The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [105]
Julie B’s mother is a teacher and scholar and the driving force in the family…. Mother gets after father for being too easygoing. Father doesn’t mind if his wife and daughter have high-brow tastes and ideas, only such are not for him. Julie becomes out-door girl, nonconformist, dominates her older brother, but is conscience-stricken if she doesn’t do required reading or if grade average slips. Sticks to her intention to do graduate work and become teacher. Older brother now college teacher and Julie, herself a graduate student now, is married to a graduate student in natural science.
When she was a freshman we presented her interview data, without interpretation, to a group of psychiatrists, psychologists, social scientists. Our idea of a really promising girl. Common question: “What’s wrong with her?” Common opinion: she would need psychotherapy. Actually she got engaged to her budding scientist in her sophomore year, became increasingly conscious of herself as an intellectual and outsider, but still couldn’t neglect her work. “If only I could flunk something,” she said.
It takes a very daring educator today to attack the sex-directed line, for he must challenge, in essence, the conventional image of femininity. The image says that women are passive, dependent, conformist, incapable of critical thought or original contribution to society; and in the best traditions of the self-fulfilling prophecy, sex-directed education continues to make them so, as in an earlier era, lack of education made them so. No one asks whether a passively feminine, uncomplicated, dependent woman—in a primitive village or in a suburb—actually enjoys greater happiness, greater sexual fulfillment than a woman who commits herself in college to serious interests beyond the home. No one, until very recently when Russians orbited moons and men in space, asked whether adjustment should be education’s aim. In fact, the sex-directed educators, so bent on women’s feminine adjustment, could gaily cite the most ominous facts about American housewives—their emptiness, idleness, boredom, alcoholism, drug addiction, disintegration to fat, disease, and despair after forty, when their sexual function has been filled—without deviating a bit from their crusade to educate all women to this sole end.
So the sex-directed educator disposes of the thirty years women are likely to live after forty with three blithe proposals:
A course in “Law and Order for the Housewife” to enable her to deal, as a widow, with insurances, taxes, wills, investments.
Men might retire earlier to help keep their wives company.
A brief fling in “volunteer community services, politics, the arts or the like”—though, since the woman will be untrained the main value will be personal therapy. “To choose only one example, a woman who wants some really novel experience may start a campaign to rid her city or country of that nauseous eczema of our modern world, the billboard.
“The billboards will remain and multiply like bacteria infesting the landscape, but at least she will have had a vigorous adult education course in local politics. Then she can relax and devote herself to the alumnae activities of the institution from which she graduated. Many a woman approaching middle years has found new vigor and enthusiasm in identifying herself with the on-going life of her college and in expanding her maternal instincts, now that her own children are grown, to encompass the new generations of students which inhabit its campus.”25
She could also take a part-time job, he said, but she shouldn’t take work away from men who must feed their families, and, in fact, she won’t have the skills or experience for a very “exciting” job.
…there is great demand for experienced and reliable women who can relieve younger women of family responsibilities on regular days or afternoons, so that they may either develop community interests or hold part-time jobs of