The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [124]
The feeling of creativeness also serves another purpose: it is an outlet for the liberated talents, the better taste, the freer imagination, the greater initiative of the modern woman. It permits her to use at home all the faculties that she would display in an outside career.
The yearning for creative opportunities and moments is a major aspect of buying motivations.
The only trouble, the surveys warned, is that she “tries to use her own mind and her own judgment. She is fast getting away from judging by collective or majority standards. She is developing independent standards.” (“Never mind the neighbors. I don’t want to ‘live up’ to them or compare myself to them at every turn.”) She can’t always be reached now with “keep up with the Joneses”—the advertiser must appeal to her own need to live.
Appeal to this thirst…. Tell her that you are adding more zest, more enjoyment to her life, that it is within her reach now to taste new experiences and that she is entitled to taste these experiences. Even more positively, you should convey that you are giving her “lessons in living.”
“House cleaning should be fun,” the manufacturer of a certain cleaning device was advised. Even though his product was, perhaps, less efficient than the vacuum cleaner, it let the housewife use more of her own energy in the work. Further, it let the housewife have the illusion that she has become “a professional, an expert in determining which cleaning tools to use for specific jobs.”
This professionalization is a psychological defense of the housewife against being a general “cleaner-upper” and menial servant for her family in a day and age of general work emancipation.
The role of expert serves a two-fold emotional function: (1) it helps the housewife achieve status, and (2) she moves beyond the orbit of her home, into the world of modern science in her search for new and better ways of doing things.
As a result, there has never been a more favorable psychological climate for household appliances and products. The modern housewife…is actually aggressive in her efforts to find those household products which, in her expert opinion, really meet her need. This trend accounts for the popularity of different waxes and polishes for different materials in the home, for the growing use of floor polishers, and for the variety of mops and cleaning implements for floors and walls.
The difficulty is to give her the “sense of achievement” of “ego enhancement” she has been persuaded to seek in the housewife “profession,” when, in actuality, “her time-consuming task, housekeeping, is not only endless, it is a task for which society hires the lowliest, least-trained, most trod-upon individuals and groups…. Anyone with a strong enough back (and a small enough brain) can do these menial chores.” But even this difficulty can be manipulated to sell her more things:
One of the ways that the housewife raises her own prestige as a cleaner of her home is through the use of specialized products for specialized tasks….
When she uses one product for washing clothes, a second for dishes, a third for walls, a fourth for floors, a fifth for venetian blinds, etc., rather than an all-purpose cleaner, she feels less like an unskilled laborer, more like an engineer, an expert.
A second way of raising her own stature is to “do things my way”—to establish an expert’s role for herself by creating her own “tricks of the trade.” For example, she may “always put a bit of bleach in all my washing—even colored, to make them really clean!”
Help her to “justify her menial task by building up her role as the protector of her family—the killer of millions of microbes and germs,” this report advised. “Emphasize her kingpin role in the family…help her be an expert rather than a menial worker…make housework a matter of