The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [160]
12
Progressive Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp
The voices now deploring American women’s retreat to home reassure us that the pendulum has begun to swing in the opposite direction. But has it? There are already signs that the daughters of the able and energetic women who went back home to live in the housewife image find it more difficult than their mothers to move forward in the world. Over the past fifteen years a subtle and devastating change seems to have taken place in the character of American children. Evidence of something similar to the housewife’s problem that has no name in a more pathological form has been seen in her sons and daughters by many clinicians, analysts, and social scientists. They have noted, with increasing concern, a new and frightening passivity, softness, boredom in American children. The danger sign is not the competitiveness engendered by the Little League or the race to get into college, but a kind of infantilism that makes the children of the housewife-mothers incapable of the effort, the endurance of pain and frustration, the discipline needed to compete on the baseball field, or get into college. There is also a new vacant sleepwalking, playing-a-part quality of youngsters who do what they are supposed to do, what the other kids do, but do not seem to feel alive or real in doing it.
In an eastern suburb in 1960, I heard a high-school sophomore stop a psychiatrist who had just given an assembly talk and ask him for “the name of that pill that you can take to hypnotize yourself so you’ll wake up knowing everything you need for the test without studying.” That same winter two college girls on a train to New York during the middle of midyear exam week told me they were going to some parties to “clear their minds” instead of studying for the exams. “Psychology has proved that when you’re really motivated, you learn instantly,” one explained. “If the professor can’t make it interesting enough so that you know it without working, that’s his fault, not yours.” A bright boy who had dropped out of college told me it was a waste of his time; “intuition” was what counted, and they didn’t teach that at college. He worked a few weeks at a gas station, a month at a bookstore. Then he stopped work and spent his time literally doing nothing—getting up, eating, going to bed, not even reading.
I saw this same vacant sleepwalking quality in a thirteen-year-old girl I interviewed in a Westchester suburb in an investigation of teenage sexual promiscuity. She was barely passing in her school work even though she was intelligent; she “couldn’t apply herself,” as the guidance counselor put it. She seemed always bored, not interested, off in a daze. She also seemed not quite awake, like a puppet with someone else pulling the strings, when every afternoon she got into a car with a group of older boys who had all “dropped out” of school in their search for “kicks.”
The sense that these new kids are, for some reason, not growing up “real” has been seen by many observers. A Texas educator, who was troubled because college boys were not really interested in the courses they were taking as an automatic passport to the right job, discovered they also were not really interested in anything they did outside of school either. Mostly, they just “killed time.” A questionnaire revealed that there was literally nothing these kids felt strongly enough about to die for, as there was nothing they actually did in which they felt really alive. Ideas, the conceptual thought which is uniquely human, were completely absent from their minds or lives.1
A social critic, one or two perceptive psychoanalysts, tried to pinpoint this change in the younger