masturbation, nocturnal emissions during dreams, intercourse with animals, and in various postures with the other sex, pre-extra-or post-marital. What the Kinsey investigators reported and the way they reported it, no less than the sex-glutted novels, magazines, plays and novels, were all symptoms of the increasing depersonalization, immaturity, joylessness and spurious senselessness of our sexual overpreoccupation.

That this spiral of sexual “lust, luridness and lasciviousness” was not exactly a sign of healthy affirmation of human intercourse became apparent as the image of males lusting after women gave way to the new image of women lusting after males. Exaggerated, perverted extremes of the sex situations seemed to be necessary to excite hero and audience alike. Perhaps the best example of this perverse reversal was the Italian movie
La Dolce Vita
, which with all its artistic and symbolic pretentions, was a hit in America because of its much-advertised sexual titillation. Though a comment on Italian sex and society, this particular movie was in the chief characteristics of its sexual preoccupation devastatingly pertinent to the American scene.

As is increasingly the case in American novels, plays and movies, the sex-seekers were mainly the women, who were shown as mindless over-or under-dressed sex creatures (the Hollywood star) and hysterical parasites (the journalist’s girl friend). In addition, there was the promiscuous rich girl who needed the perverse stimulation of the borrowed prostitute’s bed, the aggressively sex-hungry women in the candlelit “hide and seek” castle orgy, and finally the divorcée who performed her writhing strip tease to a lonely, bored and indifferent audience.

All the men, in fact, were too bored or too busy to be bothered. The indifferent, passive hero drifted from one sex-seeking woman to another—a Don Juan, an implied homosexual, drawn in phantasy to the asexual little girl, just out of reach across the water. The exaggerated extremes of the sex situations end finally in a depersonalization that creates a bloated boredom—in hero and audience alike. (The very tedium of depersonalized sex may also explain the declining audience of Broadway theaters, Hollywood movies and the American novel.) Long before the final scenes of
La Dolce Vita
—when they all go out to stare at that huge bloated dead fish—the message of the movie was made quite clear: “the sweet life” is dull.