The Feminine Mystique (44 page)

It was not a minor matter, their mistaken choice. We now know that the same range of potential ability exists for women as for men. Women, as well as men, can only find their identity in work that uses their full capacities. A woman cannot find her identity through others—her husband, her children. She cannot find it in the dull routine of housework. As thinkers of every age have said, it is only when a human being faces squarely the fact that he can forfeit his own life, that he becomes truly aware of himself, and begins to take his existence seriously. Sometimes this awareness comes only at the moment of death. Sometimes it comes from a more subtle facing of death: the death of self in passive conformity, in meaningless work. The feminine mystique prescribes just such a living death for women. Faced with the slow death of self, the American woman must begin to take her life seriously.

“We measure ourselves by many standards,” said the great American psychologist William James, nearly a century ago. “Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things, and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth.”
³⁶

If women do not put forth, finally, that effort to become all that they have it in them to become, they will forfeit their own humanity. A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide. For that future half a century after the child-bearing years are over is a fact that an American woman cannot deny. Nor can she deny that as a housewife, the world is indeed rushing past her door while she just sits and watches. The terror she feels is real, if she has no place in that world.

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. There is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps except by finally putting forth an effort—that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the narrow walls of home, to help shape the future. Only by such a personal commitment to the future can American women break out of the housewife trap and truly find fulfillment as wives and mothers—by fulfilling their own unique possibilities as separate human beings.

14

A New Life Plan for Women

“E
asy enough to say,” the woman inside the housewife's trap remarks, “but what can I do, alone in the house, with the children yelling and the laundry to sort and no grandmother to babysit?” It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question “who am I” except the voice inside herself. She may spend years on the analyst's couch, working out her “adjustment to the feminine role,” her blocks to “fulfillment as a wife and mother. And still the voice inside her may say, “That's not it.” Even the best psychoanalyst can only give her the courage to listen to her own voice. When society asks so little of women, every woman has to listen to her own inner voice to find her identity in the changing world. She must create, out of her own needs and abilities, a new life plan, fitting in the love and children and home that have defined femininity in the past with the work toward a greater purpose that shapes the future.

To face the problem is not to solve it. But once a woman faces it, as women are doing today all over America without much help from the experts, once she asks herself “What do I want to do?” she begins to find her own answers. Once she begins to see through the delusions of the feminine mystique—and realizes that neither her husband nor her children, nor the things in her house, nor sex, nor being like all the other women, can give her a self—she often finds the solution much easier than she anticipated.

Of the many women I talked to in the suburbs and cities, some were just beginning to face the problem, others were well on their way to solving it, and for still others it was no longer a problem. In the stillness of an April afternoon with all her children in school, a woman told me:

I put all my energies into the children, carting them around, worrying about them, teaching them things. Suddenly, there was this terrible feeling of emptiness. All that volunteer work I'd taken on—Scouts, PTA, the League, just didn't seem worth doing all of a sudden. As a girl, I wanted to be an actress. It was too late to go back to that. I stayed in the house all day, cleaning things I hadn't cleaned in years. I spent a lot of time just crying. My husband and I talked about its being an American woman's problem, how you give up a career for the children, and then you reach a point where you can't go back. I felt so envious of the few women I know who had a definite skill and kept working at it. My dream of being an actress wasn't real—I didn't work at it. Did I have to throw my whole self into the children? I've spent my whole life just immersed in other people, and never even knew what kind of a person I was myself. Now I think even having another baby wouldn't solve that emptiness long. You can't go back—you have to go on. There must be some real way I can go on myself.

This woman was just beginning her search for identity. Another woman had made it to the other side, and could look back now and see the problem clearly. Her home was colorful, casual, but technically she was no longer “just a housewife.” She was paid for her work as a professional painter. She told me that when she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to
enjoy
being a woman. She said:

I used to work so hard to maintain this beautiful picture of myself as a wife and mother. I had all of my children by natural childbirth. I breastfed them all. I got mad once at an older woman at a party when I said childbirth is the most important thing in life, the basic animal, and she said, “Don't you want to be more than an animal?”

