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By Root 2057 0

at home, his wife keeps the children strictly out of the way, or else. It is not so easy for a woman; if she is serious about her work she often must find some place away from home to do it, or risk becoming an ogre to her children in her impatient demands for privacy. Her attention is divided and her concentration interrupted, on the job and as a mother. A no-nonsense nine-to-five job, with a clear division between professional work and housework, requires much less discipline and is usually less lonely. Some of the stimulation and the new friendships that come from being part of the professional world can be lost by the woman who tries to fit her career into the physical confines of her housewife life.

A woman must say “no” to the feminine mystique very clearly indeed to sustain the discipline and effort that any professional commitment requires. For the mystique is no mere intellectual construct. A great many people have, or think they have, a vested interest in “Occupation: housewife.” However long it may take for women’s magazines, sociologists, educators, and psychoanalysts to correct the mistakes that perpetuate the feminine mystique, a woman must deal with them now, in the prejudices, mistaken fears, and unnecessary dilemmas voiced by her husband; her friends and neighbors; perhaps her minister, priest, or rabbi; or her child’s kindergarten teacher; or the well-meaning social worker at the guidance clinic; or her own innocent little children. But resistance, from whatever source, is better seen for what it is.

Even the traditional resistance of religious orthodoxy is masked today with the manipulative techniques of psychotherapy. Women of orthodox Catholic or Jewish origin do not easily break through the housewife image; it is enshrined in the canons of their religion, in the assumptions of their own and their husbands’ childhoods, and in their church’s dogmatic definitions of marriage and motherhood. The ease with which dogma can be dressed in the psychological tenets of the mystique can be seen in this “Suggested Outline for Married Couples’ Discussions” from the Family Life Bureau of the Archdiocese of New York. A panel of three or four married couples, after rehearsal by a “priest-moderator,” are instructed to raise the question: “Can a working wife be a challenge to the authority of the husband?”

Most of the engaged couples are convinced that there is nothing unusual or wrong in the wife working.…Don’t antagonize. Be suggestive, rather than dogmatic…. The panel couples should point out that the bride who is happy at a 9-to-5 o’clock job has this to think about:

a. She may be subtly undermining her husband’s sense of vocation as the bread-winner and head of the house. The competitive business world can inculcate in the working bride attitudes and habits which may make it difficult for her to adjust to her husband’s leadership….

c. At the end of a working day, she presents her husband with a tired mind and body at a time when he looks forward to the cheerful encouragement and fresh enthusiasm of his spouse….

d. For some brides, the tension of doubling as business woman and part-time housewife may be one of several factors contributing to sterility…

One Catholic women I interviewed withdrew from the state board of the League of Women Voters, when, in addition to the displeasure of the priest and her own husband, the school psychologist claimed that her daughter’s difficulties at school were due to her political activity. “It is more difficult for a Catholic woman to stay emancipated,” she told me. “I have retired. It will be better for everyone concerned if I am just a housewife.” At this point the telephone rang, and I eavesdropped with interest on a half-hour of high political strategy, evidently not of the League but of the local Democratic Party. The “retired” politician came back into the kitchen to finish preparing dinner, and confessed that she now hid her political activity at home “like an alcoholic or a drug addict, but I don’t seem to be able to give it up.”

Another woman, of Jewish