The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [152]
Kinsey, from his interviews of 5,940 women, found that American wives, especially of the middle class, after ten or fifteen years of marriage, reported greater sexual desire than their husbands seemed to satisfy. One out of four, by the age of forty, had engaged in some extramarital activity—usually quite sporadic. Some seemed insatiably capable of “multiple orgasms.” A growing number engaged in the “extramarital petting” more characteristic of adolescence. Kinsey also found that the sexual desire of American husbands, especially in the middle-class educated groups, seemed to wane as their wives’ increased.7
But even more disturbing than the signs of increased sexual hunger, unfulfilled, among American housewives in this era of the feminine mystique are the signs of increased conflict over their own femaleness. There is evidence that the signs of feminine sexual conflict, often referred to by the euphemism of “female troubles,” occur earlier than ever, and in intensified form, in this era when women have sought to fulfill themselves so early and exclusively in sexual terms.
The chief of the gynecological service of a famous hospital told me that he sees with increasing frequency in young mothers the same impairment of the ovarian cycle—vaginal discharge, delayed periods, irregularities in menstrual flow and duration of flow, sleeplessness, fatigue syndrome, physical disability—that he used to see only in women during menopause. He said:
The question is whether these young mothers will be pathologically blown apart when they lose their reproductive function. I see plenty of women with these menopausal difficulties which are activated, I’m sure, by the emptiness of their lives. And by simply having spent the last 28 years hanging on to the last child until there’s nothing left to hang on to. In contrast, women who’ve had children, sexual relations but who somehow have much more whole-hearted personalities, without continually having to rationalize themselves as female by having one more baby and holding on to it, have very few hot flashes, insomnia, nervousness, jitteriness.
The ones with female troubles are the ones who have denied their femininity, or are pathologically female. But we see these symptoms now in more and more young wives, in their 20’s, young women who are fatally invested in their children, who have not developed resources, other than their children—coming in with the same impairments of the ovarian cycle, menstrual difficulties, characteristic of the menopause. A woman 22 years old, who’s had three children, with symptoms more frequently seen with menopause…I say to her, “the only trouble with you is that you’ve had too many babies too fast” and reserve to myself the opinion “your personality has not developed far enough.”
At this same hospital, studies have been made of women recovering from hysterectomy, women with menstrual complaints, and women with difficult pregnancies. The ones who suffered the most pain, nausea, vomiting, physical and emotional distress depression, apathy, anxiety, were women “whose lives revolved almost exclusively around the reproductive function and its gratification in motherhood. A prototype of this attitude was expressed by one woman who said, ‘In order to be a woman, I have to be able to have children.’”8 The ones who suffered least had “well-integrated egos,” had resources of the intellect and were directed outward in their interests, even in the hospital, rather than preoccupied with themselves and their sufferings.
Obstetricians have seen this too. One told me:
It’s a funny thing. The women who have the backaches, the bleeding, the difficult pregnancy and delivery, are the ones who think their whole purpose in life is to have babies. Women who have other interests than just being reproductive machines have less trouble having babies. Don’t ask me to explain it. I’m no psychiatrist. But we’ve all noticed it.
Another gynecologist spoke of many patients in