A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (15 page)

 

ON A BREAK FROM COLLEGE IN THE EARLY 1960S, I WORKED FOR A WHILE at an institution for autistic and schizophrenic children. At that time, a leading psychiatric explanation of schizophrenia was that it was caused by mothers who subjected their kids to “double binds,” or conflicting messages. “Don’t be a sissy; be careful not to hurt yourself.” “Come kiss Mama; don’t muss my makeup.”

One day I watched a female television reporter drop off her child at the center on the way to work. She was trying to get him to let go of a glove he had taken from her during the car ride. Fearing she would be late to work, but not wanting to traumatize her child by grabbing the glove from him, and acutely aware that psychiatrists and aides were watching her every move, she followed him around the room with an anxious smile, saying, “Give Mommy the glove, honey. That’s a good boy. Give Mommy the glove. Mommy has to go now.”

When she left, a watching psychiatrist explained to me and another attendant that this was “a classic double bind.” The mother’s smile gave the boy permission to play the keep-away game with her even as she scolded him, while her use of the words “good boy” suggested that she wasn’t really serious about wanting the glove. “Magnify that by a thousand more
incidents of the same nature, and voila—you have a schizophrenic,” said my fellow aide knowingly, and I blush to admit that I nodded in agreement, believing that I had gained a new insight into the dynamics of family life.

Today we know that the “double bind” theory does not explain schizophrenia. Mothers were not driving their children crazy by giving them mixed messages. But the double binds facing women in the 1950s made many believe
they
were going crazy. In fact, one of the phrases I heard most often from the women I interviewed for this book was “I thought I must be crazy.”

THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
“LEFT ME BREATHLESS,” RECALLED GLENDA SCHILT Edwards, who was twenty-eight when she read the book, shortly after it was published. “I felt as though Betty Friedan had looked into my heart, mind, and psyche and . . . put the unexplainable distress I was suffering into words. I was astonished that before [reading the book] I could not express why I felt so depressed, even though my distress drove me to see two therapists at different times. Both therapists seemed to feel that I was having trouble ‘accepting my role as a wife.’”

Janice K. was thirty-six and the mother of ten-year-old twins when a friend sent her
The Feminine Mystique
in 1963. The year before, she had seen a psychiatrist for eight months without ever getting to the bottom of her “troubles.” She became so indignant when she read the book that she sent a copy to her therapist “with a note saying he should read it before he ever again told a woman that all she needed was to come to terms with her ‘feminine nature.’”

Laura M., now a veteran journalist, read it in high school. “My most vivid memory is that I finally realized I wasn’t crazy. I was still part of a generation expected to embrace family life as the ‘end all and be all,’to subsume my ambitions to my husband’s goals. But I didn’t want to! What was wrong with me?” Reading Friedan’s book made Laura realize that having aspirations beyond being a housewife might actually be healthy, not sick.

“I had forgotten all about
The Feminine Mystique
,” wrote Mary Lee Fulkerson, whose husband was a career military officer in the 1960s.
“Reading it now, more than 45 years after it was written and maybe 40 years after I first read it, it seems so superficial and mealy-mouthed. It took me a few days to remember how it was for me back then. And then the agony and despair of those times came flooding back to my heart and mind.”

For some women, the book was literally a lifesaver. When Rose Garrity read the book she was a young mother whose husband regularly beat her. She had married at age fifteen, dropped out of school after just one week in the tenth grade, had her first child at age seventeen, and then had four more in the next five and a half years. “I was trapped in what felt like hell,” Rose recalls. “I had been forced to drop out of school.... There were no domestic violence programs and no one ever talked about the issue.... I thought I was the only one being beaten and there was something terribly wrong with me. I was ashamed.”

Rose worked on getting her high school diploma in secret, hiding her study materials from her husband. “When I read this book it was like the curtain was thrown back on the ‘wizard’! I suddenly understood what was going on, how sexism works, and was energized to begin to survive as an individual person.” Today Rose runs a domestic violence program in rural New York and serves on the board of directors of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Most women had less burning reasons for their discontent, which made them even more likely to feel there was something “terribly wrong” with themselves. “I didn’t think I had any ‘excuse’ for what I was feeling,” says Sharon G. “My dad used to hit my mom, and I swore I would never put up with that. But no one was hitting me. I loved my husband and he loved me. Yet I was miserable.”

