The Feminine Mystique (22 page)

The point of role-playing, a technique adapted from group therapy, is to get students to understand problems “on a feeling level.” Emotions more heady than those of the usual college classroom are undoubtedly stirred up when the professor invites them to “role-play” the feelings of “a boy and a girl on their wedding night.”

There is a pseudotherapeutic air, as the professor listens patiently to endless self-conscious student speeches about personal feelings (“verbalizing”) in the hopes of sparking a “group insight.” But though the functional course is not group therapy, it is certainly an indoctrination of opinions and values through manipulation of the students' emotions; and in this manipulative disguise, it is no longer subject to the critical thinking demanded in other academic disciplines.

The students take as gospel the bits and pieces assigned in text books that explain Freud or quote Margaret Mead; they do not have the frame of reference that comes from the actual study of psychology or anthropology. In fact, by explicitly banning the usual critical attitudes of college study, these pseudoscientific marriage courses give what is often no more than popular opinion, the fiat of scientific law. The opinion may be currently fashionable, or already outdated, in psychiatric circles, but it is often merely a prejudice, buttressed by psychological or sociological jargon and well-chosen statistics to give the appearance of unquestionable scientific truth.

The discussion on premarital intercourse usually leads to the scientific conclusion that it is wrong. One professor builds up his case against sexual intercourse before marriage with statistics chosen to demonstrate that premarital sexual experience tends to make marital adjustment more difficult. The student will not know of the other statistics which refute this point; if the professor knows of them, he can in the functional marriage course feel free to disregard them as unfunctional. (“Ours is a sick society. The students need some accurate definitive kind of knowledge.”) It is functional “knowledge” that “only the exceptional woman can make a go of a commitment to a career.” Of course, since most women in the past have not had careers, the few who did were all “exceptional”—as a mixed marriage is “exceptional,” and premarital intercourse for a girl is exceptional. All are phenomena of less than 51 per cent. The whole point of functional education often seems to be: what 51 per cent of the population does today, 100 per cent should do tomorrow.

So the sex-directed educator promotes a girl's adjustment by dissuading her from any but the “normal” commitment to marriage and the family. One such educator goes farther than imaginary role-playing; she brings real ex-working mothers to class to talk about their guilt at leaving their children in the morning. Somehow, the students seldom hear about a woman who has successfully broken convention—the young woman doctor whose sister handled her practice when her babies were born, the mother who adjusted her babies' sleeping hours to her work schedule without problems, the happy Protestant girl who married a Catholic, the sexually serene wife whose premarital experience did not seem to hurt her marriage. “Exceptional” cases are of no practical concern to the functionalist, though he often acknowledges scrupulously that there
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exceptions. (The “exceptional child,” in educational jargon, bears a connotation of handicap: the blind, the crippled, the retarded, the genius, the defier of convention—anyone who is different from the crowd, in any way unique—bears a common shame; he is “exceptional.”) Somehow, the student gets the point that she does not want to be the “exceptional woman.”

Conformity is built into life-adjustment education in many ways. There is little or no intellectual challenge or discipline involved in merely learning to adjust. The marriage course is the easiest course on almost every campus, no matter how anxiously professors try to toughen it by assigning heavy reading and weekly reports. No one expects that case histories (which when read for no serious use are not much more than psychiatric soap operas), role-playing, talking about sex in class, or writing personal papers will lead to critical thinking; that's not the point of functional preparation for marriage.

This is not to say that the study of a social science, as such, produces conformity in woman or man. This is hardly the effect when it is studied critically and motivated by the usual aims of intellectual discipline, or when it is mastered for professional use. But for girls forbidden both professional and intellectual commitment by the new mystique, the study of sociology, anthropology, psychology is often merely “functional.” And in the functional course itself, the girls take those bits and pieces from Freud and Mead, the sexual statistics, the role-playing insights, not only literally and out of context, but personally—to be acted upon in their own lives. That, after all, is the whole point of life-adjustment education. It can happen among adolescents in almost any course that involves basic emotional material. It will certainly happen when the material is deliberately used not to build critical knowledge but to stir up personal emotions. Therapy, in the orthodox psychoanalytic tradition, requires the suppression of critical thinking (intellectual resistance) for the proper emotions to come out and be worked through. In therapy, this may work. But does education work, mixed up with therapy? One course could hardly be crucial, in any man or woman's life, but when it is decided that the very aim of woman's education should not be intellectual growth, but sexual adjustment, certain questions could be very crucial.

One might ask: if an education geared to the growth of the human mind weakens femininity, will an education geared to femininity weaken the growth of the mind? What is femininity, if it can be destroyed by an education which makes the mind grow, or induced by not letting the mind grow?

One might even ask a question in Freudian terms: what happens when sex becomes not only id for women, but ego and superego as well; when education, instead of developing the self, is concentrated on developing the sexual functions? What happens when education gives new authority to the feminine “shoulds”—which already have the authority of tradition, convention, prejudice, popular opinion—instead of giving women the power of critical thought, the independence and autonomy to question blind authority, new or old? At Pembroke, the women's college at Brown University in Providence, R.I., a guest psychoanalyst was recently invited to lead a buzz session on “what it means to be a woman.” The students seemed disconcerted when the guest analyst, Dr. Margaret Lawrence, said, in simple, un-Freudian English, that it was rather silly to tell women today that their main place is in the home, when most of the work women used to do is now done outside the home, and everyone else in the family spends most of his time outside the house. Hadn't they better be educated to join the rest of the family, out there in the world?

