The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [122]
The moral of the study was explicit: “Since the Balanced Homemaker represents the market with the greatest future potential, it would be to the advantage of the appliance manufacturer to make more and more women aware of the desirability of belonging to this group. Educate them through advertising that it is possible to have outside interests and become alert to wider intellectual influences (without becoming a Career Woman). The art of good homemaking should be the goal of every normal woman.”
The problem—which, if recognized at that time by one hidden persuader for the home-appliance industry, was surely recognized by others with products for the home—was that “a whole new generation of women is being educated to do work outside the home. Furthermore, an increased desire for emancipation is evident.” The solution, quite simply, was to encourage them to be “modern” housewives. The Career or Would-Be Career Woman who frankly dislikes cleaning, dusting, ironing, washing clothes, is less interested in a new wax, a new soap powder. Unlike “The True Housewife” and “The Balanced Homemaker” who prefer to have sufficient appliances and do the housework themselves, the Career Woman would “prefer servants—housework takes too much time and energy.” She buys appliances, however, whether or not she has servants, but she is “more likely to complain about the service they give,” and to be “harder to sell.”
It was too late—impossible—to turn these modern could-or-would-be career women back into True Housewives, but the study pointed out, in 1945, the potential for Balanced Housewifery—the home career. Let them “want to have their cake and eat it too…save time, have more comfort, avoid dirt and disorder, have mechanized supervision, yet not want to give up the feeling of personal achievement and pride in a well-run household, which comes from ‘doing it yourself.’ As one young housewife said: ‘It’s nice to be modern—it’s like running a factory in which you have all the latest machinery.’”
But it was not an easy job, either for business or advertisers. New gadgets that were able to do almost all the housework crowded the market; increased ingenuity was needed to give American women that “feeling of achievement,” and yet keep housework their main purpose in life. Education, independence, growing individuality, everything that made them ready for other purposes had constantly to be countered, channeled back to the home.
The manipulator’s services became increasingly valuable. In later surveys, he no longer interviewed professional women; they were not at home during the day. The women in his samples were deliberately True or Balanced Housewives, the new suburban housewives. Household and consumer products are, after all, geared to women; seventy-five per cent of all consumer advertising budgets is spent to appeal to women; that is, to housewives, the women who are available during the day to be interviewed, the women with the time for shopping. Naturally, his depth interviews, projective tests, “living laboratories,” were designed to impress his clients, but more often than not they contained the shrewd insights of a skilled social scientist, insights that could be used with profit.
His clients were told they had to do something about this growing need of American women to do creative work—“the major unfulfilled need of the modern housewife.” He wrote in one report, for example:
Every effort must be made to sell X Mix, as a base upon which the woman’s creative effort is used.
The appeal should emphasize the fact that X Mix aids the woman in expressing her creativity because it takes the drudgery away. At the same time, stress should be laid upon the cooking manipulations, the fun that goes with them, permitting you to feel that X Mix baking is real baking.
But the dilemma again: how to make her spend money on the mix that takes some of the drudgery out of baking by telling her “she can utilize her energy where it really counts”—and yet keep her from being