The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [235]
12. Time, November, 1961. See also “Housewives at the $2 Window,” New York Times Magazine, April 1, 1962, which describes how babysitting services and “clinics” for suburban housewives are now being offered at the race tracks.
13. See remarks of State Assemblywoman Dorothy Bell Lawrence, Republican, of Manhattan, reported in the New York Times, May 8, 1962. The first woman to be elected a Republican district leader in New York City, she explained: “I was doing all the work, so I told the county chairman that I wanted to be chairman. He told me it was against the rules for a woman to hold the post, but then he changed the rules.” In the Democratic “reform” movement in New York, women are also beginning to assume leadership posts commensurate with their work, and the old segregated “ladies” auxiliaries” and “women’s committees” are beginning to go.
14. Among more than a few women I interviewed who had, as the mystique advises, completely renounced their own ambitions to become wives and mothers, I noticed a repeated history of miscarriages. In several cases, only after the woman finally resumed the work she had given up, or went back to graduate school, was she able to carry to term the long-desired second or third child.
15. American women’s life expectancy—75 years—is the longest of women anywhere in the world. But as Myrdal and Klein point out in Women’s Two Roles, there is increasing recognition that, in human beings, chronological age differs from biological age: “at the chronological age of 70, the divergencies in biological age may be as wide as between the chronological ages of 50 and 90.” The new studies of aging in humans indicate that those who have the most education and who live the most complex and active lives, with deep interests and readiness for new experience and learning, do not get “old” in the sense that others do. A close study of 300 biographies (See Charlotte Buhler, “The Curve of Life as Studied in Biographies,” Journal of Applied Psychology, XIX, August, 1935, pp. 405 ff.) reveals that in the latter half of life, the person’s productivity becomes independent of his biological equipment, and, in fact, is often at a higher level than his biological efficiency—that is, if the person has emerged from biological living. Where “spiritual factors” dominated activity, the highest point of productivity came in the latter part of life; where “physical facts” were decisive in the life of an individual, the high point was reached earlier and the psychological curve was then more closely comparable to the biological. The study of educated women cited above revealed much less suffering at menopause than is considered “normal” in America today. Most of these women whose horizons had not been confined to physical housekeeping and their biological role, did not, in their fifties and sixties feel “old.” Many reported in surprise that they suffered much less discomfort at menopause than their mothers” experience had led them to expect. Therese Benedek suggests (in “Climacterium: A Developmental Phase,” Psychoanalytical Quarterly, XIX, 1950, p. 1) that the lessened discomfort, and burst of creative energy many women now experience at menopause, is at least in part due to the “emancipation” of women. Kinsey’s figures seem to indicate that women who have by education been emancipated from purely biological living, experience the full peak of sexual fulfillment much later in life than had been expected, and in fact, continue to experience it through the forties and past menopause. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is Colette—that truly human, emancipated French woman who lived and loved and wrote with so little deference to her chronological age that she said on her eightieth birthday: “If only one were 58, because at that time one