The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [203]
Courses in golf, bridge, rug-hooking, gourmet cooking, sewing are intended, I suppose, for real use, by women who stay in the housewife trap. The so-called intellectual courses offered in the usual adult education centers—art appreciation, ceramics, short-story writing, conversational French, Great Books, astronomy in the Space Age—are intended only as “self-enrichment.” The study, the effort, even the homework that imply a long-term commitment are not expected of the housewife.
Actually, many women who take these courses desperately need serious education; but if they have never had a taste of it, they do not know how and where to look for it, nor do they even understand that so many adult education courses are unsatisfactory simply because they are not serious. The dimension of reality essential even to “self-enrichment” is barred, almost by definition, in a course specifically designed for “housewives.” This is true, even where the institution giving the course has the highest standards. Recently, Radcliffe announced an “Institute for Executives’ Wives” (to be followed presumably by an “Institute for Scientists’ Wives,” or an “Institute for Artists’ Wives,” or an “Institute for College Professors’ Wives”). The executive’s wife or the scientist’s wife, at thirty-five or forty, whose children are all at school is hardly going to be helped to the new identity she needs by learning to take a more detailed, vicarious share of her husband’s world. What she needs is training for creative work of her own.
Among the women I interviewed, education was the key to the problem that has no name only when it was part of a new life plan, and meant for serious use in society—amateur or professional. They were able to find such education only in the regular colleges and universities. Despite the wishful thinking engendered by the feminine mystique in girls and in their educators, an education evaded at eighteen or twenty-one is insuperably harder to obtain at thirty-one or thirty-eight or forty-one, by a woman who has a husband and three or four children and a home. She faces, in the college or university, the prejudices created by the feminine mystique. No matter how brief her absence from the academic proving ground, she will have to demonstrate her seriousness of purpose over and over again to be readmitted. She must then compete with the teeming hordes of children she and others like her have overproduced in this era. It is not easy for a grown woman to sit through courses geared to teenagers, to be treated as a teenager again, to have to prove that she deserves to be taken as seriously as a teenager. A woman has to exercise great ingenuity, endure many rebuffs and disappointments, to find an education that fits her need, and also make it fit her other commitments as wife and mother.
One woman I interviewed who had never gone to college, decided, after psychotherapy, to take two courses a year at a nearby university which, fortunately, had an evening school. At first, she had no idea where it was leading her, but after two years, she decided to major in history and prepare to teach it in high school. She maintained a good record, even though she was often impatient with the slow pace and the busywork. But, at least, studying with some purpose made her feel better than when she used to read mystery stories or magazines at the playground. Above all, it was leading to something real for the future. But at the rate of two courses a year (which then cost $420, and two evenings a week in class), it would have taken her ten years to get a B.A. The second year, money was scarce, and she could only take one course. She could not apply for a student loan unless she went full time, which she could not do until her youngest was in first grade. In spite of it all, she stuck it out that way for four years—noticing that more and