The Feminine Mystique (35 page)

Most American housewives, however, do not shut that door. Perhaps they are afraid, finally, to be alone in that room. As another social scientist said, the American housewife’s dilemma is that she does not have the privacy to follow real interests of her own, but even if she had more time and space to herself, she would not know what to do with it.
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If she makes a career of marriage and motherhood, as the mystique tells her, if she becomes the executive of the house—and has enough children to give her quite a business to run—if she exerts the human strength, which she is forbidden by the mystique to exert elsewhere, on running a perfect house and supervising her children and sharing her husband’s career in such omnipresent detail that she has only a few minutes to spare for community work, and no time for serious larger interests, who is to say that this is not as important, as good a way to spend a life, as mastering the secrets of the atoms or the stars, composing symphonies, pioneering a new concept in government or society?

For the very able woman, who has the ability to create culturally as well as biologically, the only possible rationalization is to convince herself—as the new mystique tries so hard to convince her—that the minute physical details of child care are indeed mystically creative; that her children will be tragically deprived if she is not there every minute; that the dinner she gives the boss’s wife is as crucial to her husband’s career as the case he fights in court or the problem he solves in the laboratory. And because husband and children are soon out of the house most of the day, she must keep on having new babies, or somehow make the minutiae of housework itself important enough, necessary enough, hard enough, creative enough to justify her very existence.

If a woman’s whole existence is to be justified in this way, if the housewife’s work is really so important, so necessary, why should anyone raise an eyebrow because a latter-day Einstein’s wife expects her husband to put aside that lifeless theory of relativity and help her with the work that is supposed to be the essence of life itself: diaper the baby and don’t forget to rinse the soiled diaper in the toilet before putting it in the diaper pail, and then wax the kitchen floor.

The most glaring proof that, no matter how elaborate, “Occupation: housewife” is not an adequate substitute for truly challenging work, important enough to society to be paid for in its coin, arose from the comedy of “togetherness.” The women acting in this little morality play were told that they had the starring roles, that their parts were just as important, perhaps even more important than the parts their husbands played in the world outside the home. Was it unnatural that, since they were doing such a vital job, women insisted that their husbands share in the housework? Surely it was an unspoken guilt, an unspoken realization of their wives’ entrapment, that made so many men comply, with varying degrees of grace, to their wives’ demands. But having their husbands share the housework didn’t really compensate women for being shut out of the larger world. If anything, by removing still more of their functions, it increased their sense of individual emptiness. They needed to share vicariously more and more of their children’s and husbands’ lives. Togetherness was a poor substitute for equality; the glorification of women’s role was a poor substitute for free participation in the world as an individual.

The true emptiness beneath the American housewife’s routine has been revealed in many ways. In Minneapolis recently a school-teacher named Maurice K. Enghausen read a story in the local newspaper about the long work week of today’s housewife. Declaring in a letter to the editor that “any woman who puts in that many hours is awfully slow, a poor budgeter of time, or just plain inefficient,” this thirty-six-year-old bachelor offered to take over any household and show how it could be done.

Scores of irate housewives dared him to prove it. He took over the household of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Dalton, with four children, aged two to seven, for three days. In a single day, he cleaned the first floor, washed three loads of clothes and hung them out to dry, ironed all the laundry including underwear and sheets, fixed a soup-and-sandwich lunch and a big backyard supper, baked two cakes, prepared two salads for the next day, dressed, undressed, and bathed the children, washed wood work and scrubbed the kitchen floor. Mrs. Dalton said he was even a better cook than she was. “As for cleaning,” she said, “I am more thorough, but perhaps that is unnecessary.”

Pointing out that he had kept house for himself for seven years and had earned money at college by housework, Enghausen said, “I still wish that teaching 115 students were as easy as handling four children and a house…I still maintain that housework is not the interminable chore that women claim it is.”
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This claim, periodically expressed by men privately and publicly, has been borne out by a recent time-motion study. Recording and analyzing every movement made by a group of housewives, this study concluded that most of the energy expended in housework is superfluous. A series of intensive studies sponsored by the Michigan Heart Association at Wayne University disclosed that “women were working more than twice as hard as they should,” squandering energy through habit and tradition in wasted motion and unneeded steps.

The puzzling question of “housewife’s fatigue” sheds additional light. Doctors in many recent medical conventions report failure to cure it or get to its cause. At a meeting of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a Cleveland doctor stated that mothers, who cannot get over “that tired feeling” and complain that their doctors are no help, are neither sick nor maladjusted, but actually tired. “No psychoanalysis or deep probing is necessary,” said Dr. Leonard Lovshin, of the Cleveland Clinic. “She has a work day of sixteen hours, a work week of seven days…. Being conscientious, she gets involved in Cubs, Brownies, PTA’s, heart drives, church work, hauling children to music and dancing.” But strangely enough, he remarked, neither the housewife’s workload nor her fatigue seemed affected by how many children she had. Most of these patients had only one or two. “A woman with one child just worries four times as much about the one as the woman with four children, and it all comes out even,” Dr. Lovshin said.

