The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [213]
I didn’t blame women for being scared. I was pretty scared myself. It isn’t really possible to make a new pattern of life all by yourself. I’ve always dreaded being alone more than anything else. The anger I had not dared to face in myself during all the years I tried to play the helpless little housewife with my husband—and feeling more helpless the longer I played it—was beginning to erupt now, more and more violently. For fear of being alone, I almost lost my own self-respect trying to hold on to a marriage that was based no longer on love but on dependent hate. It was easier for me to start the women’s movement which was needed to change society than to change my own personal life.
It seemed time to start writing that second book, but I couldn’t find any new patterns in society beyond the feminine mystique. I could find a few individual women, knocking themselves out to meet Good Housekeeping standards, trying to raise Spockian children while working at a full-time job and feeling guilty about it. And conferences were being held about the availability of continuing education for women, because all those aging full-time housewife-mothers, whose babies were now in college, were beginning to be trouble—drinking, taking too many pills, committing suicide. Whole learned journals were devoted to the discussion of “women and their options”—the “stages” of women’s lives. Women, we were told, could go to school, work a bit, get married, stay with the children fifteen to twenty years, and then go back to school and work—no problem; no need for role conflicts.
The women who were advancing this theory were among the exceptional few to reach top jobs because they somehow had not dropped out for fifteen or twenty years. And these same women were advising the women flocking back to their continuing-education programs that they couldn’t really expect to get real jobs or professional training after fifteen years at home; ceramics, or professional volunteer work—that was the realistic adjustment.
Talk, that’s all it was, talk. In 1965, the long awaited report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women detailed the discriminatory wages women were earning (half the average for men), and the declining ratio of women in professional and executive jobs. The Commission recommended that women be counseled to use their abilities in society, and suggested that child-care centers and other services be provided to enable women to combine motherhood and work. But Margaret Mead, in her introduction to the report, said, in effect, If women are all going to want to make big decisions and discoveries, who is going to stay home and bandage the child’s knee or listen to the husband’s troubles? (No matter that, with her husbands’ help and even before her child’s knees were in school all day, she herself was making big anthropological discoveries and decisions. Perhaps women who have made it as “exceptional” women don’t really identify with other women. For them, there are three classes of people: men, other women, and themselves; their very status as exceptional women depends on keeping other women quiet, and not rocking the boat.)
The President’s Commission report was duly buried in bureaucratic file drawers. That summer of 1965, I got a third of the way through the book I wanted to write about going beyond the feminine mystique; by then I knew that there weren’t any new patterns, only new problems that women weren’t going to be able to solve unless society changed. And all the talk, and the reports, and the Commission, and the continuing-education programs were only examples of tokenism—maybe even