The Feminine Mystique (9 page)

In a story in
Redbook
(“A Man Who Acted Like a Husband,” November, 1957) the child-bride heroine, “a little freckle-faced brunette” whose nickname is “Junior,” is visited by her old college roommate. The roommate Kay is “a man’s girl, really, with a good head for business…she wore her polished mahogany hair in a high chignon, speared with two chopstick affairs.” Kay is not only divorced, but she has also left her child with his grandmother while she works in television. This career-woman-devil tempts Junior with the lure of a job to keep her from breast-feeding her baby. She even restrains the young mother from going to her baby when he cries at 2
A.M
. But she gets her comeuppance when George, the husband, discovers the crying baby uncovered, in a freezing wind from an open window, with blood running down its cheek. Kay, reformed and repentant, plays hookey from her job to go get her own child and start life anew. And Junior, gloating at the 2
A.M
. feeding—“I’m glad, glad, glad I’m just a housewife”—starts to dream about the baby, growing up to be a housewife, too.

With the career woman out of the way, the housewife with interests in the community becomes the devil to be exorcised. Even PTA takes on a suspect connotation, not to mention interest in some international cause (see “Almost a Love Affair,”
McCall’s
, November, 1955). The housewife who simply has a mind of her own is the next to go. The heroine of “I Didn’t Want to Tell You” (
McCall’s
, January, 1958) is shown balancing the checkbook by herself and arguing with her husband about a small domestic detail. It develops that she is losing her husband to a “helpless little widow” whose main appeal is that she can’t “think straight” about an insurance policy or mortgage. The betrayed wife says: “She must have sex appeal and what weapon has a wife against that?” But her best friend tells her: “You’re making this too simple. You’re forgetting how helpless Tania can be, and how grateful to the man who helps her…”

“I couldn’t be a clinging vine if I tried,” the wife says. “I had a better than average job after I left college and I was always a pretty independent person. I’m not a helpless little woman and I can’t pretend to be.” But she learns, that night. She hears a noise that might be a burglar; even though she knows it’s only a mouse, she calls helplessly to her husband, and wins him back. As he comforts her pretended panic, she murmurs that, of course, he was right in their argument that morning. “She lay still in the soft bed, smiling in sweet, secret satisfaction, scarcely touched with guilt.”

The end of the road, in an almost literal sense, is the disappearance of the heroine altogether, as a separate self and the subject of her own story. The end of the road is togetherness, where the woman has no independent self to hide even in guilt; she exists only for and through her husband and children.

Coined by the publishers of
McCall’s
in 1954, the concept “togetherness” was seized upon avidly as a movement of spiritual significance by advertisers, ministers, newspaper editors. For a time, it was elevated into virtually a national purpose. But very quickly there was sharp social criticism, and bitter jokes about “togetherness” as a substitute for larger human goals—for men. Women were taken to task for making their husbands do housework, instead of letting them pioneer in the nation and the world. Why, it was asked, should men with the capacities of statesmen, anthropologists, physicists, poets, have to wash dishes and diaper babies on weekday evenings or Saturday mornings when they might use those extra hours to fulfill larger commitments to their society?

Significantly, critics resented only that men were being asked to share “woman’s world.” Few questioned the boundaries of this world for women. No one seemed to remember that women were once thought to have the capacity and vision of statesmen, poets, and physicists. Few saw the big lie of togetherness for women.

Consider the Easter 1954 issue of
McCall’s
which announced the new era of togetherness, sounding the requiem for the days when women fought for and won political equality, and the women’s magazines “helped you to carve out large areas of living formerly forbidden to your sex.” The new way of life in which “men and women in ever-increasing numbers are marrying at an earlier age, having children at an earlier age, rearing larger families and gaining their deepest satisfaction” from their own homes, is one which “men, women and children are achieving together…not as women alone, or men alone, isolated from one another, but as a family, sharing a common experience.”

