The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [133]
The real crime, no matter how profitable for the American economy, is the callous and growing acceptance of the manipulator’s advice “to get them young”—the television commercials that children sing or recite even before they learn to read, the big beautiful ads almost as easy as “Look, Sally, Look,” the magazines deliberately designed to turn teenage girls into housewife buyers of things before they grow up to be women:
She reads X Magazine from beginning to end…She learns how to market, to cook and to sew and everything else a young woman should know. She plans her wardrobe ’round X Magazine’s clothes, heeds X Magazine’s counsel on beauty and beaus…consults X Magazine for the latest teen fads…and oh, how she buys from those X Magazine ads! Buying habits start in X Magazine. It’s easier to START a habit than to STOP one! (Learn how X Magazine’s unique publication, X Magazine-at-school, carries your advertising into high school home economics classrooms.)
Like a primitive culture which sacrificed little girls to its tribal gods, we sacrifice our girls to the feminine mystique, grooming them ever more efficiently through the sexual sell to become consumers of the things to whose profitable sale our nation is dedicated. Two ads recently appeared in a national news magazine, geared not to teenage girls but to executives who produce and sell things. One of them showed the picture of a boy:
I am so going to the moon…and you can’t go, ’cause you’re a girl! Children are growing faster today, their interests can cover such a wide range—from roller skates to rockets. X company too has grown, with a broad spectrum of electronic products for worldwide governmental, industrial and space application.
The other showed the face of a girl:
Should a gifted child grow up to be a housewife? Educational experts estimate that the gift of high intelligence is bestowed upon only one out of every 50 children in our nation. When that gifted child is a girl, one question is inevitably asked: “Will this rare gift be wasted if she becomes a housewife?” Let these gifted girls answer that question themselves. Over 90 per cent of them marry, and the majority find the job of being a housewife challenging and rewarding enough to make full use of all their intelligence, time and energy…. In her daily roles of nurse, educator, economist and just plain housewife, she is constantly seeking ways to improve her family’s life…. Millions of women—shopping for half the families in America—do so by saving X Stamps.
If that gifted girl-child grows up to be a housewife, can even the manipulator make supermarket stamps use all of her human intelligence, her human energy, in the century she may live while that boy goes to the moon?
Never underestimate the power of a woman, says another ad. But that power was and is underestimated in America. Or rather, it is only estimated in terms that can be manipulated at the point of purchase. Woman’s human intelligence and energy do not really figure in. And yet, they exist, to be used for some higher purpose than housework and thing-buying—or wasted. Perhaps it is only a sick society, unwilling to face its own problems and unable to conceive of goals and purposes equal to the ability and knowledge of its members, that chooses to ignore the strength of women. Perhaps it is only a sick or immature society that chooses to make women “housewives,” not people. Perhaps it is only sick or immature men and women, unwilling to face the great challenges of society, who can retreat for long, without unbearable distress, into that thing-ridden house and make it the end of life itself.
10
Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available
With a vision of the happy modern housewife as she is described by the magazines and television, by the functional sociologists, the sex-directed educators, and the manipulators dancing before my eyes, I went in search of one of