The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [199]
There are husbands, however, whose resistance is not so easily dispelled. The husband who is unable to bear his wife’s saying “no” to the feminine mystique often has been seduced himself by the infantile phantasy of having an ever-present mother, or is trying to relive that phantasy through his children. It is difficult for a woman to tell such a husband that she is not his mother and that their children will be better off without her constant attention. Perhaps if she becomes more truly herself and refuses to act out his phantasy any longer, he will suddenly wake up and see her again. And then again, perhaps he will look for another mother.
Another hazard a woman faces on her way out of the housewife trap is the hostility of other housewives. Just as the man evading growth in his own work resents his wife’s growth, so women who are living vicariously through their husbands and children resent the woman who has a life of her own. At dinner parties, the nursery school affair, the PTA open house, a woman who is more than just a housewife can expect a few barbs from her suburban neighbors. She no longer has the time for idle gossip over endless cups of coffee in the breakfast nook; she can no longer share with other wives that cozy “we’re all in the same boat” illusion; her very presence rocks that boat. And she can expect her home, her husband, and her children to be scrutinized with more than the usual curiosity for the slightest sign of a “problem.” This kind of hostility, however, sometimes masks a secret envy. The most hostile of the “happy housewives” may be the first to ask her neighbor with the new career for advice about moving on herself.
For the woman who moves on, there is always the sense of loss that accompanies change: old friends, familiar and reassuring routines lost, the new ones not yet clear. It is so much easier for a woman to say “yes” to the feminine mystique, and not risk the pains of moving on, that the will to make the effort—“ambition”—is as necessary as ability itself, if she is going to move out of the housewife trap. “Ambition,” like “career,” has been made a dirty word by the feminine mystique. When Polly Weaver, “College and Careers” editor of Mademoiselle, surveyed 400 women in 1956 on the subject of “ambition” and “competition,”4 most of them had “guilty feelings” about being ambitious. They tried, in Miss Weaver’s words, to “make it uplifting, not worldly and selfish like eating. We were surprised…at the number of women who drive themselves from morning to night for a job or the community or church, for example, but don’t want a nickel’s worth out of it for themselves. They don’t want money, social position, power, influence, recognition…. Are these women fooling themselves?”
The mystique would have women renounce ambition for themselves. Marriage and motherhood is the end; after that, women are supposed to be ambitious only for their husbands and their children. Many women who indeed “fool themselves” push husband and children to fulfill that unadmitted ambition of their own. There were, however, many frankly ambitious women among those who responded to the Mademoiselle survey—and they did not seem to suffer from it.
The ambitious women who answered our questionnaire had few regrets over sacrifices of sweet old friends, family picnics, and time for reading books no one talks about. They got more than they gave up, they said, and cited new friends, the larger world they move in, the great spurts of growth they had when they worked with the brilliant and talented—and most