The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [166]
Over a ten-year period, as she went correctly through all the motions of motherhood in suburbia, except for this inability to deal firmly with her children, she seemed visibly less and less alive, less and less sure of her own worth. The day before she hung herself in the basement of her spotless split-level house, she took her three children for a checkup by the pediatrician, and made arrangements for her daughter’s birthday party.
Few suburban housewives resort to suicide, and yet there is other evidence that women pay a high emotional and physical price for evading their own growth. They are not, as we now know, the biologically weaker of the species. In every age group, fewer women die than men. But in America, from the time when women assume their feminine sexual role as housewives, they no longer live with the zest, the enjoyment, the sense of purpose that is characteristic of true human health.
During the 1950’s, psychiatrists, analysts, and doctors in all fields noted that the housewife’s syndrome seemed to become increasingly pathological. The mild undiagnosable symptoms—bleeding blisters, malaise, nervousness, and fatigue of young housewives—became heart attacks, bleeding ulcers, hypertension, bronchopneumonia; the nameless emotional distress became a psychotic breakdown. Among the new housewife-mothers, in certain sunlit suburbs, this single decade saw a fantastic increase in “maternal psychoses,” mild-to-suicidal depressions or hallucinations over childbirth. According to medical records compiled by Dr. Richard Gordon and his wife, Katherine (psychiatrist and social psychologist, respectively), in the suburbs of Bergen County, N.J., during the 1950’s, approximately one out of three young mothers suffered depression or psychotic breakdown over childbirth. This compared to previous medical estimates of psychotic breakdown in one out of 400 pregnancies, and less severe depressions in one out of 80.
In Bergen County during 1953–57 one out of 10 of the 746 adult psychiatric patients were young wives who broke down over childbirth. In fact, young housewives (18 to 44) suffering not only childbirth depression, but all psychiatric and psychosomatic disorders with increasing severity, became during the fifties by far the predominant group of adult psychiatric patients. The number of disturbed young wives was more than half again as big as the number of young husbands, and three times as big as any other group. (Other surveys of both private and public patients in the suburbs have turned up similar findings.) From the beginning to the end of the fifties, the young housewives also increasingly displaced men as the main sufferers of coronary attack, ulcers, hypertension and bronchial pneumonia. In the hospital serving this suburban county, women now make up 40 per cent of the ulcer patients.9
I went to see the Gordons, who had attributed the increased pathologies of these new young housewives—not found among women in comparable rural areas, or older suburbs and cities—to the “mobility” of the new suburban population. But the “mobile” husbands were not breaking down as were their wives and their children. Previous studies of childbirth depression had indicated that successful professional or career women sometimes suffered “role-conflict” when they became housewife-mothers. But these new victims, whose rate of childbirth depression or breakdown was so much greater than all previous estimates, had never wanted to be anything more than housewife-mothers; that was all that was expected of them. The Gordons pointed out that their findings do not indicate that the young housewives are necessarily subjected to more stress than their husbands; for some reason the women simply show an increased tendency to succumb to stress. Could that mean that the role of housewife-mother was too much for them; or could it mean that it was not enough?
These women did not share the same childhood seeds of neurosis; some, in fact, showed none.