You do want something more, only you don't know what it is. So you put even more into housekeeping. It's not challenging enough, just ironing dresses for your little girls, so you go in for ruffly dresses that need more ironing, and bake your own bread, and refuse to get a dishwasher. You think if you make a big enough challenge out of it, then somehow it will be satisfying. And still it wasn't.

I almost had an affair. I used to feel so discontented with my husband. I used to feel outraged if he didn't help with the housework. I insisted that he do dishes, scrub floors, everything. We wouldn't quarrel, but you can't deceive yourself sometimes in the middle of the night.

I couldn't seem to control this feeling that I wanted something more from life. So I went to a psychiatrist. He kept trying to make me enjoy being feminine, but it didn't help. And then I went to one who seemed to make me find out who I was, and forget about this beautiful feminine picture. I realized I was furious at myself, furious at my husband, because I'd left school.

I used to put the kids in the car and just drive because I couldn't bear to be alone in the house. I kept wanting to do something, but I was afraid to try. One day on a back road I saw an artist painting, and it was like a voice I couldn't control saying “Do you give lessons?”

I'd take care of the house and kids all day, and after I finished the dishes at night, I'd paint. Then I took the bedroom we were going to use for another baby—five children was part of my beautiful picture—and used it for a studio for myself. I remember one night working and working and suddenly it was 2
A.M.
and I was finished. I looked at the picture, and it was like finding myself.

I can't think what I was trying to do with my life before, trying to fit some picture of an oldtime woman pioneer. I don't have to prove I'm a woman by sewing my own clothes. I am a woman, and I am myself, and I buy clothes and love them. I'm not such a darned patient, loving, perfect mother anymore. I don't change the kids' clothes top to bottom every day, and no more ruffles. But I seem to have more time to enjoy them. I don't spend much time on housework now, but it's done before my husband gets home. We bought a dishwasher.

The longer it takes to wash dishes, the less time you have for anything else. It's not creative, doing the same thing over and over. Why should a woman feel guilty at getting rid of this repetitive work. There's no virtue in dishwashing, scrubbing floors. Dacron, dishwashers, drip dry—this is fine, this is the direction physical life should take. This is our time, our only time on earth. We can't keep throwing it away. My time is all I've got, and this is what I want to do with it.

I don't need to make such a production of my marriage now because it's real. Somehow, once I began to have the sense of myself, I became aware of my husband. Before, it was like he was part of me, not a separate human being. I guess it wasn't till I stopped trying to be feminine that I began to enjoy being a woman.

And then, there were others, teetering back and forth, aware of the problem but not yet quite sure what to do about it. The chairman of a suburban fund-raising committee said:

I envy Jean who stays at home and does the work she wants to do. I haven't opened my easel in two months. I keep getting so involved in committees I don't care about. It's the thing to do to get in with the crowd here. But it doesn't make me feel quiet inside, the way I feel when I paint. An artist in the city told me, “You should take yourself more seriously. You can be an artist and a housewife and a mother—all three.” I guess the only thing that stops me is that it's hard work.

A young Ohio woman told me:

Lately, I've felt this need. I felt we simply had to have a bigger house, put on an addition, or move to a better neighborhood. I went on a frantic round of entertaining but that was like living for the interruptions of your life.

My husband thinks that being a good mother is the most important career there is. I think it's even more important than a career. But I don't think most women are all mother. I enjoy my kids, but I don't like spending all my time with them. I'm just not their age. I could make housework take up more of my time. But the floors don't need vacuuming more than twice a week. My mother swept them every day.

I always wanted to play the violin. When I went to college, girls who took music seriously were peculiar. Suddenly, it was as if some voice inside me said, now is the time, you'll never get another chance. I felt embarrassed, practicing at forty. It exhausts me and hurts my shoulder, but it makes me feel at one with something larger than myself. The universe suddenly becomes real, and you're part of it. You feel as if you really exist.

It would be quite wrong for me to offer any woman easy how-to answers to this problem. There are no easy answers, in America today; it is difficult, painful, and takes perhaps a long time for each woman to find her own answer. First, she must unequivocally say “no” to the housewife image. This does not mean, of course, that she must divorce her husband, abandon her children, give up her home. She does not have to choose between marriage and career; that was the mistaken choice of the feminine mystique. In actual fact, it is not as difficult as the feminine mystique implies, to combine marriage and motherhood and even the kind of lifelong personal purpose that once was called “career.” It merely takes a new life plan—in terms of one's whole life as a woman.