The picture essay detailing that way of life is called “a man’s place is in the home.” It describes, as the new image and ideal, a New Jersey couple with three children in a gray-shingle split-level house. Ed and Carol have “centered their lives almost completely around their children and their home.” They are shown shopping at the supermarket, carpentering, dressing the children, making breakfast together. “Then Ed joins the members of his car pool and heads for the office.”

Ed, the husband, chooses the color scheme for the house and makes the major decorating decisions. The chores Ed likes are listed: putter around the house, make things, paint, select furniture, rugs and draperies, dry dishes, read to the children and put them to bed, work in the garden, feed and dress and bathe the children, attend PTA meetings, cook, buy clothes for his wife, buy groceries.

Ed doesn’t like these chores: dusting, vacuuming, finishing jobs he’s started, hanging draperies, washing pots and pans and dishes, picking up after the children, shoveling snow or mowing the lawn, changing diapers, taking the baby-sitter home, doing the laundry, ironing. Ed, of course, does not do these chores.

There were many agonized editorial sessions, in those days at
McCall’s
. “Suddenly, everybody was looking for this spiritual significance in togetherness, expecting us to make some mysterious religious movement out of the life everyone had been leading for the last five years—crawling into the home, turning their backs on the world—but we never could find a way of showing it that wasn’t a monstrosity of dullness,” a former
McCall’s
editor reminisces. “It always boiled down to, goody, goody, goody, Daddy is out there in the garden barbecuing. We put men in the fashion pictures and the food pictures, and even the perfume pictures. But we were stifled by it editorially.

“We had articles by psychiatrists that we couldn’t use because they would have blown it wide open: all those couples propping their whole weight on their kids. But what else could you do with togetherness but child care? We were pathetically grateful to find anything else where we could show father photographed with mother. Sometimes, we used to wonder what would happen to women, with men taking over the decorating, child care, cooking, all the things that used to be hers alone. But we couldn’t show women getting out of the home and having a career. The irony is, what we meant to do was to stop editing for women as women, and edit for the men and women together. We wanted to edit for people, not women.”

But forbidden to join man in the world, can women be people? Forbidden independence, they finally are swallowed in an image of such passive dependence that they want men to make the decisions, even in the home. The frantic illusion that togetherness can impart a spiritual content to the dullness of domestic routine, the need for a religious movement to make up for the lack of identity, betrays the measure of women’s loss and the emptiness of the image. Could making men share the housework compensate women for their loss of the world? Could vacuuming the living-room floor together give the housewife some mysterious new purpose in life?

In 1956, at the peak of togetherness, the bored editors of
McCall’s
ran a little article called “The Mother Who Ran Away.” To their amazement, it brought the highest readership of any article they had ever run. “It was our moment of truth,” said a former editor. “We suddenly realized that all those women at home with their three and a half children were miserably unhappy.”

But by then the new image of American woman, “Occupation: housewife,” had hardened into a mystique, unquestioned and permitting no questions, shaping the very reality it distorted.

By the time I started writing for women’s magazines, in the fifties, it was simply taken for granted by editors, and accepted as an immutable fact of life by writers, that women were not interested in politics, life outside the United States, national issues, art, science, ideas, adventure, education, or even their own communities, except where they could be sold through their emotions as wives and mothers.

Politics, for women, became Mamie’s clothes and the Nixons’ home life. Out of conscience, a sense of duty, the
Ladies’ Home Journal
might run a series like “Political Pilgrim’s Progress,” showing women trying to improve their children’s schools and playgrounds. But even approaching politics through mother love did not really interest women, it was thought in the trade. Everyone knew those readership percentages. An editor of
Redbook
ingeniously tried to bring the bomb down to the feminine level by showing the emotions of a wife whose husband sailed into a contaminated area.

