The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [68]
What is the good of your feeling that you are now so mature that this relationship can’t do you any harm?…You are far too soft, and this is something I have got to correct, for what one of us does will also be charged to the other’s account. You are my precious little woman and even if you make a mistake, you are none the less so…. But you know all this, my sweet child…8
The Victorian mixture of chivalry and condescension which is found in Freud’s scientific theories about women is explicit in a letter he wrote on November 5, 1883, deriding John Stuart Mills’ views on “female emancipation and the woman’s question altogether.”
In his whole presentation, it never emerges that women are different beings—we will not say lesser, rather the opposite—from men. He finds the suppression of women an analogy to that of Negroes. Any girl, even without a suffrage or legal competence, whose hand a man kisses and for whose love he is prepared to dare all, could have set him right. It is really a stillborn thought to send women into the struggle for existence exactly as man. If, for instance, I imagined my gentle sweet girl as a competitor, it would only end in my telling her, as I did seventeen months ago, that I am fond of her and that I implore her to withdraw from the strife into the calm, uncompetitive activity of my home. It is possible that changes in upbringing may suppress all a woman’s tender attributes, needful of protection and yet so victorious, and that she can then earn a livelihood like men. It is also possible that in such an event one would not be justified in mourning the passing away of the most delightful thing the world can offer us—our ideal of womanhood. I believe that all reforming action in law and education would break down in front of the fact that, long before the age at which a man can earn a position in society, Nature has determined woman’s destiny through beauty, charm, and sweetness. Law and custom have much to give women that has been withheld from them, but the position of women will surely be what it is: in youth an adored darling and in mature years a loved wife.9
Since all of Freud’s theories rested, admittedly, on his own penetrating, unending psychoanalysis of himself, and since sexuality was the focus of all his theories, certain paradoxes about his own sexuality seem pertinent. His writings, as many scholars have noted, give much more attention to infantile sexuality than to its mature expression. His chief biographer, Jones, pointed out that he was, even for those times, exceptionally chaste, puritanical and moralistic. In his own life, he was relatively uninterested in sex. There were only the adoring mother of his youth, at sixteen a romance that existed purely in fantasy with a girl named Gisele, and his engagement to Martha at twenty-six. The nine months when they both lived in Vienna were not too happy because she was, evidently, uneasy and afraid of him; but separated by a comfortable distance for four years, there was a “grande passion” of 900 love letters. After their marriage, the passion seems to have quickly disappeared, though his biographers note that he was too rigid a moralist to seek sexual satisfaction outside of marriage. The only woman on whom, as an adult, he ever focused the violent passions of love and hate of which he was capable was Martha, during the early years of their engagement. After that, such emotions were focused on men. As Jones, his respectful biographer, said: “Freud’s deviation from the average in this respect, as well as his pronounced mental bisexuality, may well have influenced his theoretical views to some extent.”10
Less reverent biographers, and even Jones himself, point out that when one considers Freud’s theories in terms of his own life, one is reminded of the puritanical old maid who sees sex everywhere.11 It is interesting to note that his main complaint about his docile hausfrau was that she was not “docile” enough—and yet, in interesting ambivalence, that she was not