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By Root 2081 0

to commit themselves to work, paid or unpaid, requiring initiative, leadership and responsibility is due to the feminine mystique. This attitude of noncommitment among young housewives was confirmed by a recent study done in Westchester County.3 In an upper-income suburb, more than 50% of a group of housewives between 25 and 35, with husbands in the over-$25,000-a-year income group, wanted to go to work: 13% immediately, the rest in 5 to 15 years. Of those who planned to go to work, 3 out of 4 felt inadequately prepared. (All of these women had some college education but only one a graduate degree; a third had married at twenty or before.) These women were not driven to go to work by economic need but by what the anthropologist who made the survey called “the psychological need to be economically productive.” Evidently, volunteer work did not meet this need; though 62% of these women were doing volunteer work, it was of the “one-day and under” variety. And though they wanted jobs and felt inadequately prepared, of the 45% taking courses, very few were working toward a degree. The element of phantasy in their work plans was witnessed by “the small businesses that open and close with sad regularity.” When an alumnae association sponsored a two-session forum in the suburb on “How Women in the Middle Years Can Return to Work,” twenty-five women attended. As a beginning step, each woman was asked to come to the second meeting with a résumé. The résumé took some thought, and, as the researcher put it, “sincerity of purpose.” Only one woman was serious enough to write the résumé.

In another suburb, there is a guidance center which in the early years of the mental-health movement gave real scope to the intelligence of college-educated women of the community. They never did therapy, of course, but in the early years they administered the center and led the educational parent-discussion groups. Now that “education for family living” has become professionalized, the center is administered and the discussion groups led by professionals, often brought in from the city, who have M.A.’s or doctorates in the field. In only a very few cases did the women who “found themselves” in the work of the guidance center go on in the new profession, and get their own M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s. Most backed off when to continue would have meant breaking away from the housewife role, and becoming seriously committed to a profession.

Ironically, the only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society in a life plan that can encompass marriage and motherhood, is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique; the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession. Such a commitment is not tied to a specific job or locality. It permits year-to-year variation—a full-time paid job in one community, part-time in another, exercise of the professional skill in serious volunteer work or a period of study during pregnancy or early motherhood when a full-time job is not feasible. It is a continuous thread, kept alive by work and study and contacts in the field, in any part of the country.

The women I found who had made and kept alive such long-term commitments did not suffer the problem that has no name. Nor did they live in the housewife image. But music or art or politics offered no magic solution for the women who did not, or could not, commit themselves seriously. The “arts” seem, at first glance, to be the ideal answer for a woman. They can, after all, be practiced in the home. They do not necessarily imply that dreaded professionalism, they are suitably feminine, and seem to offer endless room for personal growth and identity, with no need to compete in society for pay. But I have noticed that when women do not take up painting or ceramics seriously enough to become professionals—to be paid for their work, or for teaching it to others, and to be recognized as a peer by other professionals—sooner or later, they cease dabbling; the Sunday painting, the idle ceramics do not bring that