The Feminine Mystique (24 page)

Under the Freudian microscope, however, a very different concept of family began to emerge. Oedipus conflict and sibling rivalry became household words. Frustration was as great a peril to childhood as scarlet fever. And singled out for special attention was the “mother.” It was suddenly discovered that the mother could be blamed for almost everything. In every case history of troubled child; alcoholic, suicidal, schizophrenic, psychopathic, neurotic adult; impotent, homosexual male; frigid, promiscuous female; ulcerous, asthmatic, and otherwise disturbed American, could be found a mother. A frustrated, repressed, disturbed, martyred, never satisfied, unhappy woman. A demanding, nagging, shrewish wife. A rejecting, overprotecting, dominating mother. World War II revealed that millions of American men were psychologically incapable of facing the shock of war, of facing life away from their “moms.” Clearly something was “wrong” with American women.

By unfortunate coincidence, this attack against mothers came about at the same time that American women were beginning to use the rights of their emancipation, to go in increasing numbers to college and professional schools, to rise in industry and the professions in inevitable competition with men. Women were just beginning to play a part in American society that depended not on their sex, but on their individual abilities. It was apparent to the naked eye, obvious to the returning GI, that these American women were indeed more independent, strong-minded, assertive of will and opinion, less passive and feminine than, for instance, the German and Japanese girls who, the GI's boasted, “even washed our backs for us.” It was less apparent, however, that these girls were different from their mothers. Perhaps that is why, by some strange distortion of logic, all the neuroses of children past and present were blamed on the independence and individuality of this new generation of American girls—independence and individuality which the housewife-mothers of the previous generation had never had.

The evidence seemed inescapable: the figures on the psychiatric discharges in the war and the mothers in their case histories; the early Kinsey figures on the incapacity of American women to enjoy sexual orgasm, especially educated women; the fact that so many women
were
frustrated, and took it out on their husbands and children. More and more men in America did feel inadequate, impotent. Many of those first generations of career women did miss love and children, resented and were resented by the men they competed with. More and more American men, women, children were going to mental hospitals, clinics, psychiatrists. All this was laid at the doorstep of the frustrated American mother, “masculinized” by her education, prevented by her insistence on equality and independence from finding sexual fulfillment as a woman.

It all fitted so neatly with the Freudian rationale that no one stopped to investigate what these pre-war mothers were really like. They were indeed frustrated. But the mothers of the maladjusted soldiers, the insecure and impotent postwar males, were not independent educated career women, but self-sacrificing, dependent, martyred-housewife “moms.”

In 1940, less than a fourth of American women worked outside the home; those who did were for the most part unmarried. A minuscule 2.5 per cent of mothers were “career women.” The mothers of the GI's who were 18 to 30 in 1940 were born in the nineteenth century, or the early 1900's, and were grown up before American women won the right to vote, or enjoyed the independence, the sexual freedom, the educational or the career opportunities of the twenties. By and large, these “moms” were neither feminists, nor products of feminism, but American women leading the traditional feminine life of housewife and mother. Was it really education, career dreams, independence, which made the “moms” frustrated, and take it out on their children? Even a book that helped build the new mystique—Edward Strecker's
Their Mothers' Sons
—confirms the fact that the “moms” were neither career women, nor feminists, nor used their education, if they had it; they lived for their children, they had no interests beyond home, children, family, or their own beauty. In fact, they fit the very image of the feminine mystique.

Here is the “mom” whom Dr. Strecker, as consultant to the Surgeon General of the Army and Navy, found guilty in the case histories of the vast majority of the 1,825,000 men rejected for military service because of psychiatric disorders, the 600,000 discharged from the Army for neuropsychiatric reasons, and the 500,000 more who tried to evade the draft—almost 3,000,000 men, out of 15,000,000 in the service, who retreated into psychoneurosis, often only a few days after induction, because they lacked maturity, “the ability to face life, live with others, think for themselves and stand on their own two feet.”

A mom is a woman whose maternal behavior is motivated by the seeking of emotional recompense for the buffets which life has dealt her own ego. In her relationship with her children, every deed and almost every breath are designed unconsciously but exclusively to absorb her children emotionally and to bind them to her securely. In order to achieve this purpose, she must stamp a pattern of immature behavior on her children. . . . The mothers of men and women capable of facing life maturely are not apt to be the traditional mom type. More likely mom is sweet, doting, self-sacrificing. . . . takes no end of trouble and spares herself no pains in selecting clothes for her grown-up children. She supervises the curl of their hair, the selection of their friends and companions, their sports, and their social attitudes and opinions. By and large she does all their thinking for them. . . . [This domination] is sometimes hard and arbitrary, more often soft, persuasive and somewhat devious. . . . Most frequent is the method of indirection in which in some way the child is made to feel that mom's hurt and trying ever so hard to conceal that hurt. The soft method is infinitely more successful in blocking manifestations of youthful thought and action. . . .

