The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [145]
So a Scarsdale woman fired her maid, and even doing her own housework and the usual community work, could not use up all her energy. “We solved the problem,” she said, speaking of herself and a friend who had tried to commit suicide. “We go bowling three mornings a week. Otherwise, we’d go out of our minds. At least, now we can sleep at night.” “There’s always some way you can get rid of it,” I heard one woman saying to another over lunch at Schrafft’s, debating somewhat listlessly what to do with the “afternoon off” from housewifery that their doctors had ordered. Diet foods and exercise salons have become a lucrative business in that futile battle to take off the fat that cannot be turned into human energy by the American housewife. It is slightly shocking to think that intelligent, educated American women are forced to “get rid of” their creative human energy by eating a chalky powder and wrestling with a machine. But no one is shocked to realize that getting rid of women’s creative energy, rather than using it for some larger purpose in society, is the very essence of being a housewife.
To live according to the feminine mystique depends on a reversal of history, a devaluation of human progress. To get women back into the home again, not like the Nazis, by ordering them there, but by “propaganda with a view to restoring woman’s sense of prestige and self-esteem as women, actual or potential mothers…women who live as women,” meant that women had to resist their own “technological unemployment.” The canning plants and bakeries did not close down, but even the mystique makers felt the need to defend themselves against the question, “are we, in suggesting that women might, of their own volition, recapture some of their functions around the home, such as cooking, preserving and decorating, trying to turn back the clock of progress?”10
Progress is not progress, they argued; in theory, the freeing of women from household drudgery liberates them for the cultivation of higher aims, but “as such aims are understood, many are called and few are chosen, among men no less than among women.” Therefore, let all women recapture that work in the home which all women can do easily—and let society stage-manage it so that prestige for women “be shifted emphatically to those women recognized as serving society most fully as women.”
For fifteen years and longer, there has been a propaganda campaign, as unanimous in this democratic nation as in the most efficient of dictatorships, to give women “prestige” as housewives. But can the sense of self in woman, which once rested on necessary work and achievement in the home, be re-created by housework that is no longer really necessary or really uses much ability—in a country and at a time when women can be free, finally, to move on to something more. It is wrong for a woman, for whatever reason, to spend her days in work that is not moving as the world around her is moving, in work that does not truly use her creative energy. Women themselves are discovering that though there is always “some way you can get rid of it,” they can have no peace until they begin to use their abilities.
Surely there are many women in America who are happy at the moment as housewives, and some whose abilities are fully used in the housewife role. But happiness is not the same thing as the aliveness of being fully used. Nor is human intelligence, human ability, a static thing. Housework, no matter how it is expanded to fill the time available, can hardly use the abilities of a woman of average or normal human intelligence, much less the