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By Root 1993 0

only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats that act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no way she can even dream about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife. And the documentary articles play back new young housewives, grown up under the mystique, who do not have even that “question within myself.” Says one, described in “How America Lives” (Ladies’ Home Journal, June, 1959): “If he doesn’t want me to wear a certain color or a certain kind of dress, then I truly don’t want to, either. The thing is, whatever he has wanted is what I also want…. I don’t believe in fifty-fifty marriages.” Giving up college and job to marry at eighteen, with no regrets, she “never tried to enter into the discussion when the men were talking. She never disputed her husband in anything…. She spent a great deal of time looking out the window at the snow, the rain, and the gradual emergence of the first crocuses. One great time-passer and consolation was…embroidery: tiny stitches in gold-metal or silken thread which require infinite concentration.”

There is no problem, in the logic of the feminine mystique, for such a woman who has no wishes of her own, who defines herself only as wife and mother. The problem, if there is one, can only be her children’s, or her husband’s. It is the husband who complains to the marriage counselor (Redbook, June, 1955): “The way I see it, marriage takes two people, each living his own life and then putting them together. Mary seems to think we both ought to live one life: mine.” Mary insists on going with him to buy shirts and socks, tells the clerk his size and color. When he comes home at night, she asks with whom he ate lunch, where, what did he talk about? When he protests, she says, “But darling, I want to share your life, be part of all you do, that’s all.…I want us to be one, the way it says in the marriage service…” It doesn’t seem reasonable to the husband that “two people can ever be one the way Mary means it. It’s just plain ridiculous on the face of it. Besides, I wouldn’t like it. I don’t want to be so bound to another person that I can’t have a thought or an action that’s strictly my own.”

The answer to “Pete’s problem,” says Dr. Emily Mudd, the famous marriage counsellor, is to make Mary feel she is living his life: invite her to town to lunch with the people in his office once in a while, order his favorite veal dish for her and maybe find her some “healthy physical activity,” like swimming, to drain off her excess energy. It is not Mary’s problem that she has no life of her own.

The ultimate, in housewife happiness, is finally achieved by the Texas housewife, described in “How America Lives” (Ladies’ Home Journal, October, 1960), who “sits on a pale aqua satin sofa gazing out her picture window at the street. Even at this hour of the morning (it is barely nine-o’clock), she is wearing rouge, powder and lipstick, and her cotton dress is immaculately fresh.” She says proudly: “By 8:30 A.M., when my youngest goes to school, my whole house is clean and neat and I am dressed for the day. I am free to play bridge, attend club meetings, or stay home and read, listen to Beethoven, and just plain loaf.

“Sometimes, she washes and dries her hair before sitting down at a bridge table at 1:30. Mornings she is having bridge at her house are the busiest, for then she must get out the tables, cards, tallies, prepare fresh coffee and organize lunch…. During the winter months, she may play as often as four days a week from 9:30 to 3 P.M…. Janice is careful to be home, before her sons return from school at 4 P.M.”

She is not frustrated, this new young housewife. An honor student at high school, married at eighteen, remarried and pregnant at twenty, she has the house she spent seven years dreaming and planning in detail. She is proud of her efficiency as a housewife, getting it all done by 8:30. She does