The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [91]
Why do they need such baiting, I wondered, remembering how we used to stand around after class, arguing about what the professor had said—Economic Theory, Political Philosophy, the History of Western Civilization, Sociology 21, Science and the Imagination, even Chaucer. “What courses are people excited about now?” I asked a blonde senior in cap and gown. Nuclear physics, maybe? Modern art? The civilizations of Africa? Looking at me as if I were some prehistoric dinosaur, she said:
Girls don’t get excited about things like that anymore. We don’t want careers. Our parents expect us to go to college. Everybody goes. You’re a social outcast at home if you don’t. But a girl who got serious about anything she studied—like wanting to go on and do research—would be peculiar, unfeminine. I guess everybody wants to graduate with a diamond ring on her finger. That’s the important thing.
I discovered an unwritten rule barring “shop talk” about courses, intellectual talk, in some college houses. On the campus, the girls looked as if they were in such a hurry, rushing, rushing. Nobody, except a few faculty members, sat around talking in the coffee dives or the corner drugstore. We used to sit for hours arguing what-is-truth, art-for-art’s-sake, religion, sex, war and peace, Freud and Marx, and all the things that were wrong with the world. A cool junior told me:
We never waste time like that. We don’t have bull sessions about abstract things. Mostly, we talk about our dates. Anyhow, I spend three days a week off campus. There’s a boy I’m interested in. I want to be with him.
A dark-eyed senior in a raincoat admitted, as a kind of secret addiction, that she liked to wander around the stacks in the library and “pick up books that interest me.”
You learn freshman year to turn up your nose at the library. Lately though—well, it hits you, that you won’t be at college next year. Suddenly you wish you’d read more, talked more, taken hard courses you skipped. So you’d know what you’re interested in. But I guess those things don’t matter when you’re married. You’re interested in your home and teaching your children how to swim and skate, and at night you talk to your husband. I think we’ll be happier than college women used to be.
These girls behaved as if college were an interval to be gotten through impatiently, efficiently, bored but businesslike, so “real” life could begin. And real life was when you married and lived in a suburban house with your husband and children. Was it quite natural, this boredom, this businesslike haste? Was it real, this preoccupation with marriage? The girls who glibly disclaimed any serious interest in their education with talk of “when I’m married” often were not seriously interested in any particular man, I discovered. The ones who were rushing to get their college work done, to spend three days a week off campus, sometimes had no real date they wanted to keep.
In my time, popular girls who spent many weekends at Yale were often just as serious about their work as the “brains.” Even if you were temporarily, or quite seriously, in love, during the week at college you lived the life of the mind—and found it absorbing, demanding, sometimes exciting, always real. Could these girls who now must work so much harder, have so much more ability to get into such a college against the growing competition, really be so bored with the life of the mind?
Gradually, I sensed the tension, the almost sullen protest, the deliberate effort—or effort deliberately avoided—behind their cool façades. Their boredom was not quite what it seemed. It was a defense, a refusal to become involved. As a woman who unconsciously thinks sex a sin is not there, is somewhere else, as she goes through the motions of sex, so these girls are somewhere else. They go through the motions, but they defend themselves against the impersonal passions of mind and spirit that college might instill in them—the dangerous