The Feminine Mystique (39 page)

Early sex, early marriage, has always been a characteristic of underdeveloped civilizations and, in America, of rural and city slums. One of the most striking of Kinsey’s findings, however, was that a delay in sexual activity was less a characteristic of socio-economic origin than of the ultimate destination—as measured, for instance, by education. A boy from a slum background, who put himself through college and became a scientist or judge, showed the same postponement of sexual activity in adolescence as others who later became scientists or judges, not as others from the same slum background. Boys from the right side of the tracks, however, who did not finish college or become scientists or judges showed more of that earlier sexual activity that was characteristic of the slum.
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Whatever this indicates about the relationship between sex and the intellect, a certain postponement of sexual activity seemed to accompany the growth in mental activity required and resulting from higher education, and the achievement of the professions of highest value to society.

Among the girls in the Kinsey survey, there even seemed to be a relationship between the ultimate level of mental or intellectual growth as measured by education, and sexual satisfaction. Girls who married in their teens—who, in Kinsey’s cases, usually stopped education with high school—started having sexual intercourse five or six years earlier than girls who continued their education through college or into professional training. This earlier sexual activity did not, however, usually lead to orgasm; these girls were still experiencing less sexual fulfillment, in terms of orgasm, five, ten and fifteen years after marriage than those who had continued their education.
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As with the promiscuous girls in the suburbs, early sexual preoccupation seemed to indicate a weak core of self which even marriage did not strengthen.

Is this the real reason for the kind of compulsive sex-seeking seen today in promiscuity, early and late, heterosexual or homosexual? Is it a coincidence that the many phenomena of depersonalized sex—sex without self, sex for lack of self—are becoming so rampant in the era when American women are told to live by sex alone? Is it a coincidence that their sons and daughters have selves so weak that they resort at an increasingly early age to a dehumanized, faceless sex-seeking? Psychiatrists have explained that the key problem in promiscuity is usually “low self-esteem,” which often seems to stem from an excessive mother-child attachment; the type of sex-seeking is relatively irrelevant. As Clara Thompson, speaking of homosexuality, says:

Compulsive sexual activity, homosexual or heterosexual, usually veils a lack of potency in other spheres of life. Contrary to the feminine mystique, sexual satisfaction is not necessarily a mark of fulfillment, in woman or man. According to Erich Fromm:

There is a similar undertone to the sex-seeking in colleges, even though the potential ability to be “productive in all other spheres of life” is high. A psychiatrist consultant for Harvard-Radcliffe students recently pointed out that college girls often seek “security” in these intense sexual relationships because of their own feelings of inadequacy, when, probably for the first time in their lives, they have to work hard, face real competition, think actively instead of passively—which is “not only a strange experience, but almost akin to physical pain.”

All this may simply represent “the first response of a sensitive, naive adolescent to a new, frighteningly complicated and sophisticated environment,” the psychiatrist said. But if the adolescent is a girl, she evidently should not, like the boy, be expected to face the challenge, master the painful work, meet the competition. The psychiatrist considers it “normal” that the girl seeks her “security” in “love,” even though the boy himself may be “strikingly immature, adolescent, and dependent”—“a slender reed, at least from the point of view of the girl’s needs.” The feminine mystique hides the fact that this early sex-seeking, harmless enough for the boy or girl who looks for no more than it offers, cannot give these young women that “clearer image of themselves”—the self-esteem they need and “the vigor to lead satisfying and creative lives.” But the mystique does not always hide from the boy the fact that the girl’s dependence on him is not really sexual, and that it may stifle his growth. Hence the boy’s hostility—even as he helplessly succumbs to the sexual invitation.

A Radcliffe student recently wrote a sensitive account of a boy’s growing bitterness at the girl who cannot study without him—a bitterness not even stilled by the sex with which they nightly evade study together.

These are, of course, the first of the children who grew up under the feminine mystique, these youngsters who use sex as such a suspiciously easy solace when they face the first hard hurdles in the race. Why is it so difficult for these youngsters to endure discomfort, to make an effort, to postpone present pleasure for future long-term goals? Sex and early marriage are the easiest way out; playing house at nineteen evades the responsibility of growing up alone. And even if a father tried to get his son to be “masculine,” to be independent, active, strong, both mother and father encouraged their daughter in that passive, weak, grasping dependence known as “femininity,” expecting her, of course, to find “security” in a boy, never expecting her to live her own life.

And so the circle tightens. Sex without self, enshrined by the feminine mystique, casts an ever-darkening shadow over man’s image of woman and woman’s image of herself. It becomes harder for both son and daughter to escape, to find themselves in the world, to love another in human intercourse. The million married before the age of nineteen, in earlier and earlier travesty of sex-seeking, betray an increased immaturity, emotional dependence, and passivity on the part of the newest victims of the feminine mystique. The shadow of sex without self may be dispelled momentarily in a sunny suburban dream house. But what will these childlike mothers and immature fathers do to their children, in that phantasy paradise where the pursuit of pleasure and things hides the loosening links to complex modern reality? What kind of sons and daughters are raised by girls who became mothers before they have ever faced that reality, or sever their links to it by becoming mothers?

