The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [81]
Sociologists themselves have recently come to the conclusion that functionalism was rather “embarrassing” because it really said nothing at all. As Kingsley Davis pointed out in his presidential address on “The Myth of Functional Analysis as a Special Method in Sociology and Anthropology” at the American Sociological Association in 1959:
For more than thirty years now “functional analysis” has been debated among sociologists and anthropologists…. However strategic it may have been in the past, it has now become an impediment rather than a prop to scientific progress…. The claim that functionalism cannot handle social change because it posits an integrated static society is true by definition….12
Unfortunately, the female objects of functional analysis were profoundly affected by it. At a time of great change for women, at a time when education, science, and social science should have helped women bridge the change, functionalism transformed “what is” for women, or “what was,” to “what should be.” Those who perpetrated the feminine protest, and made more of being a woman than it can ever be, in the name of functionalism or for whatever complex of personal or intellectual reasons, closed the door of the future on women. In all the concern for adjustment, one truth was forgotten: women were being adjusted to a state inferior to their full capabilities. The functionalists did not wholly accept the Freudian argument that “anatomy is destiny,” but they accepted whole-heartedly an equally restrictive definition of woman: woman is what society says she is. And most of the functional anthropologists studied societies in which woman’s destiny was defined by anatomy.
The most powerful influence on modern women, in terms both of functionalism and the feminine protest, was Margaret Mead. Her work on culture and personality—book after book, study after study—has had a profound effect on the women in my generation, the one before it, and the generation now growing up. She was, and still is, the symbol of the woman thinker in America. She has written millions of words in the thirty-odd years between Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928 and her latest article on American women in the New York Times Magazine or Redbook. She is studied in college classrooms by girls taking courses in anthropology, sociology, psychology, education, and marriage and family life; in graduate schools by those who will one day teach girls and counsel women; in medical schools by future pediatricians and psychiatrists; even in theological schools by progressive young ministers. And she is read in the women’s magazines and the Sunday supplements, where she publishes as readily as in the learned journals, by girls and women of all ages. Margaret Mead is her own best popularizer—and her influence has been felt in almost every layer of American thought.
But her influence, for women, has been a paradox. A mystique takes what it needs from any thinker of the time. The feminine mystique might have taken from Margaret Mead her vision of the infinite variety of sexual patterns and the enormous plasticity of human nature, a vision based on the differences of sex and temperament she found in three primitive societies: the Arapesh, where both men and women were “feminine” and “maternal” in personality and passively sexual, because both were trained to be cooperative, unaggressive, responsive to the needs and demands of others; the Mundugumor, where both husband and wife were violent, aggressive, positively sexed, “masculine” and the Tchambuli, where the woman was