The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [193]
Now I’m studying history, one course a year. It’s work, but I haven’t missed a night in 2 1/2 years. Soon I’ll be teaching. I love being a wife and mother, but I know now that when marriage is the end of your life, because you have no other mission, it becomes a miserable, tawdry thing. Who said women have to be happy, to be amused, to be entertained? You have to work. You don’t have to have a job. But you have to tackle something yourself, and see it through, to feel alive.
An hour a day, a weekend, or even a week off from motherhood is not the answer to the problem that has no name. That “mother’s hour off,”1 as advised by child-and-family experts or puzzled doctors as the antidote for the housewife’s fatigue or trapped feeling, assumes automatically that a woman is “just a housewife,” now and forever a mother. A person fully used by his work can enjoy “time off.” But the mothers I talked to did not find any magical relief in an “hour off” in fact, they often gave it up on the slightest pretext, either from guilt or from boredom. A woman who has no purpose of her own in society, a woman who cannot let herself think about the future because she is doing nothing to give herself a real identity in it, will continue to feel a desperation in the present—no matter how many “hours off” she takes. Even a very young woman today must think of herself as a human being first, not as a mother with time on her hands, and make a life plan in terms of her own abilities, a commitment of her own to society, with which her commitments as wife and mother can be integrated.
A woman I interviewed, a mental-health educator who was for many years “just a housewife” in her suburban community, sums it up: “I remember my own feeling that life wasn’t full enough for me. I wasn’t using myself in terms of my capacities. It wasn’t enough making a home. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You can’t just deny your intelligent mind; you need to be part of the social scheme.”
And looking over the trees of her garden to the quiet, empty suburban street, she said:
If you knock on any of these doors, how many women would you find whose abilities are being used? You’d find them drinking, or sitting around talking to other women and watching children play because they can’t bear to be alone, or watching TV or reading a book. Society hasn’t caught up with women yet, hasn’t found a way yet to use the skills and energies of women except to bear children. Over the last fifteen years, I think women have been running away from themselves. The reason the young ones have swallowed this feminine business is because they think if they go back and look for all their satisfaction in the home, it will be easier. But it won’t be. Somewhere along the line a woman, if she is going to come to terms with herself, has to find herself as a person.
The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way. But a job, any job, is not the answer—in fact, it can be part of the trap. Women who do not look for jobs equal to their actual capacity, who do not let themselves develop the lifetime interests and goals which require serious education and training, who take a job at twenty or forty to “help out at home” or just to kill extra time, are walking, almost as surely as the ones who stay inside the housewife trap, to a nonexistent future.
If a job is to be the way out of the trap for a woman, it must be a job that she can take seriously as part of a life plan, work in which she can grow as part of society. Suburban communities, particularly the new communities where social, cultural, educational, political, and recreational patterns are not as yet firmly established, offer numerous opportunities for the able, intelligent woman. But such work is not necessarily a “job.” In Westchester, on Long Island, in the Philadelphia suburbs, women have started mental-health clinics, art centers, day camps. In big cities and small towns,