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By Root 2005 0

American women for castrating their husbands and sons, for dominating their children, for their material greediness, for their sexual frigidity or denial of femininity may simply mask this one underlying fact: that woman, no more than man, can live by sex alone; that her struggle for identity, autonomy—that “personally productive orientation based on the human need for active participation in a creative task”—is inextricably linked with her sexual fulfillment, as a condition of her maturity. In the attempt to live by sex alone, in the image of the feminine mystique, ultimately she must “castrate” the husband and sons who can never give her enough satisfaction to make up for lack of a self, and pass on to her daughters her own unspoken disappointment, self-denigration, and discontent.

Professor Maslow told me that he thought self-actualization is only possible for women today in America if one person can grow through another—that is, if the woman can realize her own potential through her husband and children. “We do not know if this is possible or not,” he said.

The new theorists of the self, who are men, have usually evaded the question of self-realization for a woman. Bemused themselves by the feminine mystique, they assume that there must be some strange “difference” which permits a woman to find self-realization by living through her husband and children, while men must grow to theirs. It is still very difficult, even for the most advanced psychological theorist, to see woman as a separate self, a human being who, in that respect, is no different in her need to grow than is a man. Most of the conventional theories about women, as well as the feminine mystique, are based on this “difference.” But the actual basis for this “difference” is the fact that the possibility for true self-realization has not existed for women until now.

Many psychologists, including Freud, have made the mistake of assuming from observations of women who did not have the education and the freedom to play their full part in the world, that it was woman’s essential nature to be passive, conformist, dependent, fearful, childlike—just as Aristotle, basing his picture of human nature on his own culture and particular period of time, made the mistake of assuming that just because a man was a slave, this was his essential nature and therefore “it was good for him to be a slave.”

Now that education, freedom, the right to work on the great human frontiers—all the roads by which men have realized themselves—are open to women, only the shadow of the past enshrined in the mystique of feminine fulfillment keeps women from finding their road. The mystique promises women sexual fulfillment through abdication of self. But there is massive statistical evidence that the very opening to American women of those roads to their own identity in society brought a real and dramatic increase in woman’s capacity for sexual fulfillment: the orgasm. In the years between the “emancipation” of women won by the feminists and the sexual counterrevolution of the feminine mystique, American women enjoyed a decade-by-decade increase in sexual orgasm. And the women who enjoyed this the most fully were, above all, the women who went furthest on the road to self-realization, women who were educated for active participation in the world outside the home.

This evidence is found in two famous studies, generally not cited for this purpose. The first of these, the Kinsey report, was based on interviews with 5,940 women who grew up in the various decades of the twentieth century during which the emancipation of women was won, and before the era of the feminine mystique. Even according to Kinsey’s measure of sexual fulfillment, the orgasm (which many psychologists, sociologists, and analysts have criticized for its narrow, mechanistic, over-physiological emphasis, and its disregard of basic psychological nuances), his study shows a dramatic increase in sexual fulfillment during these decades. The increase began with the generation born between 1900 and 1909, who were maturing and marrying