“Women can’t take an idea, an issue, pure,” men who edited the mass women’s magazines agreed. “It has to be translated in terms they can understand as women.” This was so well understood by those who wrote for women’s magazines that a natural childbirth expert submitted an article to a leading woman’s magazine called “How to Have a Baby in an Atom Bomb Shelter.” “The article was not well written,” an editor told me, “or we might have bought it.” According to the mystique, women, in their mysterious femininity, might be interested in the concrete biological details of having a baby in a bomb shelter, but never in the abstract idea of the bomb’s power to destroy the human race.

Such a belief, of course, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 1960, a perceptive social psychologist showed me some sad statistics which seemed to prove unmistakably that American women under thirty-five are not interested in politics. “They may have the vote, but they don’t dream about running for office,” he told me. “If you write a political piece, they won’t read it. You have to translate it into issues they can understand—romance, pregnancy, nursing, home furnishings, clothes. Run an article on the economy, or the race question, civil rights, and you’d think that women had never heard of them.”

Maybe they hadn’t heard of them. Ideas are not like instincts of the blood that spring into the mind intact. They are communicated by education, by the printed word. The new young housewives, who leave high school or college to marry, do not read books, the psychological surveys say. They only read magazines. Magazines today assume women are not interested in ideas. But going back to the bound volumes in the library, I found in the thirties and forties that the mass-circulation magazines like
Ladies’ Home Journal
carried hundreds of articles about the world outside the home. “The first inside story of American diplomatic relations preceding declared war” “Can the U. S. Have Peace After This War?” by Walter Lippman; “Stalin at Midnight,” by Harold Stassen; “General Stilwell Reports on China” articles about the last days of Czechoslovakia by Vincent Sheean; the persecution of Jews in Germany; the New Deal; Carl Sandburg’s account of Lincoln’s assassination; Faulkner’s stories of Mississippi, and Margaret Sanger’s battle for birth control.

In the 1950’s they printed virtually no articles except those that serviced women as housewives, or described women as housewives, or permitted a purely feminine identification like the Duchess of Windsor or Princess Margaret. “If we get an article about a woman who does anything adventurous, out of the way, something by herself, you know, we figure she must be terribly aggressive, neurotic,” a
Ladies’ Home Journal
editor told me. Margaret Sanger would never get in today.

In 1960, I saw statistics that showed that women under thirty-five could not identify with a spirited heroine of a story who worked in an ad agency and persuaded the boy to stay and fight for his principles in the big city instead of running home to the security of a family business. Nor could these new young housewives identify with a young minister, acting on his belief in defiance of convention. But they had no trouble at all identifying with a young man paralyzed at eighteen. (“I regained consciousness to discover that I could not move or even speak. I could wiggle only one finger of one hand.” With help from faith and a psychiatrist, “I am now finding reasons to live as fully as possible.”)

Does it say something about the new housewife readers that, as any editor can testify, they can identify completely with the victims of blindness, deafness, physical maiming, cerebral palsy, paralysis, cancer, or approaching death? Such articles about people who cannot see or speak or move have been an enduring staple of the women’s magazines in the era of “Occupation: housewife.” They are told with infinitely realistic detail over and over again, replacing the articles about the nation, the world, ideas, issues, art and science; replacing the stories about adventurous spirited women. And whether the victim is man, woman or child, whether the living death is incurable cancer or creeping paralysis, the housewife reader can identify.

Writing for these magazines, I was continually reminded by editors “that women
have
to identify.” Once I wanted to write an article about an artist. So I wrote about her cooking and marketing and falling in love with her husband, and painting a crib for her baby. I had to leave out the hours she spent painting pictures, her serious work—and the way she felt about it. You could sometimes get away with writing about a woman who was not really a housewife, if you made her
sound
like a housewife, if you left out her commitment to the world outside the home, or the private vision of mind or spirit that she pursued. In February, 1949, the
Ladies’ Home Journal
ran a feature, “Poet’s Kitchen,” showing Edna St. Vincent Millay cooking. “Now I expect to hear no more about housework’s being beneath anyone, for if one of the greatest poets of our day, and any day, can find beauty in simple household tasks, this is the end of the old controversy.”