The Feminine Mystique (56 page)

21.
Ibid
., Vol. I, p. 320.

22.
Sigmund Freud, “Degradation in Erotic Life,” in
The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud
, Vol. IV.

23.
Thompson,
op. cit
., p. 133.

24.
Sigmund Freud, “The Psychology of Women,” in
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
, tr. by W. J. H. Sprott, New York, 1933, pp. 170 ff.

25.
Ibid
., p. 182.

26.
Ibid
., p. 184.

27.
Thompson,
op. cit.
, pp. 12 ff:
     The war of 1914—18 further focussed attention on ego drives…. Another idea came into analysis around this period…and that was that aggression as well as sex might be an important repressed impulse…. The puzzling problem was how to include it in the theory of instincts…. Eventually Freud solved this by his second instinct theory. Aggression found its place as part of the death instinct. It is interesting that normal self-assertion, i.e., the impulse to master, control or come to self-fulfilling terms with the environment, was not especially emphasized by Freud.

28.
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” in
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
, p. 149.

29.
Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg,
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
, New York and London, 1947, pp. 142 ff.

30.
Ernest Jones,
op. cit
., Vol. II, p. 446.

31.
Helene Deutsch,
The Psychology of Woman—A Psychoanalytical Interpretation
, New York, 1944, Vol. I, pp. 224 ff.

32.
Ibid
., Vol. I, pp. 251 ff.

33.
Sigmund Freud, “The Anatomy of the Mental Personality,” in
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
, p. 96.

Chapter 6. THE FUNCTIONAL FREEZE, THE FEMININE PROTEST, AND MARGARET MEAD

1.
Henry A. Bowman,
Marriage for Moderns
, New York, 1942, p. 21.

2.
Ibid
., pp. 22 ff.

3.
Ibid
., pp. 62 ff.

4.
Ibid
., pp. 74—76.

5.
Ibid
., pp. 66 ff.

6.
Talcott Parsons, “Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United States,” in
Essays in Sociological Theory
, Glencoe, Ill., 1949, pp. 223 ff.

7.
Talcott Parsons, “An Analytical Approach to the Theory of Social Stratification,”
op. cit
., pp. 174 ff.

8.
Mirra Komarovsky,
Women in the Modern World, Their Education and Their Dilemmas
, Boston, 1953, pp. 52—61.

9.
Ibid
., p. 66.

10.
Ibid
., pp. 72—74.

11.
Mirra Komarovsky, “Functional Analysis of Sex Roles,”
American Sociological Review
, August, 1950. See also “Cultural Contradictions and Sex Roles,”
American Journal of Sociology
, November, 1946.

12.
Kingsley Davis, “The Myth of Functional Analysis as a Special Method in Sociology and Anthropology,”
American Sociological Review
, Vol. 24, No. 6, December, 1959, pp. 757—772. Davis points out that functionalism became more or less identical with sociology itself. There is provocative evidence that the very study of sociology, in recent years, has persuaded college women to limit themselves to their “functional” traditional sexual role. A report on “The Status of Women in Professional Sociology” (Sylvia Fleis Fava,
American Sociological Review
, Vol. 25, No. 2, April, 1960) shows that while most of the students in sociology undergraduate classes are women, from 1949 to 1958 there was a sharp decline in both the number and proportion of degrees in sociology awarded to women. (4,143 B.A.’s in 1949 down to a low of 3,200 in 1955, 3,606 in 1958). And while one-half to two-thirds of the undergraduate degrees in sociology were awarded to women, women received only 25 to 43 per cent of the master’s degrees, and only 8 to 19 per cent of the Ph.D.’s. While the number of women earning graduate degrees in all fields has declined sharply during the era of the feminine mystique, the field of sociology showed, in comparison to other fields, an unusually high “mortality” rate.

13.
Margaret Mead,
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
, New York, 1935, pp. 279 ff.

14.
Margaret Mead,
From the South Seas
, New York, 1939, p. 321.

15.
Margaret Mead,
Male and Female
, New York, 1955, pp. 16—18.

16.
Ibid
., p. 26.

17.
Ibid
., footnotes, pp. 289 ff:
     I did not begin to work seriously with the zones of the body until I went to the Arapesh in 1931. While I was generally familiar with Freud’s basic work on the subject, I had not seen how it might be applied in the field until I read Geza Roheim’s first field report, “Psychoanalysis of Primitive Culture Types” “I then sent home for abstracts of K. Abraham’s work. After I became acquainted with Erik Homburger Erikson’s systematic handling of these ideas, they became an integral part of my theoretical equipment.

