The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [209]
“But how many American women really want to do more with their lives?” the cynic asks. A fantastic number of New Jersey housewives responded to an offer of intensive retraining in mathematics for former college women willing to commit themselves to becoming mathematics teachers. In January, 1962, a simple news story in the New York Times announced that Sarah Lawrence’s Esther Raushenbush had obtained a grant to help mature women finish their education or work for graduate degrees on a part-time basis that could be fitted in with their obligations as mothers. The response literally put the small Sarah Lawrence switchboard out of commission. Within twenty-four hours, Mrs. Raushenbush had taken over 100 telephone calls. “It was like bank night,” the operator said. “As if they had to get in there right away, or they might miss the chance.” Interviewing the women who applied for the program, Mrs. Raushenbush, like Virginia Senders at Minnesota, was convinced of the reality of their need. They were not “neurotically rejecting” their husbands and children; they did not need psychotherapy, but they did need more education—in a hurry—and in a form they could get without neglecting their husbands and families.
Education and re-education of American women for a serious purpose cannot be effected by one or two far-sighted institutions; it must be accomplished on a much wider scale. And no one serves this end who repeats, even for expedience or tact, the clichés of the feminine mystique. It is quite wrong to say, as some of the leading women educators are saying today, that women must of course use their education, but not, heaven forbid, in careers that will compete with men.11 When women take their education and their abilities seriously and put them to use, ultimately they have to compete with men. It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all. Consider this recent news item about America’s latest occupational therapy for the pent-up feminine need to compete:
It is a typical weekday in Dallas. Daddy is at work. Baby is having his morning nap. In an adjoining room, Brother (age 3) is riding a new rocking horse and Sis (5) is watching TV cartoons. And Mommy? Mommy is just a few feet away, crouching over the foul line on Lane 53, her hip twisted sharply to the left to steer the blue-white-marbled ball into the strike pocket between the one and three pins. Mommy is bowling. Whether in Dallas or Cleveland or Albuquerque or Spokane, energetic housewives have dropped dustcloth and vacuum and hauled the children off to the new alleys, where fulltime nurses stand ready to babysit in the fully equipped nurseries.
Said the manager of Albuquerque’s Bowl-a-Drome: “Where else can a woman compete after she gets married? They need competition just like men do…. It sure beats going home to do the dishes!”12
It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not. But it is very much to the point to say that if an able American woman does not use her human energy and ability in some meaningful pursuit (which necessarily