The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [204]
Then, with her youngest in first grade, she became a full-time student in the regular college, where the pace was even slower because the students were “less serious.” She couldn’t endure the thought of all the years ahead to get an M.A. (which she would need to teach high-school history in that state), so she switched to an education major. She certainly would not have continued this expensive, tortuous education if, by now, she had not had a clear life plan to use it, a plan that required it. Committed to elementary teaching, she was able to get a government loan for part of her full-time tuition (now exceeding $1,000 a year), and in another two years she will be finished.
Even against such enormous obstacles, more and more women with virtually no help from society and with belated and begrudging encouragement from educators themselves, are going back to school to get the education they need. Their determination betrays women’s underestimated human strength and their urgent need to use it. But only the strongest, after nearly twenty years of the feminine mystique, can move on by themselves. For this is not just the private problem of each individual woman. There are implications of the feminine mystique that must be faced on a national scale.
The problem that has no name—which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities—is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease. Consider the high incidence of emotional breakdown of women in the “role crises” of their twenties and thirties; the alcoholism and suicides in their forties and fifties; the housewives’ monopolization of all doctors’ time. Consider the prevalence of teenage marriages, the growing rate of illegitimate pregnancies, and even more seriously, the pathology of mother-child symbiosis. Consider the alarming passivity of American teenagers. If we continue to produce millions of young mothers who stop their growth and education short of identity, without a strong core of human values to pass on to their children, we are committing, quite simply, genocide, starting with the mass burial of American women and ending with the progressive dehumanization of their sons and daughters.
These problems cannot be solved by medicine, or even by psychotherapy. We need a drastic reshaping of the cultural image of femininity that will permit women to reach maturity, identity, completeness of self, without conflict with sexual fulfillment. A massive attempt must be made by educators and parents—and ministers, magazine editors, manipulators, guidance counselors—to stop the early-marriage movement, stop girls from growing up wanting to be “just a housewife,” stop it by insisting, with the same attention from childhood on that parents and educators give to boys, that girls develop the resources of self, goals that will permit them to find their own identity.
It is, of course, no easier for an educator to say “no” to the feminine mystique than for an individual girl or woman. Even the most advanced of educators, seriously concerned with the desperate need of housewives with leftover lives on their hands, hesitate to buck the tide of early marriage. They have been browbeaten by the oracles of popularized psychoanalysis and still tremble with guilt at the thought of interfering with a woman’s sexual fulfillment. The rearguard argument offered by the oracles who are, in some cases, right on college campuses themselves, is that since the primary road to identity for a woman is marriage and motherhood, serious educational interests or commitments which may cause conflicts in her role as wife and mother should be postponed until the childbearing years are over. Such a warning was made in 1962 by a psychiatric consultant to Yale University—which had been considering admitting women as undergraduates for the same serious education it gives men.
Many young