The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [48]
But even if they urged, insisted, fought to help us educate ourselves, even if they talked with yearning of careers that were not open to them, they could not give us an image of what we could be. They could only tell us that their lives were too empty, tied to home; that children, cooking, clothes, bridge, and charities were not enough. A mother might tell her daughter, spell it out, “Don’t be just a housewife like me.” But that daughter, sensing that her mother was too frustrated to savor the love of her husband and children, might feel: “I will succeed where my mother failed, I will fulfill myself as a woman,” and never read the lesson of her mother’s life.
Recently, interviewing high-school girls who had started out full of promise and talent, but suddenly stopped their education, I began to see new dimensions to the problem of feminine conformity. These girls, it seemed at first, were merely following the typical curve of feminine adjustment. Earlier interested in geology or poetry, they now were interested only in being popular; to get boys to like them, they had concluded, it was better to be like all the other girls. On closer examination, I found that these girls were so terrified of becoming like their mothers that they could not see themselves at all. They were afraid to grow up. They had to copy in identical detail the composite image of the popular girl—denying what was best in themselves out of fear of femininity as they saw it in their mothers. One of these girls, seventeen years old, told me:
I want so badly to feel like the other girls. I never get over this feeling of being a neophyte, not initiated. When I get up and have to cross a room, it’s like I’m a beginner, or have some terrible affliction, and I’ll never learn. I go to the local hangout after school and sit there for hours talking about clothes and hairdos and the twist, and I’m not that interested, so it’s an effort. But I found out I could make them like me—just do what they do, dress like them, talk like them, not do things that are different. I guess I even started to make myself not different inside.
I used to write poetry. The guidance office says I have this creative ability and I should be at the top of the class and have a great future. But things like that aren’t what you need to be popular. The important thing for a girl is to be popular.
Now I go out with boy after boy, and it’s such an effort because I’m not myself with them. It makes you feel even more alone. And besides, I’m afraid of where it’s going to lead. Pretty soon, all my differences will be smoothed out, and I’ll be the kind of girl that could be a housewife.
I don’t want to think of growing up. If I had children, I’d want them to stay the same age. If I had to watch them grow up, I’d see myself growing older, and I wouldn’t want to. My mother says she can’t sleep at night, she’s sick with worry over what I might do. When I was little, she wouldn’t let me cross the street alone, long after the other kids did.
I can’t see myself as being married and having children. It’s as if I wouldn’t have any personality myself. My mother’s like a rock that’s been smoothed by the waves, like a void. She’s put so much into her family that there’s nothing left, and she resents us because she doesn’t get enough in return. But sometimes it seems like there’s nothing there. My mother doesn’t serve any purpose except cleaning the house. She isn’t happy, and she doesn’t make my father happy. If she didn’t care about us children at all, it would have the same effect as caring too much. It makes you want to do the opposite. I don’t think it’s really love. When I was little and I ran in all excited to tell her I’d learned how to stand on my head, she was never listening.
Lately, I look into the mirror, and I’m so afraid I’m going to look like my mother. It frightens me, to catch myself being like her in gestures or speech or anything.