Judy J. remembers crying helplessly as she tried to explain her depression to her unsympathetic mother. “What more could you want?” her mother kept asking. “Do you remember what my life was like when I was raising you and your brother, with no washing machine and a wood stove I had to feed four times a day? What’s wrong with you?” Friedan’s book told Judy it was okay for her to want more, and helped her figure out what that “more” might be.

Cam Stivers recalls that around the time she read
The Feminine Mystique
, “I had the feeling (at 25!) that my life was over, and that nothing interesting would ever happen to me again.... I told myself that the fix I was in was my own fault, that there was something wrong with me. I had everything a woman was supposed to want—marriage to a nice, dependable guy (a good provider), a wonderful little kid, a nice house in the suburbs—and I was miserable.”

“I didn’t know why I was so unhappy,” recalls Danielle B., “until I read
The Feminine Mystique
. Then something clicked.” The letters Friedan received at the time were full of similar phrases: “Like light bulbs going off again and again”; “What a sense of relief”; “Now I know I’m not alone”; “It’s not just me”; “Suddenly I understand.” Nearly fifty years later, women recollected the same tremendous sense of relief. “I suddenly realized maybe I wasn’t an outcast”; “I wasn’t a nut-case”; “I wasn’t going mad”; “I recognized what was missing from my life”; “I understood what I was feeling and felt validated!!”

Cam Stivers remembers thinking,
Your unhappiness isn’t just
you.
There’s something wrong with the whole arrangement.
“I can’t express how freeing it was for me to realize that my predicament was not all my own fault.”

After finishing the book, Glenda Schilt Edwards, who still felt terrible after being treated by two different psychiatrists, “realized that what I thought might be wrong with me, was in fact, right with me!” “It was a real ‘click’ moment for me,” commented Linda Smolak, who went on to become a professor of psychology and women’s studies. “It literally changed (and perhaps saved) my life.”

Jeri G., then a thirty-six-year-old mother of three, read
The Feminine Mystique
in 1963. She had taken an overdose of sleeping pills the year before. “Maybe it was just a ‘bid for attention,’ as the cliché goes, and not a serious attempt at the time,” Jeri said, “but if so, no one gave me the kind of attention I needed. My doctor sent me to a psychiatrist, but he only made me more ashamed of my feelings. I truly believe that if I hadn’t found that book when I did, I might really have killed myself the next time.”

A look at the life of Anne Parsons reveals how tormented some women were by the pressures of the feminine mystique. Anne was the daughter of Talcott Parsons, the renowned Harvard sociologist who insisted on society’s need for “normal” families consisting of male breadwinners and female homemakers. Even though Anne’s parents encouraged her to develop her own intellect, she felt pressured to live the kind of life her father prescribed for most women. In an eight-page letter she wrote to Betty Friedan in 1963 after reading the book, Anne recalled that she had chosen not to take fourth-year math in high school “for fear of being called a brain,” and while in college had agreed to a marriage based more on the desire for security than anything else.

When she came to grips with her motivation, Anne explained, she broke off the engagement and pursued advanced work in psychiatric theory and anthropology, but at age twenty-five she was haunted by the price she felt she had been forced to pay for her choice. The unmarried career woman, she complained, was not seen “as a person at all.” Instead, she was stereotyped as “aggressive, competitive, rejecting of femininity and all the rest.” It “is like being a Negro or Jew,” she commented, “with the difference that the prejudices are manifest in such subtle ways that it is very hard to pin them down, and that the feminine mystique is so strong and attractive an ideology that it is very hard to find a countervailing point of view from which to fight for oneself.”

Feeling increasingly marginalized in her relations with colleagues, Anne committed herself to a mental institution in September 1963, where she kept a diary recording her fears about the Cold War and the arms race and her frustration with her psychiatrist’s insistence that she was “resisting insight into my feminine instincts.” Page-long sentences veer back and forth between Anne’s anxieties about the state of the world and the refrain, written in caps, “you CANNOT COME TO TERMS WITH YOUR BASIC FEMININE INSTINCTS.” Nine months later, after writing to her father that she thought the psychiatric treatments had made her worse and trying in vain to get released from the hospital, Anne committed suicide.

