The Feminine Mystique (52 page)

A number of universities automatically bar housewives by barring part-time undergraduate or graduate work. Perhaps they have been burned by dilettantes. But part-time college work, graduate or undergraduate, geared to a serious plan, is the only kind of education that can prevent a housewife from becoming a dilettante; it is the only way a woman with husband and children can get, or continue, an education. It could also be the most practical arrangement from the university’s point of view. With their facilities already overtaxed by population pressures, universities and women alike would benefit from a study program that does not require regular classroom attendance. While it makes a great deal of sense for the University of Minnesota to work out its excellent Plan for Women’s Continuing Education
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in terms of the regular university facilities, such a plan will not help the woman who must begin her education all over again to find out what she wants to do. But existing facilities, in any institution, can be used to fill in the gaps once a woman is under way on her life plan.

Colleges and universities also need a new life plan—to become lifetime institutions for their students; offer them guidance, take care of their records, and keep track of their advanced work or refresher courses, no matter where they are taken. How much greater that allegiance and financial support from their alumnae if, instead of the teaparties to raise funds and a sentimental reunion every fifth June, a woman could look to her college for continuing education and guidance. Barnard alumnae can, and do, come back and take, free, any course at any time, if they meet the qualifications for it. All colleges could conduct summer institutes to keep alumnae abreast of developments in their fields during the years of young motherhood. They could accept part-time students and offer extension courses for the housewife who could not attend classes regularly. They could advise her on reading programs, papers, or projects that could be done at home. They could also work out a system whereby projects done by their alumnae in education, mental health, sociology, political science in their own communities could be counted as equivalent credits toward a degree. Instead of collecting dimes, let women volunteers serve supervised professional apprenticeships and collect the credits that are recognized in lieu of pay for medical internes. Similarly, when a woman has taken courses at a number of different institutions, perhaps due to her husband’s geographical itinerary, and has earned her community credits from agency, hospital, library or laboratory, her college of origin, or some national center set up by several colleges, could give her the orals, the comprehensives, and the appropriate examinations for a degree. The concept of “continuing education” is already a reality for men in many fields. Why not for women? Not education for careers instead of motherhood, not education for temporary careers before motherhood, not education to make them “better wives and mothers,” but an education they will use as full members of society.

“But how many American women really want to do more with their lives?” the cynic asks. A fantastic number of New Jersey housewives responded to an offer of intensive retraining in mathematics for former college women willing to commit themselves to becoming mathematics teachers. In January, 1962, a simple news story in the
New York Times
announced that Sarah Lawrence’s Esther Raushenbush had obtained a grant to help mature women finish their education or work for graduate degrees on a part-time basis that could be fitted in with their obligations as mothers. The response literally put the small Sarah Lawrence switchboard out of commission. Within twenty-four hours, Mrs. Raushenbush had taken over 100 telephone calls. “It was like bank night,” the operator said. “As if they had to get in there right away, or they might miss the chance.” Interviewing the women who applied for the program, Mrs. Raushenbush, like Virginia Senders at Minnesota, was convinced of the reality of their need. They were not “neurotically rejecting” their husbands and children; they did not need psychotherapy, but they did need more education—in a hurry—and in a form they could get without neglecting their husbands and families.

Education and re-education of American women for a serious purpose cannot be effected by one or two far-sighted institutions; it must be accomplished on a much wider scale. And no one serves this end who repeats, even for expedience or tact, the clichés of the feminine mystique. It is quite wrong to say, as some of the leading women educators are saying today, that women must of course use their education, but not, heaven forbid, in careers that will compete with men.
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When women take their education and their abilities seriously and put them to use, ultimately they have to compete with men. It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all. Consider this recent news item about America’s latest occupational therapy for the pent-up feminine need to compete:

It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not. But it is very much to the point to say that if an able American woman does not use her human energy and ability in some meaningful pursuit (which necessarily means competition, for there is competition in every serious pursuit of our society), she will fritter away her energy in neurotic symptoms, or unproductive exercise, or destructive “love.”

It also is time to stop giving lip service to the idea that there are no battles left to be fought for women in America, that women’s rights have already been won. It is ridiculous to tell girls to keep quiet when they enter a new field, or an old one, so the men will not notice they are there. In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination—tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.

