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By Root 2039 0

these children, if the mother continued to live vicariously through the child. I noticed this same pattern in many of the women I interviewed, women who dominated their daughters, or bred them into passive dependence and conformity or unconsciously pushed them into sexual activities. One of the most tragic women I interviewed was the mother of that “sleepwalking” thirteen-year-old girl. A wealthy executive’s wife whose life was filled with all the trappings, she lived the very image of suburban “togetherness,” except that it was only a shell. Her husband’s real life was centered in his business; a life that he could not, or would not, share with his wife. She had sought to recapture her sense of life by unconsciously pushing her thirteen-year-old daughter into promiscuity. She lived in her daughter’s pseudo-sex life, which for the girl was so devoid of actual feeling that she became in it merely a “thing.”

Quite a few therapists and counselors were trying to “help” the mother and the father, on the premise, I suppose, that if the mother’s sexual-emotional needs were filled in her marriage by her husband, she would not need to solve them through her daughter—and her daughter could grow out of the “thingness” to womanhood herself. It was because the husband had so many problems of his own and the prospects of the mother ever getting enough love from him looked dim, that the counselors were trying to get the mother to develop some real interests in her own life.

But with other women I have encountered who have evaded their own growth in vicarious living and lack of personal purposes, not even the most loving of husbands have managed to stop the progressive damage to their own lives and the lives of their children. I have seen what happens when women unconsciously push their daughters into too early sexuality, because the sexual adventure was the only real adventure—or means of achieving status or identity—in their own lives. Today these daughters, who acted out their mothers’ dreams or frustrated ambitions in the “normal” feminine way and hitched their wagons to the rising stars of ambitious, able men, are, in too many cases, as frustrated and unfulfilled as their mothers. They do not all rush barefoot to the police station for fear they will murder the husband and baby who, they think, trap them in that house. All their sons do not become violent menaces in the neighborhood and at school; all their daughters do not act out their mothers’ sexual phantasies and become pregnant at fourteen. Nor do all such housewives begin drinking at 11 A.M. to hide the clunking whir of the dishwasher, the washing machine, the dryer, that are finally the only sounds of life in that empty house, as the children, one by one, go off to school.

But in suburbs like Bergen County, the rate of “separations” increased a wild 100% during the 1950’s, as the able, ambitious men kept on growing in the city while their wives evaded growth in vicarious living or noncommitment, fulfilling their feminine role at home. As long as the children were home, as long as the husband was there, the wives suffered increasingly severe illnesses, but recovered. But in Bergen County, during this decade, there was a drastic increase in suicides of women over forty-five, and of hospitalized women psychiatric patients whose children had grown up and left home.17 The housewives who had to be hospitalized and who did not recover quickly were, above all, those who had never developed their own abilities in work outside the home.18

The massive breakdown that may take place as more and more of these new young housewife-mothers who are the products of the feminine mystique reach their forties is still a matter of speculation. But the progressive infantilization of their sons and daughters, as it is mirrored in the rash of early marriages, has become an alarming fact. In March, 1962, at the national conference of the Child Study Association, the new early marriages and parenthood, which had formerly been considered an indication of “improved emotional maturity” in the younger