The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [179]
But women in America are not encouraged, or expected, to use their full capacities. In the name of femininity, they are encouraged to evade human growth.
Growth has not only rewards and pleasure, but also many intrinsic pains and always will have. Each step forward is a step into the unfamiliar and is thought of as possibly dangerous. It also frequently means giving up something familiar and good and satisfying. It frequently means a parting and a separation with consequent nostalgia, loneliness and mourning. It also often means giving up a simpler and easier and less effortful life in exchange for a more demanding, more difficult life. Growth forward is in spite of these losses and therefore requires courage, strength in the individual, as well as protection, permission and encouragement from the environment, especially for the child.13
What happens if the environment frowns on that courage and strength—sometimes virtually forbids, and seldom actually encourages that growth in the child who is a girl? What happens if human growth is considered antagonistic to femininity, to fulfillment as a woman, to woman’s sexuality? The feminine mystique implies a choice between “being a woman” or risking the pains of human growth. Thousands of women, reduced to biological living by their environment, lulled into a false sense of anonymous security in their comfortable concentration camps, have made a wrong choice. The irony of their mistaken choice is this: the mystique holds out “feminine fulfillment” as the prize for being only a wife and mother. But it is no accident that thousands of suburban housewives have not found that prize. The simple truth would seem to be that women will never know sexual fulfillment and the peak experience of human love until they are allowed and encouraged to grow to their full strength as human beings. For according to the new psychological theorists, self-realization, far from preventing the highest sexual fulfillment, is inextricably linked to it. And there is more than theoretical reason to believe that this is as true for women as for men.
In the late thirties, Professor Maslow began to study the relationship between sexuality and what he called “dominance feeling” or “self-esteem” or “ego level” in women—130 women, of college education or of comparable intelligence, between twenty and twenty-eight, most of whom were married, of Protestant middle-class city background.14 He found, contrary to what one might expect from the psychoanalytical theories and the conventional images of femininity, that the more “dominant” the woman, the greater her enjoyment of sexuality—and the greater her ability to “submit” in a psychological sense, to give herself freely in love, to have orgasm. It was not that these women higher in “dominance” were more “highly sexed,” but they were, above all, more completely themselves, more free to be themselves—and this seemed inextricably linked with a greater freedom to give themselves in love. These women were not, in the usual sense, “feminine,” but they enjoyed sexual fulfillment to a much higher degree than the conventionally feminine women in the same study.
I have never seen the implications of this research discussed in popular psychological literature about femininity or women’s sexuality. It was, perhaps, not noticed at the time, even by the theorists, as a major landmark. But its findings are thought-provoking for American women today, who lead their lives according to the dictates of the feminine mystique. Remember that this study was done in the late 1930’s, before the mystique became all-powerful. For these strong, spirited, educated women, evidently there was no conflict between the driving force to be themselves and to love. Here is the way Professor Maslow contrasted these women with their more “feminine” sisters—in terms of themselves, and in terms of their sexuality:
High dominance feeling involves good self-confidence, self-assurance, high evaluation of the self, feelings of general capability or superiority,