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By Root 2078 0

ever been blacklisted or fired for an attack on “the American woman.” Apart from the psychological pressures from mothers or wives, there have been plenty of nonsexual pressures in the America of the last decade—the compromising, never-ceasing competition, the anonymous and often purposeless work in the big organization—that also kept a man from feeling like a man. Safer to take it out on his wife and his mother than to recognize a failure in himself or in the sacred American way of life. The men were not always kidding when they said their wives were lucky to be able to stay home all day. It was also soothing to rationalize the rat race by telling themselves that they were in it “for the wife and kids.” And so men re-created their own childhood in suburbia, and made mothers of their wives. Men fell for the mystique without a murmur of dissent. It promised them mothers for the rest of their lives, both as a reason for their being and as an excuse for their failures. Is it so strange that boys who grow up with too much mother love become men who can never get enough?

But why did women sit still for this barrage of blame? When a culture has erected barrier after barrier against women as separate selves; when a culture has erected legal, political, social, economic and educational barriers to women’s own acceptance of maturity—even after most of those barriers are down it is still easier for a woman to seek the sanctuary of the home. It is easier to live through her husband and children than to make a road of her own in the world. For she is the daughter of that same mom who made it so hard for girl as well as boy to grow up. And freedom is a frightening thing. It is frightening to grow up finally and be free of passive dependence. Why should a woman bother to be anything more than a wife and mother if all the forces of her culture tell her she doesn’t have to, will be better off not to, grow up?

And so the American woman made her mistaken choice. She ran back home again to live by sex alone, trading in her individuality for security. Her husband was drawn in after her, and the door was shut against the outside world. They began to live the pretty lie of the feminine mystique, but could either of them really believe it? She was, after all, an American woman, an irreversible product of a culture that stops just short of giving her a separate identity. He was, after all, an American man whose respect for individuality and freedom of choice are his nation’s pride. They went to school together; he knows who she is. Does his meek willingness to wax the floor and wash the dishes when he comes home tired on the 6:55 hide from both their guilty awareness of the reality behind the pretty lie? What keeps them believing it, in spite of the warning signs that have cropped up all over the suburban lot? What keeps the women home? What force in our culture is strong enough to write “Occupation: housewife” so large that all the other possibilities for women have been almost obscured?

Powerful forces in this nation must be served by those pretty domestic pictures that stare at us everywhere, forbidding a woman to use her own abilities in the world. The preservation of the feminine mystique in this sense could have implications that are not sexual at all. When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women’s passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.

9

The Sexual Sell

Some months ago, as I began to fit together the puzzle of women’s retreat to home, I had the feeling I was missing something. I could trace the routes by which sophisticated thought circled back on itself to perpetuate an obsolete image of femininity; I could see how that image meshed with prejudice and misinterpreted frustrations to hide the emptiness of “Occupation: housewife” from women themselves.

But what powers it all? If, despite the nameless desperation of so many American housewives, despite the opportunities open to all women