The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [102]
This, somehow, was not what the girls expected to hear from a lady psychoanalyst. Unlike the usual functional, sex-directed lesson, it upset a conventional feminine “should.” It also implied that they should begin to make certain decisions of their own, about their education and their future.
The functional lesson is much more soothing to the unsure sophomore who has not yet quite made the break from childhood. It does not defy the comfortable, safe conventions; it gives her sophisticated words for accepting her parents’ view, the popular view, without having to figure out views of her own. It also reassures her that she doesn’t have to work in college; that she can be lazy, follow impulse. She doesn’t have to postpone present pleasure for future goals; she doesn’t have to read eight books for a history paper, take the tough physics course. It might give her a masculinity complex. After all, didn’t the book say:
Woman’s intellectuality is to a large extent paid for by the loss of valuable feminine qualities…. All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.19
A girl doesn’t have to be very lazy, very unsure, to take the hint. Thinking, after all, is hard work. In fact, she would have to do some very cold hard thinking about her own warm, intuitive knowledge to challenge this authoritative statement.
It is no wonder that several generations of American college girls of fine mind and fiery spirit took the message of the sex-directed educators, and fled college and career to marry and have babies before they became so “intellectual” that, heaven forbid, they wouldn’t be able to enjoy sex “in a feminine way.”
Even without the help of sex-directed educators, the girl growing up with brains and spirit in America learns soon enough to watch her step, “to be like all the others,” not to be herself. She learns not to work too hard, think too often, ask too many questions. In high schools, in coeducational colleges, girls are reluctant to speak out in class for fear of being typed as “brains.” This phenomenon has been borne out by many studies;20 any bright girl or woman can document it from personal experience. Bryn Mawr girls have a special term for the way they talk when boys are around, compared to the real talk they can permit themselves when they are not afraid to let their intelligence show. In the coeducational colleges, girls are regarded by others—and think of themselves—primarily in terms of their sexual function as dates, future wives. They “seek my security in him” instead of finding themselves, and each act of self-betrayal tips the scale further away from identity to passive self-contempt.
There are exceptions, of course. The Mellon study found that some Vassar seniors, as compared with freshmen, showed an enormous growth in four years—the kind of growth toward identity and self-realization which scientists now know takes place in people in their twenties and even thirties, forties, and fifties, long after the period of physical growth is over. But many girls showed no signs of growth. These were the ones who resisted, successfully, involvement with ideas, the academic work of the college, the intellectual disciplines, the larger values. They resisted intellectual development, self-development, in favor of being “feminine,” not too brainy, not too interested, not too different from the other girls. It was not that their actual sexual interests interfered; in fact, the psychologists got the impression that with many of these girls, “interest in men and marriage is a kind of defense against intellectual development.” For such girls, even sex is not real, merely a kind of conformity. The sex-directed educator would find no fault in this kind of adjustment.