The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [131]
“That’s what I mean,” I said. “Why doesn’t the pie-mix ad tell the woman she could use the time saved to be an astronomer?”
“It wouldn’t be too difficult,” he replied. “A few images—the astronomer gets her man, the astronomer as the heroine, make it glamorous for a woman to be an astronomer…but no,” he shrugged again. “The client would be too frightened. He wants to sell pie mix. The woman has to want to stay in the kitchen. The manufacturer wants to intrigue her back into the kitchen—and we show him how to do it the right way. If he tells her that all she can be is a wife and mother, she will spit in his face. But we show him how to tell her that it’s creative to be in the kitchen. We liberate her need to be creative in the kitchen. If we tell her to be an astronomer, she might go too far from the kitchen. Besides,” he added, “if you wanted to have a campaign to liberate women to be astronomers, you’d have to find somebody like the National Education Association to pay for it.”
The motivational researchers must be given credit for their insights into the reality of the housewife’s life and needs—a reality that often escaped their colleagues in academic sociology and therapeutic psychology, who saw women through the Freudian-functional veil. To their own profit, and that of their clients, the manipulators discovered that millions of supposedly happy American housewives have complex needs which home-and-family, love-and-children, cannot fill. But by a morality that goes beyond the dollar, the manipulators are guilty of using their insights to sell women things which, no matter how ingenious, will never satisfy those increasingly desperate needs. They are guilty of persuading housewives to stay at home, mesmerized in front of a television set, their nonsexual human needs unnamed, unsatisfied, drained by the sexual sell into the buying of things.
The manipulators and their clients in American business can hardly be accused of creating the feminine mystique. But they are the most powerful of its perpetuators; it is their millions which blanket the land with persuasive images, flattering the American housewife, diverting her guilt and disguising her growing sense of emptiness. They have done this so successfully, employing the techniques and concepts of modern social science, and transposing them into those deceptively simple, clever, outrageous ads and commercials, that an observer of the American scene today accepts as fact that the great majority of American women have no ambition other than to be housewives. If they are not solely responsible for sending women home, they are surely responsible for keeping them there. Their unremitting harangue is hard to escape in this day of mass communications; they have seared the feminine mystique deep into every woman’s mind, and into the minds of her husband, her children, her neighbors. They have made it part of the fabric of her everyday life, taunting her because she is not a better housewife, does not love her family enough, is growing old.
Can a woman ever feel right cooking on a dirty range? Until today, no range could ever be kept really clean. Now new RCA Whirlpool ranges have oven doors that lift off, broiler drawers that can be cleaned at the sink, drip pans that slide out easily…. The first range that any woman can keep completely clean easily…and make everything cooked taste better.
Love is said in many ways. It’s giving and accepting. It’s protecting and selecting…knowing what’s safest for those you love. Their bathroom tissue is Scott tissue always.…Now in four colors and white.
How skillfully they divert her need for achievement into sexual phantasies which promise her eternal youth, dulling her sense