18.
Ibid
., pp. 50 f.

19.
Ibid
., pp. 72 ff.

20.
Ibid
., pp. 84 ff.

21.
Ibid
., p. 85.

22.
Ibid
., pp. 125 ff.

23.
Ibid
., pp. 135 ff.

24.
Ibid
., pp. 274 ff.

25.
Ibid
., pp. 278 ff.

26.
Ibid
., pp. 276—285.

27.
Margaret Mead, Introduction to
From the South Seas
, New York, 1939, p. xiii. “It was no use permitting children to develop values different from those of their society…”

28.
Marie Jahoda and Joan Havel, “Psychological Problems of Women in Different Social Roles—A Case History of Problem Formulation in Research,”
Educational Record
, Vol. 36, 1955, pp. 325—333.

Chapter 7. THE SEX-DIRECTED EDUCATORS

1.
Mabel Newcomer,
A Century of Higher Education for Women
, New York, 1959, pp. 45 ff. The proportion of women among college students in the U.S. increased from 21 per cent in 1870 to 47 per cent in 1920; it had declined to 35. 2 per cent in 1958. Five women’s colleges had closed; 21 had become coeducational; 2 had become junior colleges. In 1956, 3 out of 5 women in the coeducational colleges were taking secretarial, nursing, home economics, or education courses. Less than 1 out of 10 doctorates were granted to women, compared to 1 in 6 in 1920, 13 per cent in 1940. Not since before World War I have the percentages of American women receiving professional degrees been as consistently low as in this period. The extent of the retrogression of American women can also be measured in terms of their failure to develop to their own potential. According to
Womanpower
, of all the young women
capable
of doing college work, only one out of four goes to college, compared to one out of two men; only one out of 300 women capable of earning a Ph.D. actually does so, compared to one out of 30 men. If the present situation continues, American women may soon rank among the most “backward” women in the world. The U.S. is probably the only nation where the proportion of women gaining higher education has decreased in the past 20 years; it has steadily increased in Sweden, Britain, and France, as well as the emerging nations of Asia and the communist countries. By the 1950’s, a larger proportion of French women were obtaining higher education than American women; the proportion of French women in the professions had more than doubled in fifty years. The proportion of French women in the medical profession alone is five times that of American women; 70 per cent of the doctors in the Soviet Union are women, compared to 5 per cent in America. See Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein,
Women’s Two Roles—Home and Work
, London, 1956, pp. 33—64.

2.
Mervin B. Freedman, “The Passage through College,” in
Personality Development During the College Years
, ed. by Nevitt Sanford,
Journal of Social Issues,
Vol. XII, No. 4, 1956, pp. 15 ff.

3.
John Bushnel, “Student Culture at Vassar,” in
The American College
, ed. by Nevitt Sanford, New York and London, 1962, pp. 509 ff.

4.
Lynn White,
Educating Our Daughters
, New York, 1950, pp. 18—48.

5.
Ibid
., p. 76.

6.
Ibid
., pp. 77 ff.

7.
Ibid
., p. 79.

8.
See Dael Wolfle,
America’s Resources of Specialized Talent
, New York, 1954.

9.
Cited in an address by Judge Mary H. Donlon in proceedings of “Conference on the Present Status and Prospective Trends of Research on the Education of Women,” 1957, American Council on Education, Washington, D.C.

10.
See “The Bright Girl: A Major Source of Untapped Talent,”
Guidance Newsletter
, Science Research Associates Inc., Chicago, Ill., May, 1959.

11.
See Dael Wolfle,
op. cit.

12.
John Summerskill, “Dropouts from College,” in
The American College
, p. 631.

13.
Joseph M. Jones, “Does Overpopulation Mean Poverty?” Center for International Economic Growth, Washington, 1962. See also
United Nations Demographic Yearbook
, New York, 1960, pp. 580 ff. By 1958, in the United States, more girls were marrying from 15 to 19 years of age than from any other age group. In all of the other advanced nations, and many of the emerging underdeveloped nations, most girls married from 20 to 24 or after 25. The U.S. pattern of teenage marriage could only be found in countries like Paraguay, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Egypt, Iraq and the Fiji Islands.