The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [212]
Epilogue
When The Feminine Mystique was at the printer’s, and my last child was in school all day, I decided I would go back to school myself and get my Ph.D. Armed with my publisher’s announcement, a copy of my summa cum laude undergraduate degree and twenty-years-back graduate record, and the New World Foundation report of the educational project I had dreamed up and run in Rockland County, I went to see the head of the social psychology department at Columbia. He was very tolerant and kind, but surely, at forty-two, after all those undisciplined years as a housewife, I must understand that I wouldn’t be able to meet the rigors of full-time graduate study for a Ph.D. and the mastery of statistics that was required. “But I used statistics throughout the book,” I pointed out. He looked blank. “Well, my dear,” he said, “what do you want to bother your head getting a Ph.D. for, anyhow?”
I began to get letters from other women who now saw through the feminine mystique, who wanted to stop doing their children’s homework and start doing their own; they were also being told they really weren’t capable of doing anything else now but making homemade strawberry jam or helping their children do fourth-grade arithmetic. It wasn’t enough just to take yourself seriously as a person. Society had to change, somehow, for women to make it as people. It wasn’t possible to live any longer as “just a housewife.” But what other way was there to live?
I remember getting stuck at that point, even when I was writing The Feminine Mystique. I had to write a last chapter, giving a solution to “the problem that has no name,” suggesting new patterns, a way out of the conflicts, whereby women could use their abilities fully in society and find their own existential human identity, sharing its action, decisions, and challenges without at the same time renouncing home, children, love, their own sexuality. My mind went blank. You do have to say “no” to the old way before you can begin to find the new “yes” you need. Giving a name to the problem that had no name was the necessary first step. But it wasn’t enough.
Personally, I couldn’t operate as a suburban housewife any longer, even if I had wanted to. For one thing, I became a leper in my own suburb. As long as I only wrote occasional articles most people never read, the fact that I wrote during the hours when the children were in school was no more a stigma than, for instance, solitary morning drinking. But now that I was acting like a real writer and even being interviewed on television, the sin was too public, it could not be condoned. Women in other suburbs were writing me letters as if I were Joan of Arc, but I practically had to flee my own crabgrass-overgrown yard to keep from being burned at the stake. Although we had been fairly popular, my husband and I were suddenly no longer invited to our neighbors’ dinner parties. My kids were kicked out of the car pool for art and dancing classes. The other mothers had a fit when I now called a cab when it was my turn, instead of driving the children myself. We had to move back to the city, where the kids could do their own thing without my chauffeuring and where I could be with them at home during some of the hours I now spent commuting. I couldn’t stand being a freak alone in the suburbs any longer.
At first, that strange hostility my book—and later the movement—seemed to elicit from some women amazed and puzzled me. Even in the beginning, there wasn’t the hostility