The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [74]
While fully recognizing that woman’s position is subjected to external influence, I venture to say that the fundamental identities “feminine-passive” and “masculine-active” assert themselves in all known cultures and races, in various forms and various quantitative proportions.
Very often a woman resists this characteristic given her by nature and in spite of certain advantages she derives from it, displays many modes of behavior that suggest that she is not entirely content with her own constitution…the expression of this dissatisfaction, combined with attempts to remedy it, result in woman’s “masculinity complex.”31
The “masculinity complex,” as Dr. Deutsch refines it, stems directly from the “female castration complex.” Thus, anatomy is still destiny, woman is still an “homme manqué.” Of course, Dr. Deutsch mentions in passing that “With regard to the girl, however, the environment exerts an inhibiting influence as regards both her aggressions and her activity.” So, penis envy, deficient female anatomy, and society “all seem to work together to produce femininity.”32
“Normal” femininity is achieved, however, only insofar as the woman finally renounces all active goals of her own, all her own “originality,” to identify and fulfill herself through the activities and goals of husband, or son. This process can be sublimated in nonsexual ways—as, for instance, the woman who does the basic research for her male superior’s discoveries. The daughter who devotes her life to her father is also making a satisfactory feminine “sublimation.” Only activity of her own or originality, on a basis of equality, deserves the opprobrium of “masculinity complex.” This brilliant feminine follower of Freud states categorically that the women who by 1944 in America had achieved eminence by activity of their own in various fields had done so at the expense of their feminine fulfillment. She will mention no names, but they all suffer from the “masculinity complex.”
How could a girl or woman who was not a psychoanalyst discount such ominous pronouncements, which, in the forties, suddenly began to pour out from all the oracles of sophisticated thought?
It would be ridiculous to suggest that the way Freudian theories were used to brainwash two generations of educated American women was part of a psychoanalytic conspiracy. It was done by well-meaning popularizers and inadvertent distorters; by orthodox converts and bandwagon faddists; by those who suffered and those who cured and those who turned suffering to profit; and, above all, by a congruence of forces and needs peculiar to the American people at that particular time. In fact, the literal acceptance in the American culture of Freud’s theory of feminine fulfillment was in tragicomic contrast to the personal struggle of many American psychoanalysts to reconcile what they saw in their women patients with Freudian theory. The theory said women should be able to fulfill themselves as wives and mothers if only they could be analyzed out of their “masculine strivings,” their “penis envy.” But it wasn’t as easy as that. “I don’t know why American women are so dissatisfied,” a Westchester analyst insisted. “Penis envy seems so difficult to eradicate in American women, somehow.”
A New York analyst, one of the last trained at Freud’s own Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna, told me:
For twenty years now in analyzing American women, I have found myself again and again in the position of having to superimpose Freud’s theory of femininity on the psychic life of my patients in a way that I was not willing to do. I have come to the conclusion that penis envy simply does not exist. I have seen women who are completely expressive, sexually, vaginally, and yet who are not mature, integrated, fulfilled. I had a woman patient on the couch for nearly two years before I could face her real problem—that it was not enough for her to be just a housewife and mother. One day she had a dream that she was teaching a class. I could not dismiss the