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By Root 1895 0

just as housewives. A few confessed longingly that “running my house and raising four children does not really use my education or the ability I once seemed to have. If only it were possible to combine motherhood and a career.” And the most bitter were those who said: “Never have found out what kind of a person I am. I wasted college trying to find myself in social life. I wish now that I had gone into something deeply enough to have a creative life of my own.” But most did know, now, who they were and what they wanted to do; and 80 per cent regretted not having planned, seriously, to use their education in professional work. Passive appreciation and even active participation in community affairs would no longer be enough when their children were a little older. Many women reported that they were planning to teach; fortunately for them, the great need for teachers gave them a chance to get back in the stream. Others anticipated years of further study before they would be qualified in their chosen fields.

These 200 Smith graduates have their counterparts in women all over the country, women of intelligence and ability, fighting their way out of the housewife trap, or never really trapped at all because of their education. But these graduates of 1942 were among the last American women educated before the feminine mystique.

In another questionnaire answered by almost 10,000 graduates of Mount Holyoke in 1962—its 125th anniversary year—one sees the effect of the mystique on women educated in the last two decades. The Mount Holyoke alumnae showed a similar high marriage and low divorce rate (2 per cent over-all). But before 1942, most were married at twenty-five or older; after 1942, the marriage age showed a dramatic drop, and the percentage having four or more children showed a dramatic rise. Before 1942, two-thirds or more of the graduates went on to further study; that proportion has steadily declined. Few, in recent classes, have won advanced degrees in the arts, sciences, law, medicine, education, compared to the 40 per cent in 1937. A drastically decreasing number also seem to share the larger vistas of national or international commitment; participation in local political clubs had dropped to 12 per cent by the class of 1952. From 1942, on few graduates had any professional affiliation. Half of all the Mount Holyoke alumnae had worked at one time but were no longer working, primarily because they had chosen “the role of housewife.” Some had returned to work—both to supplement income and because they liked to work. But in the classes from 1942 on, where most of the women were now housewives, nearly half did not intend to return to work.

The declining area of commitment to the world outside the home from 1942 on is a clear indication of the effect of the feminine mystique on educated women. Having seen the desperate emptiness, the “trapped” feeling of many young women who were educated under the mystique to be “just a housewife,” I realize the significance of my classmates’ experience. Because of their education many of them were able to combine serious commitments of their own with marriage and family. They could participate in community activities that required intelligence and responsibility, and move on, with a few years’ preparation, into professional social work or teaching. They could get jobs as substitute teachers or part-time social workers to finance the courses needed for certification. They had often grown to the point where they did not want to return to the fields they had worked in after college, and they could even get into a new field with the core of autonomy that their education had given them.

But what of the young women today who have never had a taste of higher education, who quit college to marry or marked time in their classrooms waiting for the “right man?” What will they be at forty? Housewives in every suburb and city are seeking more education today, as if a course, any course, will give them the identity they are groping toward. But the courses they take, and the courses they are offered,