The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [117]
They had none of that constant and watchful nurturing love that is urged on middle-class mothers by the child psychologizers; their mothers, like their fathers, worked all day in the factory; they had been left in the care of older sisters or brothers, had run free in fields and woods, had avoided their parents wherever possible. In these families, stress was placed upon work, rather than personal sentiment: “respect, not love is the tie that binds.” Demonstrations of affection were not altogether lacking, Green said, “but they had little in common with the definitions of parent-child love found in the middle-class women’s magazines.”
It occurred to the sociologist that perhaps the very absence of this omnipresent nurturing mother love might explain why these children did not suffer the neurotic symptoms so commonly found in the sons of middle-class parents. The Polish parents’ authority, however brutal and irrational, was “external to the core of the self,” as Green put it. The Polish parents did not have the technique or opportunity to “absorb the personality of the child.” Perhaps, Green suggested, “lack of love” and “irrational authority” do not in themselves cause neurosis, but only within a certain context of “personality absorption”—the physical and emotional blanketing of the child which brings about that slavish dependence upon the parents found among children of the native white American urban college-educated middle class.
Is “lack of love” the cause of neurosis, or the middle-class parental nurturing which “absorbs” the child’s independent self, and creates in him an excessive need for love? Psychoanalysts had always concentrated on the seeds of neuroses; Green wanted to “find out what there is to being a modern middle-class parent that fertilizes the soil of the child’s neurosis, however the individual seed is planted.”
As usual, the arrow pointed unerringly to the mother. But Green was not concerned with helping the modern American mother adjust to her role; on the contrary, he found that she lacked any real “role” as a woman in modern society.
She enters marriage and perhaps bears a child with no definite role and series of functions, as formerly…. She feels inferior to man because comparatively she has been and is more restricted. The extent of the actual emancipation of women has been commonly exaggerated….
Through a “good” marriage the middle-class girl attains far more status than is possible through a career of her own. But the period of phantom dalliance with a career, or an embarkation upon one, leave her ill-fitted for the drudgery of housecleaning, diapers, and the preparation of meals…. The mother has little to do, in or out of the home; she is her single child’s sole companion. Modern “scientific child care” enforces a constant supervision and diffused worrying over the child’s health, eating spinach, and ego development; this is complicated by the fact that much energy is spent forcing early walking, toilet-training, talking, because in an intensively competitive milieu middle-class parents from the day of birth are constantly comparing their own child’s development with that of the neighbors’ children.
Perhaps, Green speculates, middle-class mothers
…have made “love” of supreme importance in their relation to the child, theirs for him and his for them, partly because of the love-complex of our time, which is particularly ramified within the middle class, and partly as a compensation for the many sacrifices they have made for the child. The child’s need for love is experienced precisely because he has been conditioned to need it…conditioned to a slavish emotional dependence…. Not the need for parental love, but the constant threat of its withdrawal after the child has been conditioned to the need, lies at the root of the most characteristic modern neuroses; Mamma won’t like you if you don’t eat