This, somehow, was not what the girls expected to hear from a lady psychoanalyst. Unlike the usual functional, sex-directed lesson, it upset a conventional feminine “should.” It also implied that they should begin to make certain decisions of their own, about their education and their future.

The functional lesson is much more soothing to the unsure sophomore who has not yet quite made the break from childhood. It does not defy the comfortable, safe conventions; it gives her sophisticated words for accepting her parents' view, the popular view, without having to figure out views of her own. It also reassures her that she doesn't have to work in college; that she can be lazy, follow impulse. She doesn't have to postpone present pleasure for future goals; she doesn't have to read eight books for a history paper, take the tough physics course. It might give her a masculinity complex. After all, didn't the book say:

Woman's intellectuality is to a large extent paid for by the loss of valuable feminine qualities. . . . All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.
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A girl doesn't have to be very lazy, very unsure, to take the hint. Thinking, after all, is hard work. In fact, she would have to do some very cold hard thinking about her own warm, intuitive knowledge to challenge this authoritative statement.

It is no wonder that several generations of American college girls of fine mind and fiery spirit took the message of the sex-directed educators, and fled college and career to marry and have babies before they became so “intellectual” that, heaven forbid, they wouldn't be able to enjoy sex “in a feminine way.”

Even without the help of sex-directed educators, the girl growing up with brains and spirit in America learns soon enough to watch her step, “to be like all the others,” not to be herself. She learns not to work too hard, think too often, ask too many questions. In high schools, in coeducational colleges, girls are reluctant to speak out in class for fear of being typed as “brains.” This phenomenon has been borne out by many studies;
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any bright girl or woman can document it from personal experience. Bryn Mawr girls have a special term for the way they talk when boys are around, compared to the real talk they can permit themselves when they are not afraid to let their intelligence show. In the coeducational colleges, girls are regarded by others—and think of themselves—primarily in terms of their sexual function as dates, future wives. They “seek my security in him” instead of finding themselves, and each act of self-betrayal tips the scale further away from identity to passive self-contempt.

There are exceptions, of course. The Mellon study found that some Vassar seniors, as compared with freshmen, showed an enormous growth in four years—the kind of growth toward identity and self-realization which scientists now know takes place in people in their twenties and even thirties, forties, and fifties, long after the period of physical growth is over. But many girls showed no signs of growth. These were the ones who resisted, successfully, involvement with ideas, the academic work of the college, the intellectual disciplines, the larger values. They resisted intellectual development, self-development, in favor of being “feminine,” not too brainy, not too interested, not too different from the other girls. It was not that their actual sexual interests interfered; in fact, the psychologists got the impression that with many of these girls, “interest in men and marriage is a kind of defense against intellectual development.” For such girls, even sex is not real, merely a kind of conformity. The sex-directed educator would find no fault in this kind of adjustment. But in view of other evidence, one might ask: could such an adjustment mask a failure to grow that becomes finally a human deformity?

Several years ago a team of California psychologists who had been following the development of 140 bright youngsters noticed a sudden sharp drop in IQ curves in some of the teenage records. When they investigated this, they found that while most of the youngsters' curves remained at the same high level, year after year, those whose curves dropped were all girls. The drop had nothing to do with the physiological changes of adolescence; it was not found in all girls. But in the records of those girls whose intelligence dropped were found repeated statements to the effect that “it isn't too smart for a girl to be smart.” In a very real sense, these girls were arrested in their mental growth, at age fourteen or fifteen, by conformity to the feminine image.
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The fact is, girls today and those responsible for their education do face a choice. They must decide between adjustment, conformity, avoidance of conflict, therapy—or individuality, human identity, education in the truest sense, with all its pains of growth. But they do not have to face the mistaken choice painted by the sex-directed educators, with their dire warnings against loss of femininity and sexual frustration. For the perceptive psychologist who studied the Vassar girls uncovered some startling new evidence about the students who chose to become truly involved with their education. It seems that those seniors who showed the greatest signs of growth were more “masculine” in the sense of being less passive and conventional; but they were more “feminine” in inner emotional life, and the ability to gratify it. They also scored higher, far higher than as freshmen, on certain scales commonly supposed to measure neuroses. The psychologist commented: “We have come to regard elevations on such scales as evidence that education is taking place.”
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He found girls with conflicts showed more growth than the adjusted ones, who had no wish to become independent. The least adjusted were also the more developed—“already prepared for even further changes and more independence.” In summing up the Vassar study, its director could not avoid the psychological paradox: education for women does make them less feminine, less adjusted—but it makes them grow.

Being less “feminine” is closely related to being more educated and more mature. . . . It is interesting to note, however, that Feminine Sensitivity, which may well have sources in physiology and in early identifications, does not decrease during the four years; “feminine” interests and feminine role behavior, i.e., conventionality and passivity, can be understood as later and more superficial acquisitions, and, hence, more susceptible to decrease as the individual becomes more mature and more educated. . . .

One might say that if we were interested in stability alone, we would do well to plan a program to keep freshmen as they are, rather than to try to increase their education, their maturity and their flexibility with regard to sex-role behavior. Seniors are more unstable because there is more to be stabilized, less certain of their identities because more possibilities are open to them.
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At graduation, such women were, however, only at a “halfway point” in their growth to autonomy. Their fate depended on “whether they now enter a situation in which they can continue to grow or whether they find some quick but regressive means for relieving the stress.” The flight into marriage is the easiest, quickest way to relieve that stress. To the educator, bent on women's growth to autonomy, such a marriage is “regressive.” To the sex-directed educator, it is femininity fulfilled.