The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [41]
And finally, in bright and smiling contrast, are the new housewife-mothers, who cherish their “differentness,” their “unique femininity,” the “receptivity and passivity implicit in their sexual nature.” Devoted to their own beauty and their ability to bear and nurture children, they are “feminine women, with truly feminine attitudes, admired by men for their miraculous, God-given, sensationally unique ability to wear skirts, with all the implications of that fact.” Rejoicing in “the reappearance of the old-fashioned three-to-five-child family in an astonishing quarter, the upper-and upper-middle class suburbs,” Life says:
Here, among women who might be best qualified for “careers,” there is an increasing emphasis on the nurturing and homemaking values. One might guess…that because these women are better informed and more mature than the average, they have been the first to comprehend the penalties of “feminism” and to react against them…. Styles in ideas as well as in dress and decoration tend to seep down from such places to the broader population…. This is the countertrend which may eventually demolish the dominant and disruptive trend and make marriage what it should be: a true partnership in which…men are men, women are women, and both are quietly, pleasantly, securely confident of which they are—and absolutely delighted to find themselves married to someone of the opposite sex.
Look glowed at about the same time (October 16, 1956):
The American woman is winning the battle of the sexes. Like a teenager, she is growing up and confounding her critics…. No longer a psychological immigrant to man’s world, she works, rather casually, as a third of the U. S. labor force, less towards a “big career” than as a way of filling a hope chest or buying a new home freezer. She gracefully concedes the top jobs to men. This wondrous creature also marries younger than ever, bears more babies and looks and acts far more feminine than the “emancipated” girl of the 1920’s or even ’30’s. Steelworker’s wife and Junior Leaguer alike do their own housework…. Today, if she makes an old-fashioned choice and lovingly tends a garden and a bumper crop of children, she rates louder hosannas than ever before.
In the new America, fact is more important than fiction. The documentary Life and Look images of real women who devote their lives to children and home are played back as the ideal, the way women should be: this is powerful stuff, not to be shrugged off like the heroines of women’s magazine fiction. When a mystique is strong, it makes its own fiction of fact. It feeds on the very facts which might contradict it, and seeps into every corner of the culture, bemusing even the social critics.
Adlai Stevenson, in a commencement address at Smith College in 1955, reprinted in Woman’s Home Companion (September, 1955), dismissed the desire of educated women to play their own political part in “the crises of the age.” Modern woman’s participation in politics is through her role as wife and mother, said the spokesman of democratic liberalism: “Women, especially educated women, have a unique opportunity to influence us, man and boy.” The only problem is woman’s failure to appreciate that her true part in the political crisis is as wife and mother.
Once immersed in the very pressing and particular problems of domesticity, many women feel frustrated and far apart from the great issues and stirring debate for which their education has given them understanding and relish. Once they wrote poetry. Now it’s the laundry list. Once they discussed art and philosophy until late in the night. Now they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the dishes are finished. There is, often, a sense of contraction, of closing horizons and lost opportunities. They had hoped to play their part in the crises of the age. But what they do is wash the diapers.
The point is that whether