The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [181]
Where the high-dominance women were freely angry, the low-dominance women did not “have ‘nerve’ enough to say what they think and courage enough to show anger when it is necessary.” Thus, their “feminine” quietness was a concomitant of “shyness, inferiority feelings, and a general feeling that anything they could say would be stupid and would be laughed at.” Such a woman “does not want to be a leader except in her fantasies, for she is afraid of being in the forefront, she is afraid of responsibility, and she feels that she would be incompetent.”
And again Professor Maslow found an evident link between strength of self and sexuality, the freedom to be oneself and the freedom to “submit.” He found that the women who were “timid, shy, modest, neat, tactful, quiet, introverted, retiring, more feminine, more conventional,” were not capable of enjoying the kind of sexual fulfillment which was freely enjoyed by women high in dominance and self-esteem.
It would seem as if every sexual impulse or desire that has ever been spoken of may emerge freely and without inhibition in these women…. Generally the sexual act is apt to be taken not as a serious rite with fearful aspects, and differing in fundamental quality from all other acts, but as a game, as fun, as a highly pleasurable animal act.18
Moreover, Maslow found that, even in dreams and fantasies, women of above-average dominance enjoyed sexuality, while in low-dominance women the sexual dreams are always “of the romantic sort, or else are anxious, distorted, symbolized and concealed.”
Did the makers of the mystique overlook such strong and sexually joyous women when they defined passivity and renunciation of personal achievement and activity in the world as the price of feminine sexual fulfillment? Perhaps Freud and his followers did not see such women in their clinics when they created that image of passive femininity. Perhaps the strength of self which Maslow found in the cases he studied was a new phenomenon in women.
The mystique kept even the behavioral scientists from exploring the relationship between sex and self in women in the ensuing era. But, quite aside from questions of women, in recent years behavioral scientists have become increasingly uneasy about basing their image of human nature on a study of its diseased or stunted specimens—patients in the clinic. In this context, Professor Maslow later set about to study people, dead and alive, who showed no evidence of neurosis, psychosis, or psychopathic personality; people who, in his view, showed positive evidence of self-realization, or “self-actualization,” which he defined as “the full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities. Such people seem to be fulfilling themselves and to be doing the best that they are capable of doing…. They are people who have developed or are developing to the full stature of which they are capable.”19
There are many things that emerged from this study which bear directly on the problem of women in America today. For one thing, among the public figures included in his study, Professor Maslow was able to find only two women who had actually fulfilled themselves—Eleanor Roosevelt and Jane Addams. (The men included Lincoln, Jefferson, Einstein, Freud, G. W. Carver, Debs, Schweitzer, Kreisler, Goethe, Thoreau, William James, Spinoza, Whitman, Franklin Roosevelt, Beethoven.) Apart from public and historical figures, he studied at close range a small number of unnamed subjects who met his criteria—all in their 50’s and 60’s—and he screened 3,000 college students, finding only twenty who seemed to be developing in the direction of self-actualization; here also, there were very few women. As a matter of fact, his findings implied that self-actualization, or the full realization of human potential, was hardly possible at all for women in our society.
Professor Maslow found in his study that self-actualizing people invariably have a commitment, a sense of mission