The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [165]
The other method of evading growth Angyal called the method of “vicarious living.” It consists in a systematic denial and repression of one’s own personality, and an attempt to substitute some other personality, an “idealized conception, a standard of absolute goodness by which one tries to live, suppressing all those genuine impulses that are incompatible with the exaggerated and unrealistic standard,” or simply taking the personality that is “the popular cliché of the time.”
The most frequent manifestation of vicarious living is a particularly structured dependence on another person, which is often mistaken for love. Such extremely intense and tenacious attachments, however, lack all the essentials of genuine love—devotion, intuitive understanding, and delight in the being of the other person in his own right and in his own way. On the contrary, these attachments are extremely possessive and tend to deprive the partner of a “life of his own.”…The other person is needed not as someone to relate oneself to; he is needed for filling out one’s inner emptiness, one’s nothingness. This nothingness originally was only a phantasy, but with the persistent self-repression it approaches the state of being actual.
All these attempts at gaining a substitute personality by vicarious living fail to free the person from a vague feeling of emptiness. The repression of genuine, spontaneous impulses leaves the person with a painful emotional vacuousness, almost with a sense of nonexistence…8
“Noncommitment” and “vicarious living,” Angyal concludes, “can be understood as attempted solutions of the conflict between the impulse to grow and the fear of facing new situations”—but, though they may temporarily lessen the pressure, they do not actually resolve the problem; “their result, even if not their intent, is always an evasion of personal growth.”
Noncommitment and vicarious living are, however, at the very heart of our conventional definition of femininity. This is the way the feminine mystique teaches girls to seek “fulfillment as women” this is the way most American women live today. But if the human organism has an innate urge to grow, to expand and become all it can be, it is not surprising that the bodies and the minds of healthy women begin to rebel as they try to adjust to a role that does not permit this growth. Their symptoms which so puzzle the doctors and the analysts are a warning sign that they cannot forfeit their own existence, evade their own growth, without a battle.
I have seen this battle being fought by women I interviewed and by women of my own community, and unfortunately, it is often a losing battle. One young girl, first in high school and later in college, gave up all her serious interests and ambitions in order to be “popular.” Married early, she played the role of the conventional housewife, in much the same way as she played the part of a popular college girl. I don’t know at what point she lost track of what was real and what was façade, but when she became a mother, she would sometimes lie down on the floor and kick her feet in the kind of tantrum she was not able to handle in her three-year-old daughter. At the age of thirty-eight, she slashed her wrists in attempted suicide.
Another extremely intelligent woman, who gave up a challenging career as a cancer researcher to become a housewife, suffered a severe depression just before her baby was born. After she recovered she was so “close” to him that she had to stay with him at nursery school every morning for four months, or else he went into a violent frenzy of tears and tantrums. In first grade, he often vomited in the morning when he had to leave her. His violence on the playground approached danger to himself and others. When a neighbor took away from him a baseball bat with which he was about to hit a child on the head, his mother objected violently