The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [114]
The studies that show working women to be happier, better, more mature mothers do not get much publicity. Since juvenile delinquency is increasing, and more women work or “are educated for some kind of intellectual work,” there is surely a direct cause-and-effect relationship, one says. Except that evidence indicates there is not. Several years ago, much publicity was given to a study comparing matched groups of delinquent and non-delinquent boys. It was found, among other things, that there was no more delinquency, or school truancy, when the mothers worked regularly than when they were housewives. But, spectacular headlines warned, significantly more delinquents had mothers who worked irregularly. This finding brought guilt and gloom to the educated mothers who had given up full-fledged careers, but managed to keep on in their fields by working part-time, by free-lancing, or by taking temporary jobs with periods at home in between. “Here for years I’ve been purposely taking temporary jobs and part-time jobs, trying to arrange my working life in the boys’ best interests,” one such mother was quoted by the New York Times, “and now it looks as though I’ve been doing the worst possible thing!”9
Actually, this mother, a woman with professional training who lived in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood, was equating herself with mothers in that study who, it turned out, not only lived in poor socio-economic circumstances, but had in many cases been juvenile delinquents themselves. And they often had husbands who were emotionally disturbed.
The researchers who did that study suggested that the sons of these women had emotional conflicts because the mother was motivated to her sporadic work “not so much to supplement family income as to escape household and maternal responsibilities.” But another specialist, analyzing the same findings, thought the basic cause both of the mother’s sporadic employment and the son’s delinquency was the emotional instability of both parents. Whatever the reason, the situation was in no way comparable to that of most educated women who read themselves into it. In fact, as Dr. Stolz shows, many studies misinterpreted as “proof” that women cannot combine careers and motherhood actually indicate that, where other conditions are equal, the children of mothers who work because they want to are less likely to be disturbed, have problems in school, or to “lack a sense of personal worth” than housewives’ children.
The early studies of children of working mothers were done in an era when few married women worked, at day nurseries which served working mothers who were without husbands due to death, divorce or desertion. These studies were done by social workers and economists in order to press for such reforms as mothers’ pensions. The disturbances and higher death rate in such children were not found in studies done in this recent decade, when of the millions of married women working, only 1 out of 8 was not living with her husband.
In one such recent study, based on 2,000 mothers, the only significant differences were that more housewife-mothers stated “the children make me nervous” than working mothers; and the housewives seemed to have “more children.” A famous study in Chicago which had seemed to show more mothers of delinquents were working outside the home, turned out to show only that more delinquents come from broken homes. Another study of 400 seriously disturbed children (of a school population of 16,000) showed that where no broken home was involved, three times as many of the disturbed children’s mothers were housewives as working mothers.
Other studies showed that children of working mothers were less likely to be either extremely aggressive or extremely inhibited, less likely to do poorly in school, or to “lack