Some doctors, finding nothing organically wrong with these chronically tired mothers, told them, “It’s all in your mind” others gave them pills, vitamins, or injections for anemia, low blood pressure, low metabolism, or put them on diets (the average housewife is twelve to fifteen pounds overweight), deprived them of drinking (there are approximately a million known alcoholic housewives in America), or gave them tranquilizers. All such treatments were futile, Dr. Lovshin said, because these mothers were truly tired.
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Other doctors, finding that such mothers get as much or more sleep than they need, claimed the basic cause was not fatigue but boredom. This problem became so severe that the women’s magazines treated it fulsomely—in the Pollyanna terms of the feminine mystique. In a spate of articles that appeared in the late 1950’s, the “cures” suggested were usually of the more-praise-and-appreciation-from-husband variety, even though the doctors interviewed in these articles indicated clearly enough that the cause was in the “housewife-mother” role. But the magazines drew their usual conclusion: that is, and always will be woman’s lot, and she just has to make the best of it. Thus,
Redbook
(“Why Young Mothers Are Always Tired,” September, 1959) reports the findings of the Baruch study of chronic-fatigue patients:

The magazine also quotes a Johns Hopkins psychiatrist to the effect that the major factor which produces chronic fatigue in patients was “monotony unpunctuated by any major triumph or disaster,” noting that this “sums up the predicament of many a young mother.” It even cites the results of the University of Michigan study in which of 524 women asked “what are some of the things which make you feel ‘useful and important,’” almost none answered “housework” among the women who had jobs, “the overwhelming majority, married and single, felt that the job was more satisfying than the housework.” At this point the magazine interjects editorially: “This, of course, does not mean that a career is the alternative to fatigue for a young mother. If anything, the working mother may have more troubles than the housebound young matron.” The magazine’s happy conclusion: “Since the demands of housework and child-rearing are not very flexible, there is no complete solution to chronic-fatigue problems. Many women, however, can cut down fatigue if they stop asking too much of themselves. By trying to understand realistically what she can—and, more important, what she cannot—do, a woman may, in the long run, be a better wife and mother, albeit a tired one.”

Another such article (“Is Boredom Bad for You?”
McCall’s
, April 1957) asked, “Is the housewife’s chronic fatigue really boredom?” and answers: “Yes. The chronic fatigue of many housewives is brought on by the repetition of their jobs, the monotony of the setting, the isolation and the lack of stimulation. The heavy household chores, it’s been found, aren’t enough to explain the fatigue…. The more your intelligence exceeds your job requirements, the greater your boredom. This is so to such an extent that experienced employers never hire above-average brains for routine jobs…. It is this boredom plus, of course, the day-to-day frustrations which makes the average housewife’s job more emotionally fatiguing than her husband’s.” The cure: “honest enjoyment in some part of the job such as cooking or an incentive such as a party in the offing and, above all, male praise are good antidotes for domestic boredom.”

For the women I interviewed, the problem seemed to be not that too much was asked of them, but too little. “A kind of torpor comes over me when I get home from the errands,” one woman told me. “It’s as if there’s nothing I really have to do, though there’s plenty to do around the house. So I keep a bottle of martinis in the refrigerator, and I pour myself some so I’ll feel more like doing something. Or just to get through till Don comes home.”

Other women eat, as they stretch out the housework, just to fill the time available. Obesity and alcoholism, as neuroses, have often been related to personality patterns that stem from childhood. But does this explain why so many American housewives around forty have the same dull and lifeless look; does it explain their lack of vitality, the deadly sameness of their lives, the furtive between-meal snacks, drinks, tranquilizers, sleeping pills? Even given the various personalities of these women, there must be something in the nature of their work, of the lives they lead, that drives them to these escapes.

This is no less true of the American housewife’s work than it is of the work of most American men, on the assembly lines or in corporation offices: work that does not fully use a man’s capacities leaves in him a vacant, empty need for escape—television, tranquilizers, alcohol, sex. But the husbands of the women I interviewed were often engaged in work that demanded ability, responsibility, and decision. I noticed that when these men were saddled with a domestic chore, they polished it off in much less time than it seemed to take their wives. But, of course, for them this was never the work that justified their lives. Whether they put more energy into it for this reason, just to get it over with, or whether housework did not have to take so much of their energy, they did it more quickly and sometimes even seemed to enjoy it more.

Social critics, during the togetherness era, often complained that men’s careers suffered because of all this housework. But most husbands of the women I interviewed didn’t seem to let housework interfere with their careers. When husbands did that bit of housework evenings and weekends because their wives had careers, or because their wives had made such a career of housework they could not get it done themselves, or because their wives were too passive, dependent, helpless to get it done, or even because the wives left housework for their husbands, for revenge—it did not expand.

But I noticed that housework did tend to expand to fill the time available with a few husbands who seemed to be using domestic chores as an excuse for not meeting the challenge of their own careers. “I wish he wouldn’t insist on vacuuming the whole house on Tuesday evenings. It doesn’t need it and he could be working on his book,” the wife of a college professor told me. A capable social worker herself, she had managed all her professional life to work out ways of caring for her house and children without hiring servants. With her daughter’s help, she did her own thorough housecleaning on Saturday; it didn’t need vacuuming on Tuesday.

To do the work that you are capable of doing is the mark of maturity. It is not the demands of housework and children, or the absence of servants, that keep most American women from growing up to do the work of which they are capable. In an earlier era when servants were plentiful, most of the middle-class women who hired them did not use their freedom to take a more active part in society; they were confined by “woman’s role” to leisure. In countries like Israel and Russia, where women are expected to be more than just housewives, servants scarcely exist, and yet home and children and love are evidently not neglected.