The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [194]
In some suburbs and communities there is now little work left for the nonprofessional that requires intelligence—except for the few positions of leadership which most women, these days, lack the independence, the strength, the self-confidence to take. If the community has a high proportion of educated women, there simply are not enough such posts to go around. As a result, community work often expands in a kind of self-serving structure of committees and red tape, in the purest sense of Parkinson’s law, until its real purpose seems to be just to keep women busy. Such busywork is not satisfying to mature women, nor does it help the immature to grow. This is not to say that being a den mother, or serving on a PTA committee, or organizing a covered-dish supper is not useful work; for a woman of intelligence and ability, it is simply not enough.
One woman I interviewed had involved herself in an endless whirl of worthwhile community activities. But they led in no direction for her own future, nor did they truly utilize her exceptional intelligence. Indeed, her intelligence seemed to deteriorate; she suffered the problem that has no name with increasing severity until she took the first step toward a serious commitment. Today she is a “master teacher,” a serene wife and mother.
At first, I took on the hospital fund-raising committee, the clerical volunteers committee for the clinic. I was class mother for the children’s field trips. I was taking piano lessons to the tune of $30 a week, paying baby sitters so I could play for my own amusement. I did the Dewey decimal system for the library we started, and the usual den mother and PTA. The financial outlay for all these things which were only needed to fill up my life was taking a good slice out of my husband’s income. And it still didn’t fill up my life. I was cranky and moody. I would burst into tears for no reason. I couldn’t even concentrate to finish a detective story.
I was so busy, running from morning till night, and yet I never had any real feeling of satisfaction. You raise your kids, sure, but how can that justify your life? You have to have some ultimate objective, some long-term goal to keep you going. Community activities are short-term goals; you do a project; it’s done; then you have to hunt for another one. In community work, they say you mustn’t bother the young mothers with little children. This is the job of the middle-aged ones whose kids are grown. But it’s just the ones who are tied down with the kids who need to do this. When you’re not tied down by kids, drop that stuff—you need real work.
Because of the feminine mystique (and perhaps because of the simple human fear of failure, when one does compete, without sexual privilege or excuse), it is the jump from amateur to professional that is often hardest for a woman on her way out of the trap. But even if a woman does not have to work to eat, she can find identity only in work that is of real value to society2—work for which, usually, our society pays. Being paid is, of course, more than a reward—it implies a definite commitment. For fear of that commitment, hundreds of able, educated suburban housewives today fool themselves about the writer or actress they might have been, or dabble at art or music in the dilettante’s limbo of “self-enrichment,” or apply for jobs as receptionists or saleswomen, jobs well below their actual abilities. These are also ways of evading growth.
The growing boredom of American women with volunteer work, and their preference for paid jobs, no matter how low-level, has been attributed to the fact that professionals have taken over most of the posts in the community requiring intelligence. But the fact that women did not become professionals themselves, the reluctance of women in the last twenty years