The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [177]
Recent experimental work by various psychologists reveals that sheep can bind past and future into the present for a span of about fifteen minutes, and dogs for half an hour. But a human being can bring the past of thousands of years ago into the present as guide to his personal actions, and can project himself in imagination into the future, not only for half an hour, but for weeks and years. This capacity to “transcend the immediate boundaries of time,” to act and react, and see one’s experience in the dimensions of both past and future, is the unique characteristic of human existence.8 The brain-injured soldiers thus were doomed to the inhuman hell of eternal “dailyness.”
The housewives who suffer the terror of the problem that has no name are victims of this same deadly “dailyness.” As one of them told me, “I can take the real problems; it’s the endless boring days that make me desperate.” Housewives who live according to the feminine mystique do not have a personal purpose stretching into the future. But without such a purpose to evoke their full abilities, they cannot grow to self-realization. Without such a purpose, they lose the sense of who they are, for it is purpose which gives the human pattern to one’s days.9
American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if this new thinking is right, and the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror. In the name of femininity, they have evaded the choices that would have given them a personal purpose, a sense of their own being. For, as the existentialists say, the values of human life never come about automatically. “The human being can lose his own being by his own choices, as a tree or stone cannot.”10
It is surely as true of women’s whole human potential what earlier psychological theorists have only deemed true of her sexual potential—that if she is barred from realizing her true nature, she will be sick. The frustration not only of needs like sex, but of individual abilities could result in neurosis. Her anxiety can be soothed by therapy, or tranquilized by pills or evaded temporarily by busy-work. But her unease, her desperation, is nonetheless a warning that her human existence is in danger, even though she has found fulfillment, according to the tenets of the feminine mystique, as a wife and mother.
Only recently have we come to accept the fact that there is an evolutionary scale or hierarchy of needs in man (and thus in woman), ranging from the needs usually called instincts because they are shared with animals, to needs that come later in human development. These later needs, the needs for knowledge, for self-realization, are as instinctive, in a human sense, as the needs shared with other animals of food, sex, survival. The clear emergence of the later needs seems to rest upon prior satisfaction of the physiological needs. The man who is extremely and dangerously hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the satisfying of hunger are pushed into the background. “But what happens to man’s desires when there is plenty of food and his belly is chronically filled? At once, other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than the physiological hungers, dominate the organism.”11
In a sense, this evolving hierarchy of needs moves further and further away from the physiological level which depends on the material environment, and