The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [134]
“I know many such housewives who have found fulfillment as women,” one psychoanalyst said. I asked him to name four, and went to see them.
One, after five years of therapy, was no longer a driven woman, but neither was she a full-time housewife; she had become a computer programmer. The second was a gloriously exuberant woman, with a fine successful husband and three able, exuberant children. Throughout her married life she had been a professional psychoanalyst. The third, between pregnancies, continued seriously her career as a dancer. And the fourth, after psychotherapy, was moving with an increasingly serious commitment into politics.
I reported back to my guide and said that while all four seemed “fulfilled” women, none were full-time housewives and one, after all, was a member of his own profession. “That’s a coincidence with those four,” he said. But I wondered if it was a coincidence.
In another community, I was directed to a woman who, my informant said, was truly fulfilled as a housewife (“she even bakes her own bread”). I discovered that during the years when her four children were under six and she wrote on the census blank “Occupation: housewife,” she had learned a new language (with certification to teach) and had used her previous training in music first as volunteer church organist and then as a paid professional. Shortly after I interviewed her, she took a teaching position.
In many instances, however, the women I interviewed truly fitted the new image of feminine fulfillment—four, five, or six children, baked their own bread, helped build the house with their own hands, sewed all their children’s clothes. These women had had no dreams of career, no visions of a world larger than the home; all energy was centered on their lives as housewives and mothers; their only ambition, their only dream already realized. But were they fulfilled women?
In one upper-income development where I interviewed, there were twenty-eight wives. Some were college graduates in their thirties or early forties; the younger wives had usually quit college to marry. Their husbands were, to a rather high degree, engrossed in challenging professional work. Only one of these wives worked professionally; most had made a career of motherhood with a dash of community activity. Nineteen out of the twenty-eight had had natural childbirth (at dinner parties there, a few years ago, wives and husbands often got down on the floor to practice the proper relaxing exercises together). Twenty of the twenty-eight breastfed their babies. At or near forty, many of these women were pregnant. The mystique of feminine fulfillment was so literally followed in this community that if a little girl said: “When I grow up, I’m going to be a doctor,” her mother would correct her: “No, dear, you’re a girl. You’re going to be a wife and mother, like mummy.”
But what was mummy really like? Sixteen out of the twenty-eight were in analysis or analytical psychotherapy. Eighteen were taking tranquilizers; several had tried suicide; and some had been hospitalized for varying periods, for depression or vaguely diagnosed psychotic states. (“You’d be surprised at the number of these happy suburban wives who simply go berserk one night, and run shrieking through the street without any clothes on,” said the local doctor, not a psychiatrist, who had been called in, in such emergencies.) Of the women who breastfed their babies, one had continued, desperately, until the child was so undernourished that her doctor intervened by force. Twelve were engaged in extramarital affairs