The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [104]
Unlike the sex-directed educator, this professional therapist felt that the girl who suffers almost to the point of breakdown in the senior year, and who faces a personal decision about her own future—faces even an irreconcilable conflict between the values and interests and abilities her education has given her, and the conventional role of housewife—is still “healthier” than the adjusted, calm, stable girl in whom education did not “take” at all and who steps smoothly from her role as parents’ child to husband’s wife, conventionally feminine, without ever waking up to painful individual identity.
And yet the fact is, today most girls do not let their education “take” they stop themselves before getting this close to identity. I could see this in the girls at Smith, and the girls I interviewed from other colleges. It was clear in the Vassar research. The Vassar study showed that just as girls begin to feel the conflicts, the growing pains of identity, they stop growing. They more or less consciously stop their own growth to play the feminine role. Or, to put it in another way, they evade further experiences conducive to growth. Until now this stunting or evasion of growth has been considered normal feminine adjustment. But when the Vassar study followed women past the senior year—where they were on the verge of this painful crucial step in personal growth—out into life, where most of them were playing the conventional feminine role, these facts emerged:
Twenty or twenty-five years out of college, these women measured lower than seniors on the “Development Scale” which covered the whole gamut of mental, emotional, and personal growth. They did not lose all the growth achieved in college (alumnae scored higher than freshmen) but—in spite of the psychological readiness for further growth at twenty-one—they did not keep growing.
These women were, for the most part, adjusted as suburban housewives, conscientious mothers, active in their communities. But, except for the professional career women, they had not continued to pursue deep interests of their own. There seemed some reason to believe that the cessation of growth was related to the lack of deep personal interests, the lack of an individual commitment.
The women who, twenty years later, were most troubling to the psychologist were the most conventionally feminine—the ones who were not interested, even in college, in anything except finding a husband.24
In the Vassar study there was one group of students who in senior year neither suffered conflict to the point of near-breakdown nor stopped their own growth to flee into marriage. These were students who were preparing for a profession; they had gained, in college, interests deep enough to commit themselves to a career. The study revealed that virtually all such students with professional ambitions plan to marry, but marriage is for them an activity in which they will voluntarily choose to participate rather than something that is necessary for any sense of personal identity. Such students have a clear sense of direction, a greater degree of independence and self-confidence than most. They may be engaged or deeply in love, but they do not feel they must sacrifice their own individualities or their career ambitions if they wish to marry. With these girls, the psychologists did not get the impression, as they did with so many, that interest in men and in marriage was a kind of defense against intellectual development. Their interest in some particular man was real. At the same time, it did not interfere with their education.
But the degree to which the feminine mystique has brainwashed American educators was shown when the director of the Vassar study described to a panel of his colleagues such a girl, who