The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [115]
There also seemed to be a closer and more positive relationship to children among working mothers who liked their work, than among housewife-mothers or mothers who did not like their work. And a study during the thirties of college-educated mothers, who are more able to choose work they like, showed no adverse effect of their employment on their marital and emotional adjustment, or on number or seriousness of children’s problems. In general, women who work shared only two attributes; they were more likely to have higher education and to live in cities.10
In our own era, however, as droves of educated women have become suburban housewives, who among them did not worry that their child’s bedwetting, thumbsucking, overeating, refusal to eat, withdrawal, lack of friends, inability to be alone, aggressiveness, timidity, slow reading, too much reading, lack of discipline, rigidity, inhibition, exhibitionism, sexual precociousness, or sexual lack of interest was a sign of incipient neurosis. If not actual abnormality or actual delinquency, they must be at least signs of parental failure, portents of future neurosis. Sometimes they were. Parenthood, and especially motherhood, under the Freudian spotlight, had to become a full-time job and career if not a religious cult. One false step could mean disaster. Without careers, without any commitment other than their homes, mothers could devote every moment to their children; their full attention could be given to finding signs of incipient neurosis—and perhaps to producing it.
In every case history, of course, you can always find significant facts about the mother, especially if you are looking for facts, or memories, of those supposedly crucial first five years. In America, after all, the mother is always there; she is supposed to be there. Is the fact that they are always there, and there only as mothers, somehow linked to the neuroses of their children? Many cultures pass on their conflicts to children through the mothers, but in the modern cultures of the civilized world, not many educate their strongest, ablest women to make a career of their own children.
Not long ago Dr. Spock confessed, a bit uneasily, that Russian children, whose mothers usually have some purpose in their lives besides motherhood—they work in medicine, science, education, industry, government, art—seemed somehow more stable, adjusted, mature, than American children, whose full-time mothers do nothing but worry about them. Could it be that Russian women are somehow better mothers because they have a serious purpose in their own lives? At least, said the good Dr. Spock, these mothers are more sure of themselves as mothers. They are not, like American mothers, dependent on the latest word from the experts, the newest child-care fad.11 It is clearly a terrible burden on Dr. Spock to have 13,500,000 mothers so unsure of themselves that they bring up their children literally according to his book—and call piteously to him for help when the book does not work.
No headlines marked the growing concern of psychiatrists with the problem of “dependence” in American children and grownup children. The psychiatrist David Levy, in a very famous study of “maternal overprotection,” studied in exhaustive detail twenty mothers who had damaged their children to a pathological extent by “maternal infantilization, indulgence and overprotection.”12 A typical case was a twelve-year-old boy who had “infantile temper tantrums in his eleventh year when his mother refused to butter his bread for him. He still demanded her help in dressing…. He summed up his requirements in life very neatly by saying that his mother would butter his bread for him until he married, after which his wife would do so…”
All these mothers—according to physiological indexes such as menstrual flow, breast milk, and early indications of a