The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [100]
Kids tend in adolescence to be very idealistic. They think they can acquire a different set of values, marry a boy from a different background, and that it won’t matter later on. We make them aware it will matter, so they won’t walk so lightly into mixed marriages, and other traps.18
The reporter asked why “Mate Selection,” “Adjustment to Marriage” and “Education for Family Living” are taught in colleges at all, if the teacher is committed not to teach, if no material is to be learned or covered, and if the only aim is to help the student understand personal problems and emotions. After surveying a number of marriage courses for Mademoiselle, she concluded: “Only in America would you overhear one undergraduate say to another with total ingenuousness, ‘You should have been in class today. We talked about male role-playing and a couple of people really opened up and got personal.’”
The point of role-playing, a technique adapted from group therapy, is to get students to understand problems “on a feeling level.” Emotions more heady than those of the usual college classroom are undoubtedly stirred up when the professor invites them to “role-play” the feelings of “a boy and a girl on their wedding night.”
There is a pseudotherapeutic air, as the professor listens patiently to endless self-conscious student speeches about personal feelings (“verbalizing”) in the hopes of sparking a “group insight.” But though the functional course is not group therapy, it is certainly an indoctrination of opinions and values through manipulation of the students’ emotions; and in this manipulative disguise, it is no longer subject to the critical thinking demanded in other academic disciplines.
The students take as gospel the bits and pieces assigned in text books that explain Freud or quote Margaret Mead; they do not have the frame of reference that comes from the actual study of psychology or anthropology. In fact, by explicitly banning the usual critical attitudes of college study, these pseudoscientific marriage courses give what is often no more than popular opinion, the fiat of scientific law. The opinion may be currently fashionable, or already outdated, in psychiatric circles, but it is often merely a prejudice, buttressed by psychological or sociological jargon and well-chosen statistics to give the appearance of unquestionable scientific truth.
The discussion on premarital intercourse usually leads to the scientific conclusion that it is wrong. One professor builds up his case against sexual intercourse before marriage with statistics chosen to demonstrate that premarital sexual experience tends to make marital adjustment more difficult. The student will not know of the other statistics which refute this point; if the professor knows of them, he can in the functional marriage course feel free to disregard them as unfunctional. (“Ours is a sick society. The students need some accurate definitive kind of knowledge.”) It is functional “knowledge” that “only the exceptional woman can make a go of a commitment to a career.” Of course, since most women in the past have not had careers, the few who did were all “exceptional”—as a mixed marriage is “exceptional,” and premarital intercourse for a girl is exceptional. All are phenomena of less than 51 per cent. The whole point of functional education often seems to be: what 51 per cent of the population does today, 100 per cent should do tomorrow.
So the sex-directed educator promotes a girl’s adjustment by dissuading her from any but the “normal” commitment to marriage and the family. One such educator goes farther than imaginary role-playing; she brings real ex-working mothers to class to talk about their guilt at leaving their children in the morning.