The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [162]
On the march, in the temporary camps, and in the permanent ones, the strong regularly took food from the weak. There was no discipline to prevent it. Many men were sick, and these men, instead of being helped and nursed by the others, were ignored, or worse. Dysentery was common, and it made some men too weak to walk. On winter nights, helpless men with dysentery were rolled outside the huts by their comrades and left to die in the cold.6
Some thirty-eight per cent of the prisoners died, a higher prisoner death rate than in any previous American war, including the Revolution. Most prisoners became inert, inactive, withdrawing into little shells they had erected against reality. They did nothing to get food, firewood, keep themselves clean, or communicate with each other. The Major was struck by the fact that these new American GI’s almost universally “lacked the old Yankee resourcefulness,” an ability to cope with a new and primitive situation. He concluded: “This was partly—but only partly, I believe—the result of the psychic shock of being captured. It was also, I think, the result of some new failure in the childhood and adolescent training of our young men—a new softness.” Discounting the Army’s propaganda point, an educational psychologist commented: “There was certainly something terribly wrong with these young men; not softness, but hardness, slickness, and brittleness. I would call it ego-failure—a collapse of identity…. Adolescent growth can and should lead to a completely human adulthood, defined as the development of a stable sense of self…”7
The Korean prisoners, in this sense, were models of a new kind of American, evidently nurtured in ways “inimical to clarity and growth” at the hands of individuals themselves “insufficiently characterized” to develop “the kind of character and mind that conceives itself too clearly to consent to its own betrayal.”
The shocked recognition that this passive non-identity was “something new in history” came, and only came, when it began to show up in the boys. But the apathetic, dependent, infantile, purposeless being, who seems so shockingly nonhuman when remarked as the emerging character of the new American man, is strangely reminiscent of the familiar “feminine” personality as defined by the mystique. Aren’t the chief characteristics of femininity—which Freud mistakenly related to sexual biology—passivity; a weak ego or sense of self; a weak superego or human conscience; renunciation of active aims, ambitions, interests of one’s own to live through others; incapacity for abstract thought; retreat from activity directed outward to the world, in favor of activity directed inward or phantasy?
What does it mean, this emergence now in American boys as well as girls, of a personality arrested at the level of infantile phantasy and passivity? The boys and girls in whom I saw it were children of mothers who lived within the limits of the feminine mystique. They were fulfilling their roles as women in the accepted, normal way. Some had more than normal ability, and some had more than normal education, but they were alike in the intensity of their preoccupation with their children, who seemed to be their main and only interest.
One mother, who was terribly disturbed that her son could not learn to read, told me that when he came home with his first report card from kindergarten, she was as “excited as a kid myself, waiting for someone to ask me out on a date Saturday night.” She was convinced that the teachers were wrong when they said he wandered around the room in a dream, could not pay attention long enough to do the reading-readiness test. Another mother said that she could not bear it when her sons suffered any trouble or distress at all. It was as if they were herself. She told me:
I used to let them turn over all the furniture and build houses in the living room that would stay up for days, so there was no place for me even to sit