The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [89]
Apparently Margaret Mead does not acknowledge, or perhaps recognize her own role as a major architect of that “climate of opinion.” Apparently she has overlooked much of her own work, which helped persuade several generations of able modern American women “in desperate cavewoman style, to devote their whole lives to narrow domesticity—first in schoolgirl dreaming and a search for roles which make them appealingly ignorant, then as mothers and then as grandmothers…restricting their activities to the preservation of their own private, and often boring existences.”
Even though it would seem that Margaret Mead is now trying to get women out of the home, she still ascribes a sexual specialness to everything a woman does. Trying to seduce them into the modern world of science as “the teacher-mothers of infant scientists,” she is still translating the new possibilities open to women and the new problems facing them as members of the human race into sexual terms. But now “those roles which have historically belonged to women” are stretched to include political responsibility for nuclear disarmament—“to cherish not just their own but the children of the enemy.” Since, beginning with the same premise and examining the same body of anthropological evidence, she now arrives at a slightly different sexual role for women, one might seriously question the basis upon which she decides the roles a woman should play—and finds it so easy to change the rules of the game from one decade to the next.
Other social scientists have arrived at the astonishing conclusion that “being a woman was no more and no less than being human.”28 But a cultural lag is built into the feminine mystique. By the time a few social scientists were discovering the flaws in “woman’s role,” American educators had seized upon it as a magic sesame. Instead of educating women for the greater maturity required to participate in modern society—with all the problems, conflicts, and hard work involved, for educators as well as women—they began educating them to “play the role of woman.”
7
The Sex-Directed Educators
It must have been going on for ten or fifteen years before the educators even suspected it—the old-fashioned educators, that is. The new sex-directed educators were surprised that anyone should be surprised, shocked that anyone should be shocked.
The shock, the mystery, to the naive who had great hopes for the higher education of women was that more American women than ever before were going to college—but fewer of them were going on from college to become physicists, philosophers, poets, doctors, lawyers, stateswomen, social pioneers, even college professors. Fewer women in recent college graduating classes have gone on to distinguish themselves in a career or profession than those in the classes graduated before World War II, the Great Divide. Fewer and fewer college women were preparing for any career or profession requiring more than the most casual commitment. Two out of three girls who entered college were dropping out before they even finished. In the 1950’s, those who stayed, even the most able, showed no signs of wanting to be anything more than suburban housewives and mothers. In fact, to professors at Vassar and Smith and Barnard, resorting to desperate means to arouse students’ interest in anything college could teach them, the girls seemed suddenly incapable of any ambition, any vision, any passion, except the pursuit of a wedding ring. In this pursuit they seemed almost desperate, as early as freshman year.
Out of loyalty to that more and more futile illusion—the importance of higher education for women—the purist professors kept quiet at first. But the disuse of, the resistance to, higher education by American