The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [97]
Such a sex-directed impasse is revealed in the massive depths of that thousand-page study, The American College, when “motivational factors in college entrance” are analyzed from research among 1,045 boys and 1,925 girls. The study recognizes that it is the need to be independent, and find identity in society not primarily through the sex role but through work, which makes boys grow in college. The girl’s evasion of growth in college is explained by the fact that for a girl, identity is exclusively sexual; for the girl, college itself is seen even by these scholars not as the key to larger identity but as a disguised “outlet for sexual impulses.”
The identity issue for the boy is primarily an occupational-vocational question, while self-definition for the girl depends more directly on marriage. A number of differences follow from this distinction. The girl’s identity centers more exclusively on her sex-role—whose wife will I be, what kind of a family will we have; while the boy’s self-definition forms about two nuclei; he will be a husband and father (his sex-role identity) but he will also and centrally be a worker. A related difference follows and has particular importance at adolescence: the occupational identity is by and large an issue of personal choice that can begin early and to which all of the resources of rational and thoughtful planning can be directed. The boy can begin to think and plan for this aspect of identity early…. The sexual identity, so critical for feminine development, permits no such conscious or orderly effort. It is a mysterious and romantic issue, freighted with fiction, mystique, illusion. A girl may learn certain surface skills and activities of the feminine role, but she will be thought ungraceful and unfeminine if her efforts toward femininity are too clearly conscious. The real core of feminine settlement—living in intimacy with a beloved man—is a future prospect, for which there is no rehearsal. We find that boys and girls in adolescence have different approaches to the future; boys are actively planning and testing for future work identities, apparently sifting alternatives in an effort to find the role that will fit most comfortably their particular skills and interests, temperamental characteristics and needs. Girls, in contrast, are absorbed much more in phantasy, particularly phantasy about boys and popularity, marriage and love.
The dream of college apparently serves as a substitute for more direct preoccupation with marriage: girls who do not plan to go to college are more explicit in their desire to marry, and have a more developed sense of their own sex role. They are more aware of and more frankly concerned with sexuality.…The view of phantasy as an outlet for sexual impulses follows the general psychoanalytic conception that impulses denied direct expression will seek some disguised mode of gratification.15
Thus, it did not surprise them that seventy per cent of freshmen women at a Midwestern university answered the question, “What do you hope to get out of college?” with, among other things, “the man for me.” They also interpreted answers indicating a wish to “leave home,” “travel,” and answers relating to potential occupations which were given by half the girls as symbolizing “curiosity about the sexual mysteries.”
College and travel are alternatives to a more open interest in sexuality. Girls who complete their schooling with high school are closer to assuming an adult sex role in early marriages, and they have more developed conceptions of their sexual impulses and sex roles. Girls who will enter college, on the other hand, will delay direct realization and settlement of sexual identity, at least for a while. During the interim, sexual energy is converted and gratified through a phantasy system that focuses on college, the glamour of college life, and a sublimation to general sensuous experience.16
Why do the educators view girls, and only girls, in such completely sexual terms?