The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [80]
She goes on to cite the recent case of a girl who wanted to be a sociologist. She was engaged to a GI who didn’t want his wife to work. The girl herself hoped she wouldn’t find a good job in sociology.
An unsatisfactory job would, she felt, make it easier for her to comply eventually with her future husband’s wishes. The needs of the country for trained workers, the uncertainty of her own future, her current interests notwithstanding, she took a routine job. Only the future will tell whether her decision was prudent. If her fiance returns from the front, if the marriage takes place, if he is able to provide for the family without her assistance, if her frustrated wishes do not boomerang, then she will not regret her decision….
At the present historical moment, the best adjusted girl is probably one who is intelligent enough to do well in school but not so brilliant as to get all A’s…capable but not in areas relatively new to women; able to stand on her own two feet and to earn a living, but not so good a living as to compete with men; capable of doing some job well (in case she doesn’t marry, or otherwise has to work) but not so identified with a profession as to need it for her happiness.10
So, in the name of adjustment to the cultural definition of femininity—in which this brilliant sociologist obviously does not herself believe (that word “correctly” betrays her)—she ends up virtually endorsing the continued infantilizing of American woman, except insofar as it has the unintended consequence of making “the transition from the role of daughter to that of the spouse more difficult for her than for the son.”
Essentially, it is assumed that to the extent that the woman remains more “infantile,” less able to make her own decisions, more dependent upon one or both parents for initiating and channeling behavior and attitudes, more closely attached to them so as to find it difficult to part from them or to face their disapproval…or shows any other indices of lack of emotional emancipation—to that extent she may find it more difficult than the man to conform to the cultural norm of primary loyalty to the family she establishes later. It is possible, of course, that the only effect of the greater sheltering is to create in women a generalized dependency which will then be transferred to the husband and which will enable her all the more readily to accept the role of wife in a family which still has many patriarchal features.11
She finds evidence in a number of studies that college girls, in fact, are more infantile, dependent and tied to parents than boys, and do not mature, as boys do, by learning to stand alone. But she can find no evidence—in twenty psychiatric texts—that there are, accordingly, more in-law problems with the wife’s parents than the husband’s. Evidently, only with such evidence could a functionalist comfortably question the deliberate infantilization of American girls!
Functionalism was an easy out for American sociologists. There can be no doubt that they were describing things “as they were,” but in so doing, they were relieved of the responsibility of building theory from facts, of probing for deeper truth. They were also relieved of the need to formulate questions and answers that would be inevitably controversial (at a time in academic circles, as in America