The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [90]
When I read the first cautious hints of what was happening, in the preliminary report of the psychological-sociological-anthropological Mellon Foundation study of Vassar girls in 1956, I thought, “My, how Vassar must have deteriorated.”
Strong commitment to an activity or career other than that of housewife is rare. Many students, perhaps a third, are interested in graduate schooling and in careers, for example, teaching. Few, however, plan to continue with a career if it should conflict with family needs…. As compared to previous periods, however, e.g., the “feminist era,” few students are interested in the pursuit of demanding careers, such as law or medicine, regardless of personal or social pressures. Similarly, one finds few instances of people like Edna St. Vincent Millay, individuals completely committed to their art by the time of adolescence and resistant to any attempts to tamper with it…2
A later report elaborated:
Vassar students…are further convinced that the wrongs of society will gradually right themselves with little or no direct intervention on the part of women college students…. Vassar girls, by and large, do not expect to achieve fame, make an enduring contribution to society, pioneer any frontiers, or otherwise create ripples in the placid order of things…. Not only is spinsterhood viewed as a personal tragedy but offspring are considered essential to the full life and the Vassar student believes that she would willingly adopt children, if it were necessary, to create a family. In short, her future identity is largely encompassed by the projected role of wife-mother…. In describing the qualities to be found in an ideal husband, the majority of Vassar girls are quite explicit in their preference for the man who will assume the most important role, that is, handle his own career and make the majority of decisions affecting matters outside the home…. That the female should attempt, in their thinking, to usurp the prerogatives of the male is a distasteful notion which would seriously disrupt their own projected role of helpmate and faithful complement to the man of the house.3
I saw the change, a very real one, when I went back to my own college in 1959, to live for a week with the students in a campus house at Smith, and then went on to interview girls from colleges and universities all over the United States.
A beloved psychology professor, on the eve of his retirement, complained:
They’re bright enough. They have to be, to get here at all now. But they just won’t let themselves get interested. They seem to feel it will get in their way when they marry the young executive and raise all those children in the suburbs. I couldn’t schedule the final seminar for my senior honor students. Too many kitchen showers interfered. None of them considered the seminar sufficiently important to postpone their kitchen showers.
He’s exaggerating, I thought.
I picked up a copy of the college newspaper I had once edited. The current student editor described a government class in which fifteen of the twenty girls were knitting “with the stony-faced concentration of Madame Defarge. The instructor, more in challenge than in seriousness, announced that Western civilization is coming to an end. The