The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [42]
Woman’s political job is to “inspire in her home a vision of the meaning of life and freedom…to help her husband find values that will give purpose to his specialized daily chores…to teach her children the uniqueness of each individual human being.”
This assignment for you, as wives and mothers, you can do in the living room with a baby in your lap or in the kitchen with a can opener in your hand. If you’re clever, maybe you can even practice your saving arts on that unsuspecting man while he’s watching television. I think there is much you can do about our crisis in the humble role of housewife. I could wish you no better vocation than that.
Thus the logic of the feminine mystique redefined the very nature of woman’s problem. When woman was seen as a human being of limitless human potential, equal to man, anything that kept her from realizing her full potential was a problem to be solved: barriers to higher education and political participation, discrimination or prejudice in law or morality. But now that woman is seen only in terms of her sexual role, the barriers to the realization of her full potential, the prejudices which deny her full participation in the world, are no longer problems. The only problems now are those that might disturb her adjustment as a housewife. So career is a problem, education is a problem, political interest, even the very admission of women’s intelligence and individuality is a problem. And finally there is the problem that has no name, a vague undefined wish for “something more” than washing dishes, ironing, punishing and praising the children. In the women’s magazines, it is solved either by dyeing one’s hair blonde or by having another baby. “Remember, when we were all children, how we all planned to ‘be something’?” says a young housewife in the Ladies’ Home Journal (February, 1960). Boasting that she has worn out six copies of Dr. Spock’s baby-care book in seven years, she cries, “I’m lucky! Lucky! I’M SO GLAD TO BE A WOMAN!”
In one of these stories (“Holiday,” Mademoiselle, August, 1949) a desperate young wife is ordered by her doctor to get out of the house one day a week. She goes shopping, tries on dresses, looks in the mirror wondering which one her husband, Sam, will like.
Always Sam, like a Greek chorus in the back of her head. As if she herself hadn’t a definiteness of her own, a clarity that was indisputably hers…. Suddenly she couldn’t make the difference between pleated and gored skirts of sufficient importance to fix her decision. She looked at herself in the full-length glass, tall, getting thicker around the hips, the lines of her face beginning to slip. She was twenty-nine, but she felt middle-aged, as if a great many years had passed and there wasn’t very much yet to come…which was ridiculous, for Ellen was only three. There was her whole future to plan for, and perhaps another child. It was not a thing to be put off too long.
When the young housewife in “The Man Next to Me” (Redbook, November, 1948) discovers that her elaborate dinner party didn’t help her husband get a raise after all, she is in despair. (“You should say I helped. You should say I’m good for something…Life was like a puzzle with a piece missing, and the piece was me, and I couldn’t figure my place in it at all.”) So she dyes her hair blonde, and when her husband reacts satisfactorily in bed to the new “blonde me,” she “felt a new sense of peace, as if I’d answered the question within myself.”
Over and over again, stories in women’s magazines insist that woman can know fulfillment