The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [106]
If the feminine mystique has not destroyed her sense of humor, a woman might laugh at such a candid description of the life her expensive sex-directed education fits her for: an occasional alumnae reunion and someone else’s housework. The sad fact is, in the era of Freud and functionalism and the feminine mystique, few educators escaped such a sex-distortion of their own values. Max Lerner,27 even Riesman in The Lonely Crowd, suggested that women need not seek their own autonomy through productive contribution to society—they might better help their husbands hold on to theirs, through play. And so sex-directed education segregated recent generations of able American women as surely as separate-but-equal education segregated able American Negroes from the opportunity to realize their full abilities in the mainstream of American life.
It does not explain anything to say that in this era of conformity colleges did not really educate anybody. The Jacob report,28 which leveled this indictment against American colleges generally, and even the more sophisticated indictment by Sanford and his group, does not recognize that the colleges’ failure to educate women for an identity beyond their sexual role was undoubtedly a crucial factor in perpetuating, if not creating, that conformity which educators now so fashionably rail against. For it is impossible to educate women to devote themselves so early and completely to their sexual role—women who, as Freud said, can be very active indeed in achieving a passive end—without pulling men into the same comfortable trap. In effect, sex-directed education led to a lack of identity in women most easily solved by early marriage. And a premature commitment to any role—marriage or vocation—closes off the experiences, the testing, the failures and successes in various spheres of activity that are necessary for a person to achieve full maturity, individual identity.
The danger of stunting of boys’ growth by early domesticity was recognized by the sex-directed educators. As Margaret Mead put it recently:
Early domesticity has always been characteristic of most savages, of most peasants and of the urban poor…. If there are babies, it means, you know, the father’s term paper gets all mixed up with the babies’ bottle…. Early student marriage is domesticating boys so early they don’t have a chance for full intellectual development. They don’t have a chance to give their entire time, not necessarily to study in the sense of staying in the library—but in the sense that the married students don’t have time to experience, to think, to sit up all night in bull sessions, to develop as individuals. This is not only important for the intellectuals, but also the boys who are going to be the future statesmen of the country and lawyers and doctors and all sorts of professional men.29
But what of the girls who will never even write the term papers because of the baby’s bottle? Because of the feminine mystique, few have seen it as a tragedy that they thereby trap themselves in that one passion, one occupation, one role for life. Advanced educators in the early 1960’s have their own cheerful fantasies about postponing women’s education until after they have had their babies; they thereby acknowledge that they have resigned themselves almost unanimously to the early marriages, which continue unabated.
But by choosing femininity over the painful growth to full identity, by never achieving the hard core of self that comes not from fantasy but from mastering reality, these girls are doomed to suffer ultimately that bored, diffuse feeling of purposelessness, nonexistence, non-involvement with the world that can be called anomie, or lack of identity, or merely felt as the problem that has no name.
Still, it is too easy to make education the scapegoat. Whatever the mistakes of the sex-directed educators, other educators have