The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [144]
Other women eat, as they stretch out the housework, just to fill the time available. Obesity and alcoholism, as neuroses, have often been related to personality patterns that stem from childhood. But does this explain why so many American housewives around forty have the same dull and lifeless look; does it explain their lack of vitality, the deadly sameness of their lives, the furtive between-meal snacks, drinks, tranquilizers, sleeping pills? Even given the various personalities of these women, there must be something in the nature of their work, of the lives they lead, that drives them to these escapes.
This is no less true of the American housewife’s work than it is of the work of most American men, on the assembly lines or in corporation offices: work that does not fully use a man’s capacities leaves in him a vacant, empty need for escape—television, tranquilizers, alcohol, sex. But the husbands of the women I interviewed were often engaged in work that demanded ability, responsibility, and decision. I noticed that when these men were saddled with a domestic chore, they polished it off in much less time than it seemed to take their wives. But, of course, for them this was never the work that justified their lives. Whether they put more energy into it for this reason, just to get it over with, or whether housework did not have to take so much of their energy, they did it more quickly and sometimes even seemed to enjoy it more.
Social critics, during the togetherness era, often complained that men’s careers suffered because of all this housework. But most husbands of the women I interviewed didn’t seem to let housework interfere with their careers. When husbands did that bit of housework evenings and weekends because their wives had careers, or because their wives had made such a career of housework they could not get it done themselves, or because their wives were too passive, dependent, helpless to get it done, or even because the wives left housework for their husbands, for revenge—it did not expand.
But I noticed that housework did tend to expand to fill the time available with a few husbands who seemed to be using domestic chores as an excuse for not meeting the challenge of their own careers. “I wish he wouldn’t insist on vacuuming the whole house on Tuesday evenings. It doesn’t need it and he could be working on his book,” the wife of a college professor told me. A capable social worker herself, she had managed all her professional life to work out ways of caring for her house and children without hiring servants. With her daughter’s help, she did her own thorough housecleaning on Saturday; it didn’t need vacuuming on Tuesday.
To do the work that you are capable of doing is the mark of maturity. It is not the demands of housework and children, or the absence of servants, that keep most American women from growing up to do the work of which they are capable. In an earlier era when servants were plentiful, most of the middle-class women who hired them did not use their freedom to take a more active part in society; they were confined by “woman’s role” to leisure. In countries like Israel and Russia, where women are expected to be more than just housewives, servants scarcely exist, and yet home and children and love are evidently not neglected.
It is the mystique of feminine fulfillment, and the immaturity it breeds, that prevents women from doing the work of which they are capable. It is not strange that women who have lived for ten or twenty years within the mystique, or who adjusted to it so young that they have never experienced being on their own, should be afraid to face