The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [129]
Time and time again, the surveys shrewdly analyzed the needs, and even the secret frustrations of the American housewife; and each time if these needs were properly manipulated, she could be induced to buy more “things.” In 1957, a survey told the department stores that their role in this new world was not only to “sell” the housewife but to satisfy her need for “education”—to satisfy the yearning she has, alone in her house, to feel herself a part of the changing world. The store will sell her more, the report said, if it will understand that the real need she is trying to fill by shopping is not anything she can buy there.
Most women have not only a material need, but a psychological compulsion to visit department stores. They live in comparative isolation. Their vista and experiences are limited. They know that there is a vaster life beyond their horizon and they fear that life will pass them by.
Department stores break down that isolation. The woman entering a department store suddenly has the feeling she knows what is going on in the world. Department stores, more than magazines, TV, or any other medium of mass communication, are most women’s main source of information about the various aspects of life…
There are many needs that the department store must fill, this report continued. For one, the housewife’s “need to learn and to advance in life.”
We symbolize our social position by the objects with which we surround ourselves. A woman whose husband was making $6,000 a few years ago and is making $10,000 now needs to learn a whole new set of symbols. Department stores are her best teachers of this subject.
For another, there is the need for achievement, which for the new modern housewife, is primarily filled by a “bargain.”
We have found that in our economy of abundance, preoccupation with prices is not so much a financial as a psychological need for the majority of women…. Increasingly a “bargain” means not that “I can now buy something which I could not afford at a higher price” it mainly means “I’m doing a good job as a housewife; I’m contributing to the welfare of the family just as my husband does when he works and brings home the paycheck.”
The price itself hardly matters, the report said:
Since buying is only the climax of a complicated relationship, based to a large extent on the woman’s yearning to know how to be a more attractive woman, a better housewife, a superior mother, etc., use this motivation in all your promotion and advertising. Take every opportunity to explain how your store will help her fulfill her most cherished roles in life…
If the stores are women’s school of life, ads are the textbooks. They have an inexhaustible avidity for these ads which give them the illusion that they are in contact with what is going on in the world of inanimate objects, objects through which they express so much of so many of their drives…
Again, in 1957, a survey very correctly reported that despite the “many positive aspects” of the “new home-centered era,” unfortunately too many needs were now centered on the home—that home was not able to fill. A cause for alarm? No indeed; even these needs are grist for manipulation.
The family is not always the psychological pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of promise of modern life as it has sometimes been represented. In fact, psychological demands are being made upon the family today which it cannot fulfill….
Fortunately for the producers and advertisers of America (and also for the family and the psychological well-being of our citizens) much of this gap may be filled, and is being filled, by the acquisition of consumer goods.
Hundreds of products fulfill a whole set of psychological functions that producers and advertisers should know of and use in the development of more effective sales approaches. Just as producing once served as an outlet for social tension, now consumption serves the same purpose.