The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [94]
In terms of the new mystique, the woman scholar was suspect, simply by virtue of being one. She was not just working to support her home; she must have been guilty of an unfeminine commitment, to have kept working in her field all those hard, grinding, ill-paid years to the Ph.D. In self-defense she sometimes adopted frilly blouses or another innocuous version of the feminine protest. (At psychoanalytic conventions, an observer once noticed, the lady analysts camouflage themselves with pretty, flowery, smartly feminine hats that would make the casual suburban housewife look positively masculine.) M.D. or Ph.D., those hats and frilly blouses say, let nobody question our femininity. But the fact is, their femininity was questioned. One famous women’s college adopted in defense the slogan, “We are not educating women to be scholars; we are educating them to be wives and mothers.” (The girls themselves finally got so tired of repeating this slogan in full that they abbreviated it to “WAM.”)
In building the sex-directed curriculum, not everyone went as far as Lynn White, former president of Mills College, but if you started with the premise that women should no longer be educated like men, but for their role as women, you almost had to end with his curriculum—which amounted to replacing college chemistry with a course in advanced cooking.
The sex-directed educator begins by accepting education’s responsibility for the frustration, general and sexual, of American women.
On my desk lies a letter from a young mother, a few years out of college:
“I have come to realize that I was educated to be a successful man and must now learn by myself to be a successful woman.” The basic irrelevance of much of what passes as women’s education in America could not be more compactly phrased…. The failure of our educational system to take into account these simple and basic differences between the life patterns of average men and women is at least in part responsible for the deep discontent and restlessness which affects millions of women….
It would seem that if women are to restore their self-respect they must reverse the tactics of the older feminism which indignantly denied inherent differences in the intellectual and emotional tendencies of men and women. Only by recognizing and insisting upon the importance of such differences can women save themselves, in their own eyes, of conviction as inferiors.4
The sex-directed educator equates as masculine our “vastly overrated cultural creativity,” “our uncritical acceptance of ‘progress’ as good in itself,” “egotistic individualism,” “innovation,” “abstract construction,” “quantitative thinking”—of which, of course, the dread symbol is either communism or the atom bomb. Against these, equated as feminine, are “the sense of persons, of the immediate, of intangible qualitative relationships, an aversion for statistics and quantities,” “the intuitive,” “the emotional,” and all the forces that “cherish” and “conserve” what is “good, true, beautiful, useful, and holy.”
A feminized higher education might include sociology, anthropology, psychology. (“These are studies little concerned with the laurel-crowned genius of the strong man,” praises the educational protector of femininity. “They are devoted to exploring the quiet and unspectacular forces of society and of the mind…. They embrace the feminine preoccupation with conserving and cherishing.”) It would hardly include either pure science (since abstract theory and quantitative thinking are unfeminine) or fine art, which is masculine, “flamboyant and abstract.” The applied or minor arts, however, are feminine: ceramics, textiles,