There are frightening implications for the future of our nation in the parasitical softening that is being passed on to the new generation of children as a result of our stubborn embrace of the feminine mystique. The tragedy of children acting out the sexual phantasies of their housewife-mothers is only one sign of the progressive dehumanization that is taking place. And in this “acting out” by the children, the feminine mystique can finally be seen in all its sick and dangerous obsolescence.

T
he voices now deploring American women’s retreat to home reassure us that the pendulum has begun to swing in the opposite direction. But has it? There are already signs that the daughters of the able and energetic women who went back home to live in the housewife image find it more difficult than their mothers to move forward in the world. Over the past fifteen years a subtle and devastating change seems to have taken place in the character of American children. Evidence of something similar to the housewife’s problem that has no name in a more pathological form has been seen in her sons and daughters by many clinicians, analysts, and social scientists. They have noted, with increasing concern, a new and frightening passivity, softness, boredom in American children. The danger sign is not the competitiveness engendered by the Little League or the race to get into college, but a kind of infantilism that makes the children of the housewife-mothers incapable of the effort, the endurance of pain and frustration, the discipline needed to compete on the baseball field, or get into college. There is also a new vacant sleepwalking, playing-a-part quality of youngsters who do what they are supposed to do, what the other kids do, but do not seem to feel alive or real in doing it.

In an eastern suburb in 1960, I heard a high-school sophomore stop a psychiatrist who had just given an assembly talk and ask him for “the name of that pill that you can take to hypnotize yourself so you’ll wake up knowing everything you need for the test without studying.” That same winter two college girls on a train to New York during the middle of midyear exam week told me they were going to some parties to “clear their minds” instead of studying for the exams. “Psychology has proved that when you’re really motivated, you learn instantly,” one explained. “If the professor can’t make it interesting enough so that you know it without working, that’s his fault, not yours.” A bright boy who had dropped out of college told me it was a waste of his time; “intuition” was what counted, and they didn’t teach that at college. He worked a few weeks at a gas station, a month at a bookstore. Then he stopped work and spent his time literally doing nothing—getting up, eating, going to bed, not even reading.

I saw this same vacant sleepwalking quality in a thirteen-year-old girl I interviewed in a Westchester suburb in an investigation of teenage sexual promiscuity. She was barely passing in her school work even though she was intelligent; she “couldn’t apply herself,” as the guidance counselor put it. She seemed always bored, not interested, off in a daze. She also seemed not quite awake, like a puppet with someone else pulling the strings, when every afternoon she got into a car with a group of older boys who had all “dropped out” of school in their search for “kicks.”

The sense that these new kids are, for some reason, not growing up “real” has been seen by many observers. A Texas educator, who was troubled because college boys were not really interested in the courses they were taking as an automatic passport to the right job, discovered they also were not really interested in anything they did outside of school either. Mostly, they just “killed time.” A questionnaire revealed that there was literally nothing these kids felt strongly enough about to die for, as there was nothing they actually did in which they felt really alive. Ideas, the conceptual thought which is uniquely human, were completely absent from their minds or lives.
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A social critic, one or two perceptive psychoanalysts, tried to pinpoint this change in the younger generation as a basic change in the American character. Whether for better or worse, whether it was a question of sickness or health, they saw that the human personality, recognizable by a strong and stable core of self, was being replaced by a vague, amorphous “other-directed personality.”
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In the 1950’s, David Riesman found no boy or girl with that emerging sense of his own self which used to mark human adolescence, “though I searched for autonomous youngsters in several public schools and several private schools.”
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At Sarah Lawrence College, where students had taken a large responsibility for their own education and for the organization of their own affairs, it was discovered that the new generation of students was helpless, apathetic, incapable of handling such freedom. If left to organize their own activities, no activities were organized; a curriculum geared to the students’ own interests no longer worked because the students did not have strong interests of their own. Harold Taylor, then president of Sarah Lawrence, described the change as follows:

