The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [71]
“The discovery of her castration is a turning-point in the life of the girl,” Freud went on to say. “She is wounded in her self-love by the unfavorable comparison with the boy, who is so much better equipped.” Her mother, and all women, are depreciated in her own eyes, as they are depreciated for the same reason in the eyes of man. This either leads to complete sexual inhibition and neurosis, or to a “masculinity complex” in which she refuses to give up “phallic” activity (that is, “activity such as is usually characteristic of the male”) or to “normal femininity,” in which the girl’s own impulses to activity are repressed, and she turns to her father in her wish for the penis. “The feminine situation is, however, only established when the wish for the penis is replaced by the wish for a child—the child taking the place of the penis.” When she played with dolls, this “was not really an expression of her femininity,” since this was activity, not passivity. The “strongest feminine wish,” the desire for a penis, finds real fulfillment only “if the child is a little boy, who brings the longed-for penis with him…. The mother can transfer to her son all the ambition she has had to suppress in herself, and she can hope to get from him the satisfaction of all that has remained to her of her masculinity complex.”25
But her inherent deficiency, and the resultant penis envy, is so hard to overcome that the woman’s superego—her conscience, ideals—are never as completely formed as a man’s: “women have but little sense of justice, and this is no doubt connected with the preponderance of envy in their mental life.” For the same reason, women’s interests in society are weaker than those of men, and “their capacity for the sublimation of their instincts is less.” Finally, Freud cannot refrain from mentioning “an impression which one receives over and over again in analytical work”—that not even psychoanalysis can do much for women, because of the inherent deficiency of femininity.
A man of about thirty seems a youthful, and, in a sense, an incompletely developed individual, of whom we expect that he will be able to make good use of the possibilities of development, which analysis lays open to him. But a woman of about the same age, frequently staggers us by her psychological rigidity and unchangeability…. There are no paths open to her for further development; it is as though the whole process had been gone through and remained unaccessible to influence for the future; as though, in fact, the difficult development which leads to femininity had exhausted all the possibilities of the individual …even when we are successful in removing the sufferings by solving her neurotic conflict.26
What was he really reporting? If one interprets “penis envy” as other Freudian concepts have been reinterpreted, in the light of our new knowledge that what Freud believed to be biological was often a cultural reaction, one sees simply that Victorian culture gave women many reasons to envy men: the same conditions, in fact, that the feminists fought against. If a woman who was denied the freedom, the status and the pleasures that men enjoyed wished secretly that she could have these things, in the shorthand of the dream, she might wish herself a man and see herself with that one thing which made men unequivocally different—the penis. She would, of course, have to learn to keep her envy, her