The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [232]
30. A. C. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, p. 403.
31. Sylvan Keiser, “Body Ego During Orgasm,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1952, Vol. XXI, pp. 153—166:
Individuals of this group are characterized by failure to develop adequate egos failure to develop adequate egos. Their anxious devotion to, and lavish care of, their bodies belies the inner feelings of hollowness and inadequacy…. These patients have little sense of their own identity and are always ready to take on the personality of someone else. They have few personal convictions, and yield readily to the opinions of others…. It is chiefly among such patients that coitus can be enjoyed only up to the point of orgasm…. They dared not allow themselves uninhibited progression to orgasm with its concomitant loss of control, loss of awareness of the body, or death…. In instances of uncertainty about the structure and boundaries of the body image, one might say that the skin does not serve as an envelope which sharply defines the transition from the self to the environment; the one gradually merges into the other; there is no assurance of being a distinct entity endowed with the strength to give of itself without endangering one’s own integrity.
32. Lawrence Kubie, “Psychiatric Implications of the Kinsey Report,” in Sexual Behavior in American Society, pp. 270 ff:
This simple biologic aim is overlaid by many subtle goals of which the individual himself is usually unaware. Some of these are attainable; some are not. Where the majority are attainable, then the end result of sexual activity is an afterglow of peaceful completion and satisfaction. Where, however, the unconscious goals are unattainable, then whether orgasm has occurred or not, there remains a post-coital state of unsated need, and sometimes of fear, rage or depression.
33. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, pp. 239—283, 367—380. See also Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself; and David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd.
34. See Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein (Women’s Two Roles), who point out that the number of American women now working outside the home seems greater than it is because the base from which the comparison is usually made was unusually small: a century ago the proportion of American women working outside the home was far smaller than in the European countries. In other words, the woman problem in America was probably unusually severe because the displacement of American women from essential work and identity in society was far more drastic—primarily because of the extremely rapid growth and industrialization of the American economy. The women who had grown with the men in the frontier days were banished almost overnight to anomie—which is a very expressive sociological name for that sense of non-existence or non-identity suffered by one who has no real place in society—when the important work left the home, where they stayed. In contrast, in France where industrialization was slower, and farms and small family-size shops are still fairly important in the economy, women a century ago still worked in large numbers—in field and shop—and today the majority of French women are not full-time housewives in the American sense of the mystique, for an enormous number still work in the fields, in addition to that one out of three who, as in America, work in industry, sales, offices, and professions. The growth of women in France has much more closely paralleled the growth of the society, since the proportion of French women in the professions has doubled in fifty years. It is interesting to note that the feminine mystique does not prevail in France, to the extent that it does here; there is a legitimate image in France of a feminine career woman and feminine intellectual, and French men seem responsive to women sexually, without equating femininity either with glorified emptiness or that man-eating castrative mom. Nor has the family been weakened—in actuality or mystique—by women’s work in industry