The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [103]
Several years ago a team of California psychologists who had been following the development of 140 bright youngsters noticed a sudden sharp drop in IQ curves in some of the teenage records. When they investigated this, they found that while most of the youngsters’ curves remained at the same high level, year after year, those whose curves dropped were all girls. The drop had nothing to do with the physiological changes of adolescence; it was not found in all girls. But in the records of those girls whose intelligence dropped were found repeated statements to the effect that “it isn’t too smart for a girl to be smart.” In a very real sense, these girls were arrested in their mental growth, at age fourteen or fifteen, by conformity to the feminine image.21
The fact is, girls today and those responsible for their education do face a choice. They must decide between adjustment, conformity, avoidance of conflict, therapy—or individuality, human identity, education in the truest sense, with all its pains of growth. But they do not have to face the mistaken choice painted by the sex-directed educators, with their dire warnings against loss of femininity and sexual frustration. For the perceptive psychologist who studied the Vassar girls uncovered some startling new evidence about the students who chose to become truly involved with their education. It seems that those seniors who showed the greatest signs of growth were more “masculine” in the sense of being less passive and conventional; but they were more “feminine” in inner emotional life, and the ability to gratify it. They also scored higher, far higher than as freshmen, on certain scales commonly supposed to measure neuroses. The psychologist commented: “We have come to regard elevations on such scales as evidence that education is taking place.”22 He found girls with conflicts showed more growth than the adjusted ones, who had no wish to become independent. The least adjusted were also the more developed—“already prepared for even further changes and more independence.” In summing up the Vassar study, its director could not avoid the psychological paradox: education for women does make them less feminine, less adjusted—but it makes them grow.
Being less “feminine” is closely related to being more educated and more mature…. It is interesting to note, however, that Feminine Sensitivity, which may well have sources in physiology and in early identifications, does not decrease during the four years; “feminine” interests and feminine role behavior, i.e., conventionality and passivity, can be understood as later and more superficial acquisitions, and, hence, more susceptible to decrease as the individual becomes more mature and more educated….
One might say that if we were interested in stability alone, we would do well to plan a program to keep freshmen as they are, rather than to try to increase their education, their maturity and their flexibility with regard to sex-role behavior. Seniors are more unstable because there is more to be stabilized, less certain of their identities because more possibilities are open to them.23
At graduation, such women were, however, only at a “halfway point” in their growth to autonomy. Their fate depended on “whether they now enter a situation in which they can continue to grow or whether they find some quick but regressive means for relieving the stress.” The flight into marriage is the easiest, quickest way to relieve that stress. To the educator, bent on women’s growth to autonomy, such a marriage is “regressive.” To the sex-directed educator, it is femininity fulfilled.
A therapist at another college told me of girls who had never committed themselves, either to their work or any other activity of the college and who felt that they would “go to pieces” when their parents refused to let them leave college to marry the boys in whom they found “security.” When these girls, with help, finally applied