The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [234]
Thus, some women expressed certain regrets: “It is too late to develop a new skill leading to a career.” “If I had pursued a single line, it would have utilized my potential to the full.” But the authors note with approval that “the vast majority have somehow adjusted themselves to their place in society.”
Because our culture demands of women certain renunciations of activity and limits her scope of participation in the stream of life, at this point being a woman would seem to be an advantage rather than a handicap. All her life, as a female, she had been encouraged to be sensitive to the feelings and needs of others. Her life, at strategic points, had required denials of self. She had had ample opportunities for “dress rehearsals” for this latest renunciation” of a long series of renunciations begun early in life. Her whole life as a woman had been giving her a skill which she was now free to use to the full without further preparation…
7. Nevitt Sanford, “Personality Development During the College Years,” Journal of Social Issues, 1956, Vol. 12, No. 4, p. 36.
8. The public flurry in the spring of 1962 over the sexual virginity of Vassar girls is a case in point. The real question, for the educator, would seem to me to be whether these girls were getting from their education the serious lifetime goals only education can give them. If they are, they can be trusted to be responsible for their sexual behavior. President Blanding indeed defied the mystique to say boldly that if girls are not in college for education, they should not be there at all. That her statement caused such an uproar is evidence of the extent of sex-directed education.
9. The impossibility of part-time study of medicine, science, and law, and of part-time graduate work in the top universities has kept many women of high ability from attempting it. But in 1962, the Harvard Graduate School of Education let down this barrier to encourage more able housewives to become teachers. A plan was also announced in New York to permit women doctors to do their psychiatric residencies and postgraduate work on a part-time basis, taking into account their maternal responsibilities.
10. Virginia L. Senders, “The Minnesota Plan for Women’s Continuing Education,” in “Unfinished Business—Continuing Education for Women,” The Educational Record, American Council on Education, October, 1961, pp. 10 ff.
11. Mary Bunting, “The Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study,” Ibid., pp. 19 ff. Radcliffe’s president reflects the feminine mystique when she deplores “the use the first college graduates made of their advanced educations. Too often and understandably, they became crusaders and reformers, passionate, fearless, articulate, but also, at times, loud. A stereotype of the educated women grew up in the popular mind and concurrently, a prejudice against both the stereotype and the education.” Similarly she states:
That we have not made any respectable attempt to meet the special educational needs of women in the past is the clearest possible evidence of the fact that our educational objectives have been geared exclusively to the vocational patterns of men. In changing that emphasis, however, our goal should not be to equip and encourage women to compete with men…. Women, because they are not generally the principal breadwinners, can be perhaps most useful as the trail blazers, working along the bypaths, doing the unusual job that men cannot afford to gamble on. There is always room on the fringes even when competition in the intellectual market places is keen.
That women use their education today primarily “on the fringes” is a result of the feminine mystique,