The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [34]
The road from Sarah and the seaplane to the sandwich maker was traveled in only ten years. In those ten years, the image of American woman seems to have suffered a schizophrenic split. And the split in the image goes much further than the savage obliteration of career from women’s dreams.
In an earlier time, the image of woman was also split in two—the good, pure woman on the pedestal, and the whore of the desires of the flesh. The split in the new image opens a different fissure—the feminine woman, whose goodness includes the desires of the flesh, and the career woman, whose evil includes every desire of the separate self. The new feminine morality story is the exorcising of the forbidden career dream, the heroine’s victory over Mephistopheles: the devil, first in the form of a career woman, who threatens to take away the heroine’s husband or child, and finally, the devil inside the heroine herself, the dream of independence, the discontent of spirit, and even the feeling of a separate identity that must be exorcised to win or keep the love of husband and child.
In a story in Redbook (“A Man Who Acted Like a Husband,” November, 1957) the child-bride heroine, “a little freckle-faced brunette” whose nickname is “Junior,” is visited by her old college roommate. The roommate Kay is “a man’s girl, really, with a good head for business…she wore her polished mahogany hair in a high chignon, speared with two chopstick affairs.” Kay is not only divorced, but she has also left her child with his grandmother while she works in television. This career-woman-devil tempts Junior with the lure of a job to keep her from breast-feeding her baby. She even restrains the young mother from going to her baby when he cries at 2 A.M. But she gets her comeuppance when George, the husband, discovers the crying baby uncovered, in a freezing wind from an open window, with blood running down its cheek. Kay, reformed and repentant, plays hookey from her job to go get her own child and start life anew. And Junior, gloating at the 2 A.M. feeding—“I’m glad, glad, glad I’m just a housewife”—starts to dream about the baby, growing up to be a housewife, too.
With the career woman out of the way, the housewife with interests in the community becomes the devil to be exorcised. Even PTA takes on a suspect connotation, not to mention interest in some international cause (see “Almost a Love Affair,” McCall’s, November, 1955). The housewife who simply has a mind of her own is the next to go. The heroine of “I Didn’t Want to Tell You” (McCall’s, January, 1958) is shown balancing the checkbook by herself and arguing with her husband about a small domestic detail. It develops that she is losing her husband to a “helpless little widow” whose main appeal is that she can’t “think straight” about an insurance policy or mortgage. The betrayed wife says: “She must have sex appeal and what weapon has a wife against that?” But her best friend tells her: “You’re making this too simple. You’re forgetting how helpless Tania can be, and how grateful to the man who helps her…”
“I couldn’t be a clinging vine if I tried,” the wife says. “I had a better than average job after I left college and I was always a pretty independent person. I’m not a helpless little woman and I can’t pretend to be.” But she learns, that night. She hears a noise that might be a burglar; even though she knows it’s only a mouse, she calls helplessly to her husband, and wins him back. As he comforts her pretended panic, she murmurs that, of course, he was right in their argument that morning. “She lay still in the soft bed, smiling in sweet, secret satisfaction, scarcely touched with guilt.”
The end of the road, in an almost literal sense, is the disappearance of the heroine altogether, as a separate self and the subject of her own story. The end of the road is togetherness, where