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By Root 1924 0

97 per cent of these women who married—usually about three years after college—only 3 per cent had been divorced; of 20 per cent who had been interested in another man since marriage, most “did nothing about it.” As mothers, 86 per cent planned their children’s births and enjoyed their pregnancies; 70 per cent breastfed their babies from one to nine months. They had more children than their mothers (average: 2.94), but only 10 per cent had ever felt “martyred” as mothers. Through 99 per cent reported that sex was only “one factor among many” in their lives, they neither felt over and done with sexually, nor were they just beginning to feel the sexual satisfaction of being a woman. Some 85 per cent reported that sex “gets better with the years,” but they also found it “less important than it used to be.” They shared life with their husbands “as fully as one can with another human being,” but 75 per cent admitted readily that they could not share all of it.

Most of them (60 per cent) could not honestly say, in reporting their main occupation as homemaker, that they found it “totally fulfilling.” They only spent an average of four hours a day on housework and they did not “enjoy” it. It was perhaps true that their education made them frustrated in their role as housewives. Educated before the era of the feminine mystique, many of them had faced a sharp break from their emerging identity in that housewife role. And yet most of these women continued to grow within the framework of suburban housewifery—perhaps because of the autonomy, the sense of purpose, the commitment to larger values which their education had given them.

Some 79 per cent had found some way to pursue the goals that education had given them, for the most part within the physical confines of their communities. The old Helen Hokinson caricatures notwithstanding, their assumption of community responsibility was, in general, an act of maturity, a commitment that used and renewed strength of self. For these women, community activity almost always had the stamp of innovation and individuality, rather than the stamp of conformity, status-seeking, or escape. They set up cooperative nursery schools in suburbs where none existed; they started teenage canteens and libraries in schools where Johnny wasn’t reading because, quite simply, there were no good books. They innovated new educational programs that finally became a part of the curriculum. One was personally instrumental in getting 13,000 signatures for a popular referendum to get politics out of the school system. One publicly spoke out for desegregation of schools in the South. One got white children to attend a de facto segregated school in the North. One pushed an appropriation for mental-health clinics through a Western state legislature. One set up museum art programs for school children in each of three cities she had lived in since marriage. Others started or led suburban choral groups, civic theaters, foreign-policy study groups. Thirty per cent were active in local party politics, from the committee level to the state assembly. Over 90 per cent reported that they read the newspaper thoroughly every day and voted regularly. They evidently never watched a daytime television program and seemed almost never to play bridge, or read women’s magazines. Of the fifteen to three hundred books apiece they had read in that one year, half were not best sellers.

Facing forty, most of these women could report quite frankly that their hair was graying, and their “skin looks faded and tired,” and yet say, with not much regret for lost youth, “I have a growing sense of self-realization, inner serenity and strength.” “I have become more my real self.”

“How do you visualize your life after your children are grown?” they were asked on the questionnaire. Most of them (60 per cent) had concrete plans for work or study. They planned to finish their education finally, for many who had no career ambitions in college had them now. A few had reached “the depths of bitterness,” “the verge of disillusion and despair,” trying to live