She must learn to compete then, not as a woman, but as a human being. Not until a great many women move out of the fringes into the mainstream will society itself provide the arrangements for their new life plan. But every girl who manages to stick it out through law school or medical school who finishes her M.A. or Ph.D. and goes on to use it, helps others move on. Every woman who fights the remaining barriers to full equality which are masked by the feminine mystique makes it easier for the next woman. The very existence of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, under Eleanor Roosevelt’s leadership, creates a climate where it is possible to recognize and do something about discrimination against women, in terms not only of pay but of the subtle barriers to opportunity. Even in politics, women must make their contribution not as “housewives” but as citizens. It is, perhaps, a step in the right direction when a woman protests nuclear testing under the banner of “Women Strike for Peace.” But why does the professional illustrator who heads the movement say she is “just a housewife,” and her followers insist that once the testing stops, they will stay happily at home with their children? Even in the city strongholds of the big political party machines, women can—and are beginning to—change the insidious unwritten rules which let them do the political housework while the men make the decisions.
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When enough women make life plans geared to their real abilities, and speak out for maternity leaves or even maternity sabbaticals, professionally run nurseries, and the other changes in the rules that may be necessary, they will not have to sacrifice the right to honorable competition and contribution anymore than they will have to sacrifice marriage and motherhood. It is wrong to keep spelling out unnecessary choices that make women unconsciously resist either commitment or motherhood
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—and that hold back recognition of the needed social changes. It is not a question of women having their cake and eating it, too. A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man’s advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all. But with the vision to make a new life plan of her own, she can fulfill a commitment to profession and politics, and to marriage and motherhood with equal seriousness.

Women who have done this, in spite of the dire warnings of the feminine mystique, are in a sense “mutations,” the image of what the American woman can be. When they did not or could not work full time for a living, they spent part-time hours on work which truly interested them. Because time was of the essence, they often skipped the time-wasting, self-serving details of both housewifery and professional busywork.

Whether they knew it or not, they were following a life plan. They had their babies before or after internship, between fellowships. If good full-time help was not available in the children’s early years, they gave up their jobs and took a part-time post that may not have paid handsomely, but kept them moving ahead in their profession. The teachers innovated in PTA, and substituted; the doctors took clinical or research jobs close to home; the editors and writers started free-lancing. Even if the money they made was not needed for groceries or household help (and usually it was), they earned tangible proof of their ability to contribute. They did not consider themselves “lucky” to be housewives; they competed in society. They knew that marriage and motherhood are an essential part of life, but not the whole of it.

These “mutations” suffered—and surmounted—the “cultural discontinuity in role conditioning,” the “role crisis” and the identity crisis. They had problems, of course, tough ones—juggling their pregnancies, finding nurses and housekeepers, having to give up good assignments when their husbands were transferred. They also had to take a lot of hostility from other women—and many had to live with the active resentment of their husbands. And, because of the mystique, many suffered unnecessary pains of guilt. It took, and still takes, extraordinary strength of purpose for women to pursue their own life plans when society does not expect it of them. However, unlike the trapped housewives whose problems multiply with the years, these women solved their problems and moved on. They resisted the mass persuasions and manipulations, and did not give up their own, often painful, values for the comforts of conformity. They did not retreat into privatism, but met the challenges of the real world. And they know quite surely now who they are.

They were doing, perhaps without seeing it clearly, what every man and woman must do now to keep up with the increasingly explosive pace of history, and find or keep individual identity in our mass society. The identity crisis in men and women cannot be solved by one generation for the next; in our rapidly changing society, it must be faced continually, solved only to be faced again in the span of a single lifetime. A life plan must be open to change, as new possibilities open, in society and in oneself. No woman in America today who starts her search for identity can be sure where it will take her. No woman starts that search today without struggle, conflict, and taking her courage in her hands. But the women I met, who were moving on that unknown road, did not regret the pains, the efforts, the risks.

In the light of woman’s long battle for emancipation, the recent sexual counterrevolution in America has been perhaps a final crisis, a strange breath-holding interval before the larva breaks out of the shell into maturity—a moratorium during which many millions of women put themselves on ice and stopped growing. They say that one day science will be able to make the human body live longer by freezing its growth. American women lately have been living much longer than men—walking through their leftover lives like living dead women. Perhaps men may live longer in America when women carry more of the burden of the battle with the world, instead of being a burden themselves. I think their wasted energy will continue to be destructive to their husbands, to their children, and to themselves until it is used in their own battle with the world. But when women as well as men emerge from biological living to realize their human selves, those leftover halves of life may become their years of greatest fulfillment.
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Then the split in the image will be healed, and daughters will not face that jumping-off point at twenty-one or forty-one. When their mothers’ fulfillment makes girls sure they want to be women, they will not have to “beat themselves down” to be feminine; they can stretch and stretch until their own efforts will tell them who they are. They will not need the regard of boy or man to feel alive. And when women do not need to live through their husbands and children, men will not fear the love and strength of women, nor need another’s weakness to prove their own masculinity. They can finally see each other as they are. And this may be the next step in human evolution.