The first step in that plan is to see housework for what it is—not a career, but something that must be done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Once a woman stops trying to make cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, “something more,” she can say “no, I don't want a stove with rounded corners, I don't want four different kinds of soap.” She can say “no” to those mass daydreams of the women's magazines and television, “no” to the depth researchers and manipulators who are trying to run her life. Then, she can use the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher and all the automatic appliances, and even the instant mashed potatoes for what they are truly worth—to save time that can be used in more creative ways.

The second step, and perhaps the most difficult for the products of sex-directed education, is to see marriage as it really is, brushing aside the veil of over-glorification imposed by the feminine mystique. Many women I talked to felt strangely discontented with their husbands, continually irritated with their children, when they saw marriage and motherhood as the final fulfillment of their lives. But when they began to use their various abilities with a purpose of their own in society, they not only spoke of a new feeling of “aliveness” or “completeness” in themselves, but of a new, though hard to define, difference in the way they felt about their husbands and children. Many echoed this woman's words:

The funny thing is, I enjoy my children more now that I've made room for myself. Before, when I was putting my whole self into the children, it was as if I was always looking for something through them. I couldn't just enjoy them as I do now, as though they were a sunset, something outside me, separate. Before, I felt so tied down by them, I'd try to get away in my mind. Maybe a woman has to be
by herself
to be really
with
her children.

A New England lawyer's wife told me:

I thought I had finished. I had come to the end of childhood, had married, had a baby, and I was happy with my marriage. But somehow I was disconsolate, because I assumed this was the end. I would take up upholstery one week, Sunday painting the next. My house was spotless. I devoted entirely too much time to entertaining my child. He didn't need all that adult companionship. A grown woman playing with a child all day, disintegrating herself in a hundred directions to fill the time, cooking fancy food when no one needs it, and then furious if they don't eat it—you lose your adult common sense, your whole sense of yourself as a human being.

Now I'm studying history, one course a year. It's work, but I haven't missed a night in 2 ½ years. Soon I'll be teaching. I love being a wife and mother, but I know now that when marriage is the end of your life, because you have no other mission, it becomes a miserable, tawdry thing. Who said women have to be happy, to be amused, to be entertained? You have to work. You don't have to have a job. But you have to tackle something yourself, and see it through, to feel alive.

An hour a day, a weekend, or even a week off from motherhood is not the answer to the problem that has no name. That “mother's hour off,”
¹
as advised by child-and-family experts or puzzled doctors as the antidote for the housewife's fatigue or trapped feeling, assumes automatically that a woman is “just a housewife,” now and forever a mother. A person fully used by his work can enjoy “time off.” But the mothers I talked to did not find any magical relief in an “hour off”; in fact, they often gave it up on the slightest pretext, either from guilt or from boredom. A woman who has no purpose of her own in society, a woman who cannot let herself think about the future because she is doing nothing to give herself a real identity in it, will continue to feel a desperation in the present—no matter how many “hours off” she takes. Even a very young woman today must think of herself as a human being first, not as a mother with time on her hands, and make a life plan in terms of her own abilities, a commitment of her own to society, with which her commitments as wife and mother can be integrated.

A woman I interviewed, a mental-health educator who was for many years “just a housewife” in her suburban community, sums it up: “I remember my own feeling that life wasn't full enough for me. I wasn't using myself in terms of my capacities. It wasn't enough making a home. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can't just deny your intelligent mind; you need to be part of the social scheme.”

And looking over the trees of her garden to the quiet, empty suburban street, she said:

If you knock on any of these doors, how many women would you find whose abilities are being used? You'd find them drinking, or sitting around talking to other women and watching children play because they can't bear to be alone, or watching TV or reading a book. Society hasn't caught up with women yet, hasn't found a way yet to use the skills and energies of women except to bear children. Over the last fifteen years, I think women have been running away from themselves. The reason the young ones have swallowed this feminine business is because they think if they go back and look for all their satisfaction in the home, it will be easier. But it won't be. Somewhere along the line a woman, if she is going to come to terms with herself, has to find herself as a person.