The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [92]
A pretty sophomore explained to me:
The idea is to be casual, very sophisticated. Don’t be too enthusiastic about your work or anything. People who take things too seriously are more or less pitied or laughed at. Like wanting to sing, being so intent about it you make other people uncomfortable. An oddball.
Another girl elaborated:
They might feel sorry for you. I think you can be serious about your work and not be looked down upon as a total intellectual, if you stop now and then and think isn’t this too hysterical. Because you do it with tongue in cheek, it’s O.K.
A girl with a fraternity pin on her pink sweater said:
Maybe we should take it more seriously. But nobody wants to graduate and get into something where they can’t use it. If your husband is going to be an organization man, you can’t be too educated. The wife is awfully important for the husband’s career. You can’t be too interested in art, or something like that.
A girl who had dropped out of honors in history told me:
I loved it. I got so excited about my work I would sometimes go into the library at eight in the morning and not come out till ten at night. I even thought I might want to go on to graduate school or law school and really use my mind. Suddenly, I was afraid of what would happen. I wanted to lead a rich full life. I want to marry, have children, have a nice house. Suddenly I felt, what am I beating my brains out for. So this year I’m trying to lead a well-rounded life. I take courses, but I don’t read eight books and still feel like reading the ninth. I stop and go to the movies. The other way was harder, and more exciting. I don’t know why I stopped. Maybe I just lost courage.
The phenomenon does not seem confined to any particular college; one finds it among the girls in any college, or department of a college, which still exposes students to the life of the mind. A junior from a Southern university said:
Ever since I was a little girl, science has had a fascination for me. I was going to major in bacteriology and go into cancer research. Now I’ve switched to home economics. I realized I don’t want to go into something that deep. If I went on, I’d have been one of those dedicated people. I got so caught up in the first two years, I never got out of the laboratory. I loved it, but I was missing so many things. If the girls were off swimming in the afternoon, I’d be working on my smears and slides. There aren’t any girls in bacteriology here, sixty boys and me in the lab. I couldn’t get on with the girls anymore who don’t understand science. I’m not so intensely interested in home economics as I was in bacteriology, but I realize it was better for me to change, and get out with people. I realized I shouldn’t be that serious. I’ll go home and work in a department store until I get married.
The mystery to me is not that these girls defend themselves against an involvement with the life of the mind, but that educators should be mystified by their defense, or blame it on the “student culture,” as certain educators do. The one lesson a girl could hardly avoid learning, if she went to college between 1945 and 1960, was not to get interested, seriously interested, in anything besides getting married and having children, if she wanted to be normal, happy, adjusted, feminine, have a successful husband, successful children, and a normal, feminine, adjusted, successful sex life. She might have learned some of this lesson at home, and some of it from the other girls in college, but she also learned it, incontrovertibly, from those entrusted with developing her critical, creative intelligence: her college professors.
A subtle and almost unnoticed change had taken place in the academic culture for American women in the last fifteen years: the new sex-direction of their educators. Under the influence of the feminine mystique, some college presidents and professors charged with the education of women had become more concerned with their students’ future capacity for sexual