The “self-sacrificing” mom when hard-pressed may admit hesitatingly that perhaps she does look “played out” and is actually a bit tired, but she chirps brightly “What of it?” . . . The implication is that she does not care how she looks or feels, for in her heart there is the unselfish joy of service. From dawn until late at night she finds her happiness in doing for her children. The house belongs to them. It must be “just so”; the meals on the minute, hot and tempting. Food is available at all hours. . . . No buttons missing from garments in this orderly house. Everything is in its proper place. Mom knows where it is. Uncomplainingly, gladly, she puts things where they belong after the children have strewn them about, here, there, and everywhere. . . . Anything the children need or want, mom will cheerfully get for them. It is the perfect home. . . . Failing to find a comparable peaceful haven in the outside world, it is quite likely that one or more of the brood will remain in or return to the happy home, forever enwombed.
⁴

The “mom” may also be “the pretty addlepate” with her cult of beauty, clothing, cosmetics, perfumes, hairdos, diet and exercise, or “the pseudo-intellectual who is forever taking courses and attending lectures, not seriously studying one subject and informing herself thoroughly about it, but one month mental hygiene, the next economics, Greek architecture, nursery schools.” These were the “moms” of the sons who could not be men at the front or at home, in bed or out, because they really wanted to be babies. All these moms had one thing in common:

. . . the emotional satisfaction, almost repletion, she derives from keeping her children paddling about in a kind of psychological amniotic fluid rather than letting them swim away with the bold and decisive strokes of maturity from the emotional maternal womb. . . . Being immature herself, she breeds immaturity in her children and, by and large, they are doomed to lives of personal and social insufficiency and unhappiness . . .
⁵

I quote Dr. Strecker at length because he was, oddly enough, one of the psychiatric authorities most frequently cited in the spate of postwar articles and speeches condemning American women for their lost femininity—and bidding them rush back home again and devote their lives to their children. Actually, the moral of Strecker's cases was just the opposite; those immature sons had mothers who devoted
too
much of their lives to their children, mothers who had to keep their children babies or they themselves would have no lives at all, mothers who never themselves reached or were encouraged to reach maturity: “the state or quality of being mature; ripeness, full development . . . independence of thought and action”—the quality of being fully human. Which is not quite the same as femininity.

Facts are swallowed by a mystique in much the same way, I guess, as the strange phenomenon by which hamburger eaten by a dog becomes dog, and hamburger eaten by a human becomes human. The facts of the GI's neurosis became, in the 1940's, “proof” that American women had been seduced from feminine fulfillment by an education geared to career, independence, equality with men, “self-realization at any cost”—even though most of these frustrated women were simply housewives. By some fascinating paradox, the massive evidence of psychological damage done to boys and girls by frustrated mothers who devoted all their days to filling children's needs was twisted by the feminine mystique to a summons to the new generation of girls to go back home and devote
their
days to filling children's needs.

Nothing made that hamburger more palatable than the early Kinsey figures which showed that sexual frustration in women was related to their education. Chewed and rechewed was the horrendous fact that between 50 and 85 per cent of the college women polled had never experienced sexual orgasm, while less than one-fifth of high-school educated women reported the same problem. As
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
interpreted these early Kinsey returns:

Among women with a grade school education or less, complete failure to achieve orgasm diminished toward the vanishing point. Dr. Kinsey and his colleagues reported that practically 100% full orgastic reaction had been found among uneducated Negro women. . . . The psychosexual rule that begins to take form, then, is this: the more educated the woman is, the greater chance there is of sexual disorder, more or less severe . . .
⁶

Nearly a decade went by before publication of the full Kinsey report on women, which completely contradicted those earlier findings. How many women realize, even now, that Kinsey's 5,940 case histories of American women showed that the number of females reaching orgasm in marriage, and the number of females reaching orgasm nearly 100 per cent of the time,
was
related to education, but the more educated the woman, the greater chance of sexual fulfillment. The woman with only a grade-school education was more likely never to experience orgasm, while the woman who finished college, and who went on to graduate or professional school, was far more likely to achieve full orgasm nearly 100 per cent of the time. In Kinsey's words:

We found that the number of females reaching orgasm within any five-year period was rather distinctly higher among those with upper educational backgrounds. . . . In every period of marriage, from the first until at least the fifteenth year, a larger number of the females in the sample who had more limited educational backgrounds had completely failed to respond to orgasm in their marital coitus, and a small number of the better educated females had so completely failed. . . .

These data are not in accord with a preliminary, unpublished calculation which we made some years ago. On the basis of a smaller sample, and on the basis of a less adequate method of calculation, we seemed to find a larger number of the females of the lower educational levels responding to orgasm in the marital coitus. These data now need correction . . .
⁷

But the mystique nourished by the early incorrect figures was not so easily corrected.

And then there were the frightening figures and case histories of children abandoned and rejected because their mothers worked. How many women realize, even now, that the babies in those publicized cases, who withered away from lack of maternal affection, were not the children of educated, middle-class mothers who left them in others' care certain hours of the day to practice a profession or write a poem, or fight a political battle—but truly abandoned children: foundlings often deserted at birth by unwed mothers and drunken fathers, children who never had a home or tender loving care. Headlines were made by any study which implied that working mothers were responsible for juvenile delinquency, school difficulties or emotional disturbance in their children. Recently a psychologist, Dr. Lois Meek Stolz, of Stanford University, analyzed all the evidence from such studies. She discovered that at the present time, one can say
anything
—good or bad—about children of employed mothers and support the statement by
some
research findings. But there is no definitive evidence that children are less happy, healthy, adjusted,
because
their mothers work.
⁸

The studies that show working women to be happier, better, more mature mothers do not get much publicity. Since juvenile delinquency is increasing, and more women work or “are educated for some kind of intellectual work,” there is surely a direct cause-and-effect relationship, one says. Except that evidence indicates there is not. Several years ago, much publicity was given to a study comparing matched groups of delinquent and non-delinquent boys. It was found, among other things, that there was no more delinquency, or school truancy, when the mothers worked regularly than when they were housewives. But, spectacular headlines warned, significantly more delinquents had mothers who worked irregularly. This finding brought guilt and gloom to the educated mothers who had given up full-fledged careers, but managed to keep on in their fields by working part-time, by free-lancing, or by taking temporary jobs with periods at home in between. “Here for years I've been purposely taking temporary jobs and part-time jobs, trying to arrange my working life in the boys' best interests,” one such mother was quoted by the
New York Times
, “and now it looks as though I've been doing the worst possible thing!”
⁹