The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [78]
For the first time in history, American young women in great numbers are being faced with these questions: Shall I voluntarily prepare myself for a lifelong, celibate career? Or shall I prepare for a temporary vocation, which I shall give up when I marry and assume the responsibilities of homemaking and motherhood? Or should I attempt to combine homemaking and a career?…The great majority of married women are homemakers….
If a woman can find adequate self-expression through a career rather than through marriage, well and good. Many young women, however, overlook the fact that there are numerous careers that do not furnish any medium or offer any opportunity for self-expression. Besides they do not realize that only the minority of women, as the minority of men, have anything particularly worthwhile to express.3
And so Nora is left with the cheerful impression that if she chooses a career, she is also choosing celibacy. If she has any illusions about combining marriage and career, the functionalist admonishes her:
How many individuals…can successfully pursue two careers simultaneously? Not many. The exceptional person can do it, but the ordinary person cannot. The problem of combining marriage and homemaking with another career is especially difficult, since it is likely that the two pursuits will demand qualities of different types. The former, to be successful, requires self-negation; the latter, self-enhancement. The former demands cooperation; the latter competition…. There is greater opportunity for happiness if husband and wife supplement each other than there is when there is duplication of function…4
And just in case Nora has any doubts about giving up her career ambitions, she is offered this comforting rationalization:
A woman who is an effective homemaker must know something about teaching, interior decoration, cooking, dietetics, consumption, psychology, physiology, social relations, community resources, clothing, household equipment, housing, hygiene and a host of other things…. She is a general practitioner rather than a specialist….
The young woman who decides upon homemaking as her career need have no feeling of inferiority…. One may say, as some do, “Men can have careers because women make homes.” One may say that women are released from the necessity for wage earning and are free to devote their time to the extremely important matter of homemaking because men specialize in breadwinning. Or one may say that together the breadwinner and the homemaker form a complementary combination second to none.5
This marriage textbook is not the most subtle of its school. It is almost too easy to see that its functional argument is based on no real chain of scientific fact. (It is hardly scientific to say “this is what is, therefore this is what should be.”) But this is the essence of functionalism as it came to pervade all of American sociology in this period, whether or not the sociologist called himself a “functionalist.” In colleges which would never stoop to the “role-playing lessons” of the so-called functional family course, young women were assigned Talcott Parsons’ authoritative “analysis of sex-roles in the social structure of the United States,” which contemplates no alternative for a woman other than the role of “housewife,” patterned with varying emphasis on “domesticity,” “glamour,” and “good companionship.”
It is perhaps not too much to say that only in very exceptional cases can an adult man be genuinely self-respecting and enjoy a respected status in the eyes of others if he does not “earn a living” in an approved occupational role…. In the case of the feminine role the situation is radically different…. The woman’s fundamental status is that of her husband’s