The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [142]
The true emptiness beneath the American housewife’s routine has been revealed in many ways. In Minneapolis recently a school-teacher named Maurice K. Enghausen read a story in the local newspaper about the long work week of today’s housewife. Declaring in a letter to the editor that “any woman who puts in that many hours is awfully slow, a poor budgeter of time, or just plain inefficient,” this thirty-six-year-old bachelor offered to take over any household and show how it could be done.
Scores of irate housewives dared him to prove it. He took over the household of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Dalton, with four children, aged two to seven, for three days. In a single day, he cleaned the first floor, washed three loads of clothes and hung them out to dry, ironed all the laundry including underwear and sheets, fixed a soup-and-sandwich lunch and a big backyard supper, baked two cakes, prepared two salads for the next day, dressed, undressed, and bathed the children, washed wood work and scrubbed the kitchen floor. Mrs. Dalton said he was even a better cook than she was. “As for cleaning,” she said, “I am more thorough, but perhaps that is unnecessary.”
Pointing out that he had kept house for himself for seven years and had earned money at college by housework, Enghausen said, “I still wish that teaching 115 students were as easy as handling four children and a house…I still maintain that housework is not the interminable chore that women claim it is.”8
This claim, periodically expressed by men privately and publicly, has been borne out by a recent time-motion study. Recording and analyzing every movement made by a group of housewives, this study concluded that most of the energy expended in housework is superfluous. A series of intensive studies sponsored by the Michigan Heart Association at Wayne University disclosed that “women were working more than twice as hard as they should,” squandering energy through habit and tradition in wasted motion and unneeded steps.
The puzzling question of “housewife’s fatigue” sheds additional light. Doctors in many recent medical conventions report failure to cure it or get to its cause. At a meeting of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a Cleveland doctor stated that mothers, who cannot get over “that tired feeling” and complain that their doctors are no help, are neither sick nor maladjusted, but actually tired. “No psychoanalysis or deep probing is necessary,” said Dr. Leonard Lovshin, of the Cleveland Clinic. “She has a work day of sixteen hours, a work week of seven days…. Being conscientious, she gets involved in Cubs, Brownies, PTA’s, heart drives, church work, hauling children to music and dancing.” But strangely enough, he remarked, neither the housewife’s workload nor her fatigue seemed affected by how many children she had. Most of these patients had only one or two. “A woman with one child just worries four times as much about the one as the woman with four children, and it all comes out even,” Dr. Lovshin said.
Some doctors, finding nothing organically wrong with these chronically tired mothers, told them, “It’s all in your mind” others gave them pills, vitamins, or injections for anemia, low blood pressure, low metabolism, or put them on diets (the average housewife is twelve to fifteen pounds overweight), deprived them of drinking (there are approximately a million known alcoholic housewives in America), or