Anne Parsons might have developed her mental problems even in a world where single female intellectuals were not regarded as defective
women and psychiatrists did not tell patients they were resisting their feminine instincts if they held strong political opinions or harbored intellectual ambitions. But many other women insisted it was the tenets of Freudian psychiatry that had made them feel crazy, and it was Friedan’s book, not talk therapy or medication, that allowed them to reclaim their sanity.

Some, like Edwards, echoed Anne Parsons’s claim that seeing a psychiatrist had made things worse. Edwards recalls: “My presenting complaint was that I did not know why I had such sad and distressed feelings, as I had everything I thought I should have to feel happy; a successful husband, three wonderful children, a house in the suburbs, a station wagon and a family dog, what else could possibly be lacking? They told me I was having trouble ‘accepting my role as a wife.’”

A self-described “ex-newspaper woman” with two young children wrote to Friedan in November 1963 that when she talked to a psychiatrist about the sense of emptiness she felt in being a full-time homemaker, he kept asking “if I was
sure
there wasn’t ‘Another Man’ involved and whether I really loved my children.”

Other women reported a better experience, finding psychiatrists who sympathized with their frustration or depression and made useful suggestions about how to alleviate it. But most of the women I interviewed told me that the turning point in their lives came when they started seeing their anxiety as a legitimate social grievance rather than an individual problem. This insight gave them the courage to pursue their dreams, or sometimes just the permission to
have
a dream. For that, most credit
The Feminine Mystique
.

 

CONSTANCE AHRONS IS THE LAST PERSON IN THE WORLD I WOULD HAVE expected to have subscribed to any form of the feminine mystique. When I met her back in the early 1990s, she was already the author of a groundbreaking book challenging the conventional wisdom about divorce and directed the Marriage and Family Therapy Doctoral Training Program at the University of Southern California. Having heard Ahrons explain complex topics in interviews and give no quarter when confronted with sloppy
thinking, I found her thoroughly intimidating. Well groomed and self-assured, she seemed the kind of woman who would simultaneously notice the holes in my arguments and the ones in my stockings.

But when I interviewed Ahrons for my research, I learned that she was not born to the professional, capable role she seems to inhabit so effortlessly. She might have gone down a very different path had it not been for reading Betty Friedan’s book.

Ahrons was the daughter of immigrant parents from Russia and Poland. Her father had three years of college and was a small merchant. Her mother was a high school graduate who alternated between being a full-time homemaker and helping her husband in the store. When Ahrons was growing up, she never thought about preparing for a profession. She entered college in 1954, the first woman in her family to do so. But she and her family saw college “more like a finishing school” than a training ground for work. She almost flunked out the first year, in part because she had never thought of herself as smart. In the family folklore, “my brother was the bright one, and I was the pretty one.”

Ahrons got married in her sophomore year, at age nineteen, and had her first child at twenty. At that point she dropped out of college to become a full-time housewife and mother. Getting married, she recalls, was such an overriding dream that once she achieved it, she had no idea what to fantasize about next.

This was a common theme among the women I interviewed: Having been raised to believe that finding a husband and having children would be the crowning achievements of their lives, many said that they looked into the future a few years after having children and found that they had no compelling goal left to pursue. As Cam Stivers said, it felt as if her life was already over.

When
The Feminine Mystique
came out in 1963, Ahrons had two children and had been deeply unhappy for several years. “The thoughts I had were terrible. I wished for another life. I woke up and started to clean and wash clothes and was miserable. No one seemed to understand. My friends didn’t feel that way.” Her husband could afford to hire household
help, which was the norm in the upper-middle-class family into which Ahrons had married. But her friends used their babysitters to get their hair done, go shopping, or play bridge. Ahrons longed for something different. “I tried to sell
LIFE
magazine over the phone,” she recalls, “which resulted in a terrible sense of rejection. I took a Christmas job three evenings a week, without telling my husband, and he made me quit after a week.” None of her friends worked, and none understood her dissatisfaction with a life that they enjoyed. In 1961 she began seeing a psychiatrist, who put her on tranquilizers.