The educators, at first, blamed this on the caution and conservatism of the McCarthy era, the helplessness engendered by the atom bomb; later, in the face of Soviet advances in the space race, the politicians and public opinion blamed the general “softness” of the educators. But, whatever their own weaknesses, the best of the educators knew only too well that they were dealing with a passivity which the children brought with them to school, a frightening “basic passivity which…makes heroic demands on those who must daily cope with them in or out of school.”
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The physical passivity of the younger generation showed itself in a muscular deterioration, finally alarming the White House. Their emotional passivity was visible in bearded, undisciplined beatnikery—a singularly passionless and purposeless form of adolescent rebellion. Juvenile delinquency ratios just as high as those in the city slums began to show up in the pleasant bedroom suburbs among the children of successful, educated, respected and self-respecting members of society, middle-class children who had all the “advantages,” all the “opportunities.” A movie called “I Was a Teenage Frankenstein” may not have seemed funny to parents in West-chester and Connecticut who were visited by the vice squad in 1960 because their kids were taking drugs at parties in each others’ pine-paneled playrooms. Or the Bergen County parents whose kids were arrested in 1962 for mass violation of the graves in a suburban cemetery; or the parents in a Long Island suburb whose daughters at thirteen were operating a virtual “call girl” service. Behind the senseless vandalism, the riots in Florida at spring vacation, the promiscuity, the rise in teenage venereal disease and illegitimate pregnancies, the alarming dropouts from high school and college, was this new passivity. For these bored, lazy, “gimme” kids, “kicks” was the only way to kill the monotony of vacant time.

That this passivity was more than a question of boredom—that it signaled a deterioration of the human character—was felt by those who studied the behavior of the American GI’s who were prisoners of war in Korea in the 1950’s. An Army doctor, Major Clarence Anderson, who was allowed to move freely among the prison camps to treat the prisoners, observed:

Some thirty-eight per cent of the prisoners died, a higher prisoner death rate than in any previous American war, including the Revolution. Most prisoners became inert, inactive, withdrawing into little shells they had erected against reality. They did nothing to get food, firewood, keep themselves clean, or communicate with each other. The Major was struck by the fact that these new American GI’s almost universally “lacked the old Yankee resourcefulness,” an ability to cope with a new and primitive situation. He concluded: “This was partly—but only partly, I believe—the result of the psychic shock of being captured. It was also, I think, the result of some new failure in the childhood and adolescent training of our young men—a new softness.” Discounting the Army’s propaganda point, an educational psychologist commented: “There was certainly something terribly wrong with these young men; not softness, but hardness, slickness, and brittleness. I would call it ego-failure—a collapse of identity…. Adolescent growth can and should lead to a completely human adulthood, defined as the development of a stable sense of self…”
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The Korean prisoners, in this sense, were models of a new kind of American, evidently nurtured in ways “inimical to clarity and growth” at the hands of individuals themselves “insufficiently characterized” to develop “the kind of character and mind that conceives itself too clearly to consent to its own betrayal.”

The shocked recognition that this passive non-identity was “something new in history” came, and only came, when it began to show up in the boys. But the apathetic, dependent, infantile, purposeless being, who seems so shockingly nonhuman when remarked as the emerging character of the new American man, is strangely reminiscent of the familiar “feminine” personality as defined by the mystique. Aren’t the chief characteristics of femininity—which Freud mistakenly related to sexual biology—passivity; a weak ego or sense of self; a weak superego or human conscience; renunciation of active aims, ambitions, interests of one’s own to live through others; incapacity for abstract thought; retreat from activity directed outward to the world, in favor of activity directed inward or phantasy?

What does it mean, this emergence now in American boys as well as girls, of a personality arrested at the level of infantile phantasy and passivity? The boys and girls in whom I saw it were children of mothers who lived within the limits of the feminine mystique. They were fulfilling their roles as women in the accepted, normal way. Some had more than normal ability, and some had more than normal education, but they were alike in the intensity of their preoccupation with their children, who seemed to be their main and only interest.

One mother, who was terribly disturbed that her son could not learn to read, told me that when he came home with his first report card from kindergarten, she was as “excited as a kid myself, waiting for someone to ask me out on a date Saturday night.” She was convinced that the teachers were wrong when they said he wandered around the room in a dream, could not pay attention long enough to do the reading-readiness test. Another mother said that she could not bear it when her sons suffered any trouble or distress at all. It was as if they were herself. She told me:

Another woman said:

I do not think it is a coincidence that the increasing passivity—and dreamlike unreality—of today’s children has become so widespread in the same years that the feminine mystique encouraged the great majority of American women—including the most able, and the growing numbers of the educated—to give up their own dreams, and even their own education, to live through their children. The “absorption” of the child’s personality by the middle-class mother—already apparent to a perceptive sociologist in the 1940’s—has inevitably increased during these years. Without serious interests outside the home, and with housework routinized by appliances, women could devote themselves almost exclusively to the cult of the child from cradle to kindergarten. Even when the children went off to school their mothers could share their lives, vicariously and sometimes literally. To many, their relationship with their children became a love affair, or a kind of symbiosis.

“Symbiosis” is a biological term; it refers to the process by which, to put it simply, two organisms live as one. With human beings, when the fetus is in the womb, the mother’s blood supports its life; the food she eats makes it grow, its oxygen comes from the air she breathes, and she discharges its wastes. There is a biological oneness in the beginning between mother and child, a wonderful and intricate process. But this relationship ends with the severing of the umbilical cord and the birth of the baby into the world as a separate human being.