The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [120]
There are certain facts of life so obvious and mundane that one never talks about them. Only the child blurts out: “Why do people in books never go to the toilet?” Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house. In all the talk of femininity and woman’s role, one forgets that the real business of America is business. But the perpetuation of housewifery, the growth of the feminine mystique, makes sense (and dollars) when one realizes that women are the chief customers of American business. Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives.
I have no idea how it happened. Decision-making in industry is not as simple, as rational, as those who believe the conspiratorial theories of history would have it. I am sure the heads of General Foods, and General Electric, and General Motors, and Macy’s and Gimbel’s and the assorted directors of all the companies that make detergents and electric mixers, and red stoves with rounded corners, and synthetic furs, and waxes, and hair coloring, and patterns for home sewing and home carpentry, and lotions for detergent hands, and bleaches to keep the towels pure white, never sat down around a mahogany conference table in a board room on Madison Avenue or Wall Street and voted on a motion: “Gentlemen, I move, in the interests of all, that we begin a concerted fifty-billion-dollar campaign to stop this dangerous movement of American women out of the home. We’ve got to keep them housewives, and let’s not forget it.”
A thinking vice-president says: “Too many women getting educated. Don’t want to stay home. Unhealthy. If they all get to be scientists and such, they won’t have time to shop. But how can we keep them home? They want careers now.”
“We’ll liberate them to have careers at home,” the new executive with horn-rimmed glasses and the Ph.D. in psychology suggests. “We’ll make home-making creative.”
Of course, it didn’t happen quite like that. It was not an economic conspiracy directed against women. It was a byproduct of our general confusion lately of means with ends; just something that happened to women when the business of producing and selling and investing in business for profit—which is merely the way our economy is organized to serve man’s needs efficiently—began to be confused with the purpose of our nation, the end of life itself. No more surprising, the subversion of women’s lives in America to the ends of business, than the subversion of the sciences of human behavior to the business of deluding women about their real needs. It would take a clever economist to figure out what would keep our affluent economy going if the housewife market began to fall off, just as an economist would have to figure out what to do if there were no threat of war.
It is easy to see why it happened. I learned how it happened when I went to see a man who is paid approximately a million dollars a year for his professional services in manipulating the emotions of American women to serve the needs of business. This particular man got in on the ground floor of the hidden-persuasion business in 1945 and kept going. The headquarters of his institute for motivational manipulation is a baronial mansion in upper Westchester. The walls of a ballroom two stories high are filled with steel shelves holding a thousand-odd studies for business and industry, 300,000 individual “depth interviews,” mostly with American housewives.1
He let me see what I wanted, said I could use anything that was not confidential to a specific company. Nothing there for anyone to hide, to