• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1880 0

But a striking similarity that emerged in their case histories was the fact that they had abandoned their education below the level of their ability. The sufferers were the ones who quit high school or college; more often than comparable women their age, they had started college—and left, usually after a year.10 Many also had come from “the more restrictive ethnic groups” (Italian or Jewish) or from small towns in the South where “women were protected and kept dependent.” Most had not pursued either education or job, nor moved in the world on their own in any capacity. A few who broke down had held relatively unskilled jobs, or had the beginnings of interests which they gave up when they became suburban housewife-mothers. But most had had no ambition other than that of marrying an up-and-coming man; many were fulfilling not only their own dreams but also the frustrated status dreams of their mothers, in marrying ambitious, capable men. As Dr. Gordon described them to me: “They were not capable women. They had never done anything. They couldn’t even organize the committees which needed to be organized in these places. They had never been required to apply themselves, learn how to do a job and then do it. Many of them quit school. It’s easier to have a baby than get an A. They never learned to take stresses, pain, hard work. As soon as the going was tough, they broke down.”

Perhaps because these girls were more passive, more dependent than other women, walled up in the suburbs, they sometimes seemed to become as infantile as their children. And their children showed a passivity and infantilism that seemed pathological—very early in the sons. One finds in the suburban mental-health clinics today, the overwhelming majority of the child patients are boys, in dramatic and otherwise inexplicable reversal of the fact that most of the adult patients in all clinics and doctors’ offices today are women—that is, housewives. Putting aside the theoretical terms of his profession a Boston analyst who has many women patients told me:

It is true, there are too many more women patients than men. Their complaints are varied, but if you look underneath, you find this underlying feeling of emptiness. It is not inferiority. It is almost like nothingness. The situation is that they are not pursuing any goals of their own.

Another doctor, in a suburban mental-health clinic, told me of the young mother of a sixteen-year-old girl who, since their move to the suburb seven years ago, has been completely preoccupied with her children except for a little “do good” work in the community. Despite this mother’s constant anxiety about her daughter (“I think about her all day—she doesn’t have any friends and will she get into college?”), she forgot the day her daughter was to take her college entrance exams.

Her anxiousness about her daughter and what she was doing was her own anxiety about herself, and what she wasn’t doing. When these women suffer with the preoccupation of what they aren’t doing with themselves, the children actually get very little real contact with them. I think of another child, 2 years old, with very severe symptoms because he has almost no actual contact with his mother. She is very much in the home, all day, every day. I have to teach her to have even physical contact with the child. But it won’t be solved until the mother faces her own need for self-fulfillment. Being available to one’s children has nothing to do with the amount of time—being able to be there for each child in terms of what he needs can happen in a split second. And a mother can be there all day, and not be there for the child, because of her preoccupation with herself. So he holds his breath in temper tantrums; he fights in anger; he refuses to let her leave him at nursery school; even at 9 a boy still requires his mother to go to the bathroom with him, lie down with him or he can’t go to sleep. Or he becomes withdrawn to the point of schizophrenia. And she is frantically trying to answer the child’s needs and demands. But if she was really able