The Feminine Mystique (57 page)

14.
Nevitt Sanford, “Higher Education as a Social Problem,” in
The American College
, p. 23.

15.
Elizabeth Douvan and Carol Kaye, “Motivational Factors in College Entrance,” in
The American College
, pp. 202—206.

16.
Ibid
., pp. 208 ff.

17.
Esther Lloyd-Jones, “Women Today and Their Education,”
Teacher’s College Record
, Vol. 57, No. 1, October, 1955; and No. 7, April, 1956. See also Opal David,
The Education of Women’ signs for the Future
, American Council on Education, Washington, D.C., 1957.

18.
Mary Ann Guitar, “College Marriage Courses—Fun or Fraud?”
Mademoiselle
, February, 1961.

19.
Helen Deutsch,
op. cit
., Vol. 1, p. 290.

20.
Mirra Komarovsky,
op. cit
., p. 70. Research studies indicate that 40 per cent of college girls “play dumb” with men. Since the ones who do not include those not excessively overburdened with intelligence, the great majority of American girls who are gifted with high intelligence evidently learn to hide it.

21.
Jean Macfarlane and Lester Sontag, Research reported to the Commission on the Education of Women, Washington, D.C., 1954, (mimeo ms.).

22.
Harold Webster,’ some Quantitative Results, “in
Personality Development During the College Years
, ed. by Nevitt Sanford,
Journal of Social Issues
, 1956, Vol. 12, No. 4, p. 36.

23.
Nevitt Sanford,
Personality Development During the College Years
,
Journal of Social Issues
, 1956, Vol. 12, No. 4.

24.
Mervin B. Freedman,’ studies of College Alumni,” in
The American College
, p. 878.

25.
Lynn White,
op. cit
., p. 117.

26.
Ibid
., pp. 119 ff.

27.
Max Lerner,
America As a Civilization
, New York, 1957, pp. 608—611:
     The crux of it lies neither in the biological nor economic disabilities of women but in their sense of being caught between a man’s world in which they have no real will to achieve and a world of their own in which they find it hard to be fulfilled…. When Walt Whitman exhorted women “to give up toys and fictions and launch forth, as men do, amid real, independent, stormy life,” he was thinking—as were many of his contemporaries—of the wrong kind of equalitarianism…. If she is to discover her identity, she must start by basing her belief in herself on her womanliness rather than on the movement for feminism. Margaret Mead has pointed out that the biological life cycle of the woman has certain well-marked phases from menarche through the birth of her children to her menopause; that in these stages of her life cycle, as in her basic bodily rhythms, she can feel secure in her womanhood and does not have to assert her potency as the male does. Similarly, while the multiple roles that she must play in life are bewildering, she can fulfill them without distraction if she knows that her central role is that of a woman…. Her central function, however, remains that of creating a life style for herself and for the home in which she is life creator and life sustainer.

28.
See Philip E. Jacob,
Changing Values in College
, New York, 1957.

29.
Margaret Mead, “New Look at Early Marriages,” interview in
U.S. News and World Report
, June 6, 1960.

Chapter 8. THE MISTAKEN CHOICE

1.
See the
United Nations Demographic Yearbook
, New York, 1960, pp. 99—118 and pp. 476—490; p. 580. The annual rate of population increase in the U.S. in the years 1955—59 was far higher than that of other Western nations, and higher than that of India, Japan, Burma, and Pakistan. In fact, the increase for North America (1.8) exceeded the world rate (1.7). The rate for Europe was .8; for the USSR 1.7; Asia 1.8; Africa 1.9; and South America 2.3. The increase in the underdeveloped nations was, of course, largely due to medical advances and the drop in death rate; in America it was almost completely due to increased birth rate, earlier marriage, and larger families. For the birth rate continued to rise in the U.S. from 1950 to 1959, while it was falling in countries like France, Norway, Sweden, the USSR, India and Japan. The U.S. was the only so-called “advanced” nation, and one of the few nations in the world where, in 1958, more girls married at ages 15 to 19 than at any other age. Even the other countries which showed a rise in the birth rate—Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, Chile, New Zealand, Peru—did not show this phenomenon of teenage marriage.

2.
See “The Woman with Brains (continued),”
New York Times Magazine
, January 17, 1960, for the outraged letters in response to an article by Marya Mannes, “Female Intelligence—Who Wants It?”
New York Times Magazine
, January 3, 1960.

