The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [118]
Green was only concerned with mothers in terms of their effect on their sons. But it occurred to him that “personality absorption” alone cannot, after all, explain neurosis. Because otherwise, he says, middle-class women of the previous generation would all have suffered such neuroses—and nobody recorded such suffering in those women. Certainly the personality of the middle-class girl of the late nineteenth century was “absorbed” by her parents, by the demands of “love” and unquestioning obedience. However, “the rate of neurosis under those conditions was probably not too high,” the sociologist concludes, because even though the woman’s own personality was “absorbed,” it was consistently absorbed “within a role which changed relatively slightly from childhood into adolescence, courtship, and finally into marriage” she never could be her own person.
The modern middle-class boy, on the other hand, is forced to compete with others, to achieve—which demands a certain degree of independence, firmness of purpose, aggressiveness, self-assertion. Thus, in the boy, the mother-nourished need for everyone to love him, the inability to erect his own values and purposes is neurotic, but not in the girl.
It is provocative, this speculation made by a sociologist in 1946, but it never penetrated far beyond the inner circles of social theory, never permeated the bulwarks of the feminine mystique, despite increasing national awareness that something was wrong with American mothers. Even this sociologist, who managed to get behind the mystique and see children in terms other than their need for more mother love, was concerned only with the problem of the sons. But was not the real implication that the role of the middle-class American housewife forces many a mother to smother, absorb, the personality of both her sons and daughters? Many saw the tragic waste of American sons who were made incapable of achievement, individual values, independent action; but they did not see as tragic the waste of the daughters, or of the mothers to whom it happened generations earlier. If a culture does not expect human maturity from its women, it does not see its lack as a waste, or as a possible cause of neurosis or conflict. The insult, the real reflection on our culture’s definition of the role of women, is that as a nation we only noticed that something was wrong with women when we saw its effects on their sons.
Is it surprising that we misunderstood what was really wrong? How could we understand it, in the static terms of functionalism and adjustment? Educators and sociologists applauded when the personality of the middle-class girl was “consistently” absorbed from childhood through adulthood by her “role as woman.” Long live the role, if adjustment is served. The waste of a human self was not considered a phenomenon to be studied in women—only the frustration caused by “cultural inconsistencies in role-conditioning,” as the great social scientist Ruth Benedict described the plight of American women. Even women themselves, who felt the misery, the helplessness of their lack of self, did not understand the feeling; it became the problem that has no name. And in their shame and guilt they turned again to their children to escape the problem. So the circle completes itself, from mother to sons and daughters, generation after generation.
The unremitting attack on women which has become an American preoccupation in recent years might also stem from the same escapist motives that sent men and women back to the security of the home. Mother love is said to be sacred in America, but with all the reverence and lip service she is paid, mom is a pretty safe target, no matter how correctly or incorrectly her failures are interpreted. No one has