The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [198]
Even to a woman of less orthodox tradition, the most powerful weapon of the feminine mystique is the argument that she rejects her husband and her children by working outside the home. If, for any reason, her child becomes ill or her husband has troubles of his own, the feminine mystique, insidious voices in the community, and even the woman’s own inner voice will blame her “rejection” of the housewife role. It is then that many a woman’s commitment to herself and society dies aborning or takes a serious detour.
One woman told me that she gave up her job in television to become “just a housewife” because her husband suddenly decided his troubles in his own profession were caused by her failure to “play the feminine role” she was trying to “compete” with him; she wanted “to wear the pants.” She, like most women today, was vulnerable to such charges—one psychiatrist calls it the “career woman’s guilt syndrome.” And so she began to devote all the energies she had once put into her work to running her family—and to a nagging critical interest in her husband’s career.
In her spare time in the suburbs, however, she rather absentmindedly achieved flamboyant local success as the director of a little-theater group. This, on top of her critical attention to her husband’s career, was far more destructive to his ego and a much more constant irritation to him and to her children than her professional work in which she had competed impersonally with other professionals in a world far away from home. One day, when she was directing a little-theater rehearsal, her son was hit by an automobile. She blamed herself for the accident, and so she gave up the little-theater group, resolving this time, cross her heart, that she would be “just a housewife.”
She suffered, almost immediately, a severe case of the problem that has no name; her depression and dependence made her husband’s life hell. She sought analytic help, and in a departure from the nondirective approach of orthodox analysts, her therapist virtually ordered her to get back to work. She started writing a serious novel with finally the kind of commitment she had evaded, even when she had a job. In her absorption, she stopped worrying about her husband’s career; imperceptibly, she stopped phantasying another accident every time her son was out of her sight. And still, though she was too far along to retreat, she sometimes wondered if she were putting her marriage on the chopping block.
Contrary to the mystique, her husband—reacting either to the contagious example of her commitment, or to the breathing space afforded by the cessation of her hysterical dependence, or for independent reasons of his own—buckled down to the equivalent of that novel in his own career. There were still problems, of course, but not the old ones; when they broke out of their own traps, somehow their relationship with each other began growing again.
Still, with every kind of growth, there are risks. I encountered one woman in my interviews whose husband divorced her shortly after she went to work. Their marriage had become extremely destructive. The sense of identity that the woman achieved from her work may have made her less willing to accept the destructiveness, and perhaps precipitated the divorce, but it also made her more able to survive it.
In other instances, however, women told me that the violent objections of their husbands disappeared when they finally made up their own minds and went to work. Had they