The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [85]
In our Occidental view of life, woman, fashioned from man’s rib, can at the most strive unsuccessfully to imitate man’s superior powers and higher vocations. The basic theme of the initiatory cult, however, is that women, by virtue of their ability to make children, hold the secret of life. Man’s role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary. By a great effort man has hit upon a method of compensating himself for his basic inferiority. Equipped with various mysterious noise-making instruments, whose potency rests upon their actual forms being unknown to those who hear the sounds—that is, the women and children must never know that they are really bamboo flutes, or hollow logs…they can get the male children away from the women, brand them as incomplete and themselves turn boys into men. Women, it is true, make human beings, but only men can make men.20
True, this primitive society was a “shaky structure, protected by endless taboos and precautions”—by women’s shame, fluttery fear, indulgence of male vanity—and it survived only as long as everyone kept the rules. “The missionary who shows the flutes to the women has broken the culture successfully.”21 But Margaret Mead, who might have shown American men and women “the flutes” of their own arbitrary and shaky taboos, precautions, shames, fears, and indulgence of male vanity, did not use her knowledge in this way. Out of life the way it was—in Samoa, Bali, where all men envied women—she held up an ideal for American women that gave new reality to the shaky structure of sexual prejudice, the feminine mystique.
The language is anthropological, the theory stated as fact is Freudian, but the yearning is for a return to the Garden of Eden: a garden where women need only forget the “divine discontent” born of education to return to a world in which male achievement becomes merely a poor substitute for child-bearing.
The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough—whether it be to build gardens or raise cattle, kill game or kill enemies, build bridges or handle bank shares—so that the male may, in the course of his life, reach a solid sense of irreversible achievement of which his childhood knowledge of the satisfactions of child-bearing has given him a glimpse. In the case of women, it is only necessary that they be permitted by the given social arrangements to fulfill their biological role, to attain this sense of irreversible achievement. If women are to be restless and questing, even in the face of child-bearing, they must be made so through education.22
What the feminine mystique took from Margaret Mead was not her vision of woman’s great untested human potential, but this glorification of the female sexual function that has indeed been tested, in every culture, but seldom, in civilized cultures, valued as highly as the unlimited potential of human creativity, so far mainly displayed by man. The vision the mystique took from Margaret Mead was of a world where women, by merely being women and bearing children, will earn the same respect accorded men for their creative achievements—as if possession of uterus and breasts bestows on women a glory that men can never know, even though they labor all their lives to create. In such a world, all the other things that a woman can do or be are merely pale substitutes for the conception of a child. Femininity becomes more than its definition by society; it becomes a value which society must protect from the destructive onrush of civilization like the vanishing buffalo.
Margaret Mead’s eloquent pages made a great many American women envy the serene femininity of a bare-breasted Samoan, and try to make themselves into languorous savages, breasts unfettered by civilization’s brassieres, and brains undisturbed by pallid man-made knowledge of the goals of human progress.
Woman’s biological career-line has a natural climax structure that can be overlaid, muted, muffled and publicly denied, but which remains as an essential element in both sexes’ view of