The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [206]
In the face of the feminine mystique with its powerful hidden deterrents, educators must realize that they cannot inspire young women to commit themselves seriously to their education without taking some extraordinary measures. The few so far attempted barely come to grips with the problem. Mary Bunting’s new Institute for Independent Study at Radcliffe is fine for women who already know what they want to do, who have pursued their studies to the Ph.D. or are already active in the arts, and merely need some respite from motherhood to get back in the mainstream. Even more important, the presence of these women on the campus, women who have babies and husbands and who are still deeply committed to their own work, will undoubtedly help dispel the image of the celibate career woman and fire some of those Radcliffe sophomores out of the “climate of unexpectation” that permits them to meet the nation’s highest standard of educational excellence to use it later only in marriage and motherhood. This is what Mary Bunting had in mind. And it can be done elsewhere, in even simpler ways.
It would pay every college and university that wants to encourage women to take education seriously to recruit for their faculties all the women they can find who have combined marriage and motherhood with the life of the mind—even if it means concessions for pregnancies or breaking the old rule about hiring the wife of the male associate professor who has her own perfectly respectable M.A. or Ph.D. As for the unmarried woman scholars, they must no longer be treated like lepers. The simple truth is that they have taken their existence seriously, and have fulfilled their human potential. They might well be, and often are, envied by women who live the very image of opulent togetherness, but have forfeited themselves. Women, as well as men, who are rooted in human work are rooted in life.
It is essential, above all, for educators themselves to say “no” to the feminine mystique and face the fact that the only point in educating women is to educate them to the limit of their ability. Women do not need courses in “marriage and the family” to marry and raise families; they do not need courses in homemaking to make homes. But they must study science—to discover in science; study the thought of the past—to create new thought; study society—to pioneer in society. Educators must also give up these “one thing at a time” compromises. That separate layering of “education,” “sex,” “marriage,” “motherhood,” “interests for the last third of life,” will not solve the role crisis. Women must be educated to a new integration of roles. The more they are encouraged to make that new life plan—integrating a serious, lifelong commitment to society with marriage and motherhood—the less conflicts and unnecessary frustrations they will feel as wives and mothers, and the less their daughters will make mistaken choices for lack of a full image of woman’s identity.
I could see this in investigating college girls’ rush to early marriage. The few who were not in such a desperate hurry to “get a man” and who committed themselves to serious long-range interests—evidently not worried that they would thereby lose their “femininity”—almost all had mothers, or other private images of women, who were committed to some serious purpose. (“My mother happens to be a teacher.” “My best friend’s mother is a doctor; she always seems so busy and happy.”)
Education itself can help provide that new image—and the spark in girls to create their own—as soon as it stops compromising and temporizing with the old image of “woman’s role.” For women as well as men, education is and must be the matrix of human evolution. If today American women are finally breaking out of the housewife trap in search of new identity, it is quite simply because so many women have had a taste of higher education—unfinished, unfocused, but still powerful