The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [127]
In talking to scores of young couples and brides-to-be, we found that, as a rule, their conversations and dreams centered to a very large degree around their future homes and their furnishings, around shopping “to get an idea,” around discussing the advantages and disadvantages of various products….
The modern bride is deeply convinced of the unique value of married love, of the possibilities of finding real happiness in marriage and of fulfilling her personal destiny in it and through it.
But the engagement period today is a romantic, dreamy and heady period only to a limited extent. It is probably safe to say that the period of engagement tends to be a rehearsal of the material duties and responsibilities of marriage. While waiting for the nuptials, couples work hard, put aside money for definite purchases, or even begin buying on an installment plan.
What is the deeper meaning of this new combination of an almost religious belief in the importance and beauty of married life on the one hand, and the product-centered outlook, on the other?…
The modern bride seeks as a conscious goal that which in many cases her grandmother saw as a blind fate and her mother as slavery: to belong to a man to have a home and children of her own, to choose among all possible careers the career of wife-mother-homemaker.
The fact that the young bride now seeks in her marriage complete “fulfillment,” that she now expects to “prove her own worth” and find all the “fundamental meanings” of life in her home, and to participate through her home in “the interesting ideas of the modern era, the future,” has enormous “practical applications,” advertisers were told. For all these meanings she seeks in her marriage, even her fear that she will be “left behind,” can be channeled into the purchase of products. For example, a manufacturer of sterling silver, a product that is very difficult to sell, was told:
Reassure her that only with sterling can she be fully secure in her new role…it symbolizes her success as a modern woman. Above all, dramatize the fun and pride that derive from the job of cleaning silver. Stimulate the pride of achievement. “How much pride you get from the brief task that’s so much fun…”
Concentrate on the very young teenage girls, this report further advised. The young ones will want what “the others” want, even if their mothers don’t. (“As one of our teenagers said: ‘All the gang has started their own sets of sterling. We’re real keen about it—compare patterns and go through the ads together. My own family never had any sterling and they think I’m showing off when I spend my money on it—they think plated’s just as good. But the kids think they’re way off base.’”) Get them in schools, churches, sororities, social clubs; get them through home-economics teachers, group leaders, teenage TV programs and teenage advertising. “This is the big market of the future and word-of-mouth advertising, along with group pressure, is not only the most potent influence but in the absence of tradition, a most necessary one.”
As for the more independent older wife, that unfortunate tendency to use materials that require little care—stainless steel, plastic dishes, paper napkins—can be met by making her feel guilty about the effects on the children. (“As one young wife told us: ‘I’m out of the house all day long, so I can’t prepare and serve meals the way I want to. I don’t like it that way—my husband and the children deserve a better break. Sometimes I think it’d be better if we tried to get along on one salary and have a real home life but there are always so many things we need.’”) Such guilt, the report maintained, can be used to make her see the product, silver, as a means of holding the family together; it gives “added psychological value.” What’s more, the product can even fill the housewife’s need for identity: “Suggest that it becomes truly a part of you, reflecting you. Do not be afraid to suggest mystically that sterling will adapt itself to any house and any person.”
The fur industry is in