The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [154]
But in the suburbs where most hours of the day there are virtually no men at all—to give even the appearance of sex—women who have no identity other than sex creatures must ultimately seek their reassurance through the possession of “things.” One suddenly sees why manipulators cater to sexual hunger in their attempt to sell products which are not even remotely sexual. As long as woman’s needs for achievement and identity can be channeled into this search for sexual status, she is easy prey for any product which presumably promises her that status—a status that cannot be achieved by effort or achievement of her own. And since that endless search for status as a desirable sexual object is seldom satisfied in reality for most American housewives (who at best can only try to look like Elizabeth Taylor), it is very easily translated into a search for status through the possession of objects.
Thus women are aggressors in suburban status-seeking and their search has the same falseness and unreality as their sex-seeking. Status, after all, is what men seek and acquire through their work in society. A woman’s work—housework—cannot give her status; it has the lowliest status of almost any work in society. A woman must acquire her status vicariously through her husband’s work. The husband himself, and even the children, become symbols of status, for when a woman defines herself as a housewife, the house and the things in it are, in a sense, her identity; she needs these external trappings to buttress her emptiness of self, to make her feel like somebody. She becomes a parasite, not only because the things she needs for status come ultimately from her husband’s work, but because she must dominate, own him, for the lack of an identity of her own. If her husband is unable to provide the things she needs for status, he becomes an object of contempt, just as she is contemptuous of him if he cannot fill her sexual needs. Her very dissatisfaction with herself she feels as dissatisfaction with her husband and their sexual relations. As a psychiatrist put it: “She demands too much satisfaction from her marital relations. Her husband resents it and becomes unable to function sexually with her at all.”
Could this be the reason for the rising tide of resentment among the new young husbands at the girls whose only ambition was to be their wives? The old hostility against domineering “moms” and aggressive career girls may, in the long run, pale before the new male hostility for the girls whose active pursuit of the “home career” has resulted in a new kind of domination and aggression. To be the tool, the sex-instrument, the “man around the house,” is evidently no dream-come-true for a man.
In March, 1962, a reporter noted in Redbook a new phenomenon on the suburban scene: that “young fathers feel trapped”:
Many husbands feel that their wives, firmly quoting authorities on home management, child rearing and married love, have set up a tightly scheduled, narrowly conceived scheme of family living that leaves little room for a husband’s authority or point of view. (A husband said “Since I’ve been married, I feel I’ve lost all my guts. I don’t feel like a man anymore. I’m still young, yet I don’t get much out of life. I don’t want advice, but I sometimes feel like something is bursting loose inside.”) The husbands named their wives as their chief source of frustration, superseding children, employers, finances, relatives, community and friends…. The young father is no longer free to make his own mistakes or to swing his own weight in a family crisis. His wife, having just read Chapter VII, knows exactly what should be done.
The article goes on to quote a social worker:
The modern wife’s insistence on achieving sexual satisfaction for herself may pose a major problem for her husband. A husband can be teased, flattered and cajoled into performing as an expert lover. But if his wife scorns and upbraids him as though he had proved unable to carry a trunk up the attic stairs, she is in for trouble