The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [171]
Many girls will admit that they want to get married because they do not want to work any longer. They harbor dreams of being taken care of for the rest of their lives without worry, with just enough furnishing, to do little housework, interesting downtown shopping trips, happy children, and nice neighbors. The dream of a husband seems somehow less important but in the fantasies of girls about marriage, it usually concerns a man who has the strength of an indestructible, reliable, powerful father, and the gentleness, givingness, and self-sacrificing love of a good mother. Young men give as their reason for wanting to marry very often the desire to have a motherly woman in the house, and regular sex just for the asking without trouble and bother…. In fact, what is supposed to secure maturity and independence is in reality a concealed hope to secure dependency, to prolong the child-parent relationship with the privileges of being a child, and with as little as possible of its limitations.19
And there were other ominous signs across the nation of mounting uncontrollable violence among young parents and their children trapped in that passive dependence. A psychiatrist reported that such wives were reacting to hostility from their husbands by becoming even more dependent and passive, until they sometimes became literally unable to move, to take a step, by themselves. This did not make their husbands treat them with more love, but more rage. And what was happening to the rage the wives did not dare to use against their husbands? Consider this recent news item (Time, July 20, 1962) about the “Battered-Child Syndrome.”
To many doctors, the incident is becoming distressingly familiar. A child, usually under three, is brought to the office with multiple fractures—often including a fractured skull. The parents express appropriate concern, report that the child fell out of bed, or tumbled down the stairs, or was injured by a playmate. But x-rays and experience lead the doctor to a different conclusion: the child has been beaten by his parents.
Gathering documentation from 71 hospitals, a University of Colorado team found 302 battered-child cases in a single year; 33 died, 85 suffered permanent brain damage. The parents, who were driven “to kick and punch their children, twist their arms, beat them with hammers or the buckle end of belts, burn them with cigarettes or electric irons,” were as likely to live in those suburban split-levels as in tenements. The A.M.A. predicted that when statistics on the battered-child syndrome are complete, “it is likely that it will be found to be a more frequent cause of death than such well-recognized and thoroughly studied diseases as leukemia, cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy.”
The “parent” with most opportunity to beat that battered child was, of course, the mother. As one young mother of four said to the doctor, as she confessed to the wish to kill herself:
There doesn’t seem any reason for me to go on living. I don’t have anything to look forward to. Jim and I don’t even talk to each other any more except about the bills and things that need to be fixed in the house. I know he resents being so old and tied down when he’s still young, and he blames it on me because it was I that wanted us to get married then. But the worst thing is, I feel so envious of my own children. I almost hate them, because they have their lives ahead, and mine is over.
It may or may not be a symbolic coincidence but the same week the child-and-family profession recognized