3.
See National Manpower Council,
Womanpower
, New York, 1957. In 1940, more than half of all employed women in the U.S. were under 25, and one-fifth were over 45. In the 1950’s peak participation in paid employment occurs among young women of 18 and 19—and women over 45, the great majority of whom hold jobs for which little training is required. The new preponderance of older married women in the working force is partly due to the fact that so few women in their twenties and thirties now work, in the U.S. Two out of five of all employed women are now over 45, most of them wives and mothers, working part time at unskilled work. Those reports of millions of American wives working outside the home are misleading in more ways than one: of all employed women, only one-third hold full-time jobs, one-third work full time only part of the year—for instance, extra saleswomen in the department stores at Christmas—and one-third work part time, part of the year. The women in the professions are, for the most part, that dwindling minority of single women; the older untrained wives and mothers, like the untrained 18-year-olds, are concentrated at the lower end of the skill ladder and the pay scales, in factory, service, sales and office work. Considering the growth in the population, and the increasing professionalization of work in America, the startling phenomenon is not the much-advertised, relatively insignificant increase in the numbers of American women who now work outside the home, but the fact that two out of three adult American women do
not
work outside the home, and the increasing millions of young women who are not skilled or educated for work in any profession. See also Theodore Caplow,
The Sociology of Work
, 1954, and Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein,
Women’s Two Roles—Home and Work
, London, 1956.

4.
Edward Strecker,
Their Mother’s Sons
, Philadelphia and New York, 1946, pp. 52—59.

5.
Ibid
., pp. 31 ff.

6.
Farnham and Lundberg,
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
, p. 271. See also Lynn White,
Educating Our Daughters
, p. 90.
     Preliminary results of the careful study of American sex habits being conducted at the University of Indiana by Dr. A. C. Kinsey indicate that there is an inverse correlation between education and the ability of a woman to achieve habitual orgastic experience in marriage. According to the present evidence, admittedly tentative, nearly 65 per cent of the marital intercourse had by women with college backgrounds is had without orgasm for them, as compared to about 15 per cent for married women who have gone no further than grade school.

7.
Alfred C. Kinsey,
et al
., Staff of the Institute for Sex Research, Indiana University,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, Philadelphia and London, 1953, pp. 378 ff.

8.
Lois Meek Stolz, “Effects of Maternal Employment on Children: Evidence from Research,”
Child Development
, Vol. 31, No. 4, 1960, pp. 749—782.

9.
H. F. Southard, “Mothers” Dilemma: To Work or Not?”
New York Times Magazine
, July 17, 1960.

10.
Stolz,
op. cit
. See also Myrdal and Klein,
op. cit
., pp. 125 ff.

11.
Benjamin Spock, “Russian Children Don’t Whine, Squabble or Break Things—Why?”
Ladies” Home Journal
, October, 1960.

12.
David Levy,
Maternal Overprotection
, New York, 1943.

13.
Arnold W. Green, “The Middle-Class Male Child and Neurosis,”
American Sociological Review
, Vol. II, No. 1, 1946.

Chapter 9. THE SEXUAL SELL

1.
The studies upon which this chapter is based were done by the Staff of the Institute for Motivational Research, directed by Dr. Ernest Dichter. They were made available to me through the courtesy of Dr. Dichter and his colleagues, and are on file at the Institute, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.

2.
Harrison Kinney,
Has Anybody Seen My Father?,
, New York, 1960.

Chapter 10. HOUSEWIFERY EXPANDS TO FILL THE TIME AVAILABLE

1.
Jhan and June Robbins, “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped,”
Redbook
, September, 1960.

2.
Carola Woerishoffer Graduate Department of Social Economy and Social Research, “Women During the War and After,” Bryn Mawr College, 1945.

3.
Theodore Caplow points out in
The Sociology of Work
, p. 234, that with the rapidly expanding economy since 1900, and the extremely rapid urbanization of the United States, the increase in the employment of women from 20.4 per cent in 1900 to 28.5 per cent in 1950 was exceedingly modest. Recent studies of time spent by American housewives on housework, which confirm my description of the Parkinson effect, are summarized by Jean Warren, “Time: Resource or Utility,”
Journal of Home Economics
, Vol. 49, January, 1957, pp. 21 ff. Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein in
Women’s Two Roles—Home and Work
cite a French study which showed that working mothers reduced time spent on housework by 30 hours a week, compared to a full-time housewife. The work week of a working mother with three children broke down to 35.2 hours on the job, 48.3 hours on housework; the full-time housewife spent 77.7 hours on housework. The mother with a full-time job or profession, as well as the housekeeping and children, worked only one hour a day longer than the full-time housewife.

4.
Robert Wood,
Suburbia, Its People and Their Politics
, Boston, 1959.

5.
See “Papa’s Taking Over the PTA Mama Started,”
New York Herald Tribune
, February 10, 1962. At the 1962 national convention of Parent-Teacher Associations, it was revealed that 32 per cent of the 46,457 PTA presidents are now men. In certain states the percentage of male PTA heads is even higher, including New York (33 per cent), Connecticut (45 per cent) and Delaware (80 per cent).

6.
Nanette E. Scofield,’ some Changing Roles of Women in Suburbia: A Social Anthropological Case Study,” transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 22, No. 6, April, 1960.