The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [190]
14
A New Life Plan for Women
“Easy enough to say,” the woman inside the housewife’s trap remarks, “but what can I do, alone in the house, with the children yelling and the laundry to sort and no grandmother to babysit?” It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question “who am I” except the voice inside herself. She may spend years on the analyst’s couch, working out her “adjustment to the feminine role,” her blocks to “fulfillment as a wife and mother. And still the voice inside her may say, “That’s not it.” Even the best psychoanalyst can only give her the courage to listen to her own voice. When society asks so little of women, every woman has to listen to her own inner voice to find her identity in the changing world. She must create, out of her own needs and abilities, a new life plan, fitting in the love and children and home that have defined femininity in the past with the work toward a greater purpose that shapes the future.
To face the problem is not to solve it. But once a woman faces it, as women are doing today all over America without much help from the experts, once she asks herself “What do I want to do?” she begins to find her own answers. Once she begins to see through the delusions of the feminine mystique—and realizes that neither her husband nor her children, nor the things in her house, nor sex, nor being like all the other women, can give her a self—she often finds the solution much easier than she anticipated.
Of the many women I talked to in the suburbs and cities, some were just beginning to face the problem, others were well on their way to solving it, and for still others it was no longer a problem. In the stillness of an April afternoon with all her children in school, a woman told me:
I put all my energies into the children, carting them around, worrying about them, teaching them things. Suddenly, there was this terrible feeling of emptiness. All that volunteer work I’d taken on—Scouts, PTA, the League, just didn’t seem worth doing all of a sudden. As a girl, I wanted to be an actress. It was too late to go back to that. I stayed in the house all day, cleaning things I hadn’t cleaned in years. I spent a lot of time just crying. My husband and I talked about its being an American woman’s problem, how you give up a career for the children, and then you reach a point where you can’t go back. I felt so envious of the few women I know who had a definite skill and kept working at it. My dream of being an actress wasn’t real—I didn’t work at it. Did I have to throw my whole self into the children? I’ve spent my whole life just immersed in other people, and never even knew what kind of a person I was myself. Now I think even having another baby wouldn’t solve that emptiness long. You can’t go back—you have to go on. There must be some real way I can go on myself.
This woman was just beginning her search for identity. Another woman had made it to the other side, and could look back now and see the problem clearly. Her home was colorful, casual, but technically she was no longer “just a housewife.” She was paid for her work as a professional painter. She told me that when she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman. She said:
I used to work so hard to maintain this beautiful picture of myself as a wife and mother. I had all of my children by natural childbirth. I breastfed them all. I got mad once at an older woman at a party when I said childbirth is the most important thing in life, the basic animal, and she