The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [228]
11. Edith M. Stern, “Women Are Household Slaves,” American Mercury, January, 1949.
12. Russell Lynes, “The New Servant Class,” in A Surfeit of Honey, New York, 1957, pp. 49—64.
Chapter 11. THE SEX-SEEKERS
1. Several social historians have commented on America’s sexual preoccupation from the male point of view. “America has come to stress sex as much as any civilization since the Roman,” says Max Lerner (America as A Civilization, p. 678). David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, 1950, p. 172 ff.) calls sex “the Last Frontier.”
More than before, as job-mindedness declines, sex permeates the daytime as well as the playtime consciousness. It is viewed as a consumption good not only by the old leisure classes but by the modern leisure masses….
One reason for the change is that women are no longer objects for the acquisitive consumer but are peer-groupers themselves…. Today, millions of women, freed by technology from many household tasks, given by technology many aids to romance, have become pioneers with men on the frontiers of sex. As they become knowing consumers, the anxiety of men lest they fail to satisfy the women also grows….
It is mainly the clinicians who have noted that the men are often less eager now than their wives as sexual “consumers.” The late Dr. Abraham Stone, whom I interviewed shortly before his death, said that the wives complain more and more of sexually “inadequate” husbands. Dr. Karl Menninger reports that for every wife who complains of her husband’s excessive sexuality, a dozen wives complain that their husbands are apathetic or impotent. These “problems” are cited in the mass media as additional evidence that American women are losing their “femininity”—and thus provide new ammunition for the mystique. See John Kord Lagemann, “The Male Sex,” Redbook, December, 1956.
2. Albert Ellis, The Folklore of Sex, New York, 1961, p. 123.
3. See the amusing parody, “The Pious Pornographers,” by Ray Russell, in The Permanent Playboy, New York, 1959.
4. A. C. Spectorsky, The Exurbanites, New York, 1955, p. 223.
5. Nathan Ackerman, The Psychodynamics of Family Life, New York, 1958, pp. 112—127.
6. Evan Hunter, Strangers When We Meet, New York, 1958, pp. 231—235.
7. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, pp. 353 ff., p. 426.
8. Doris Menzer-Benaron M.D., et al., “Patterns of Emotional Recovery from Hysterectomy,” Psychosomatic Medicine, XIX, No. 5, September, 1957, pp. 378—388.
9. The fact that 75 per cent to 85 per cent of young mothers in America today feel negative emotions—resentment, grief, disappointment, outright rejection—when they become pregnant for the first time has been established in many studies. In fact, the perpetrators of the feminine mystique report findings to reassure young mothers that they are only “normal” in feeling this strange rejection of pregnancy—and that the only real problem is their “guilt” over feeling it. Thus Redbook magazine, in “How Women Really Feel about Pregnancy” (November, 1958), reports that the Harvard School of Public Health found 80 to 85 per cent of “normal women reject the pregnancy when they become pregnant” Long Island College Clinic found that less than a fourth of women are “happy” about their pregnancy; a New Haven study finds only 17 of 100 women “pleased” about having a baby. Comments the voice of editorial authority:
The real danger that arises when a pregnancy is unwelcome and filled with troubled feelings is that a woman may become guilty and panic-stricken because she believes her reactions are unnatural or abnormal. Both marital and mother-child relations can be damaged as a result…. Sometimes a mental-health specialist is needed to allay guilt feelings…. Nor is there any time when a normal woman does not have feelings of depression and doubt when she learns that she is pregnant.
Such articles never mention the various studies which indicate that women in other countries, both more and less advanced than the United States, and even American “career” women, are less