The Feminine Mystique (56 page)

Notes

Chapter 1. THE PROBLEM THAT HAS NO NAME

1.
See the Seventy-fifth Anniversary Issue of
Good Housekeeping
, May, 1960, “The Gift of Self,” a symposium by Margaret Mead, Jessamyn West,
et al
.

2.
Lee Rainwater, Richard P. Coleman, and Gerald Handel,
Workingman's Wife
, New York, 1959.

3.
Betty Friedan, “If One Generation Can Ever Tell Another,”
Smith Alumnae Quarterly
, Northampton, Mass., Winter, 1961. I first became aware of “the problem that has no name” and its possible relationship to what I finally called “the feminine mystique” in 1957, when I prepared an intensive questionnaire and conducted a survey of my own Smith College classmates fifteen years after graduation. This questionnaire was later used by alumnae classes of Radcliffe and other women's colleges with similar results.

4.
Jhan and June Robbins, “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped,”
Redbook
, September, 1960.

5.
Marian Freda Poverman, “Alumnae on Parade,”
Barnard Alumnae Magazine
, July, 1957.

Chapter 2. THE HAPPY HOUSEWIFE HEROINE

1.
Betty Friedan, “Women Are People Too!”
Good Housekeeping
, September, 1960. The letters received from women all over the United States in response to this article were of such emotional intensity that I was convinced that “the problem that has no name” is by no means confined to the graduates of the women's Ivy League colleges.

2.
In the 1960's, an occasional heroine who was not a “happy housewife” began to appear in the women's magazines. An editor of
McCall's
explained it: “Sometimes we run an offbeat story for pure entertainment value.” One such novelette, which was written to order by Noel Clad for
Good Housekeeping
(January, 1960), is called “Men Against Women.” The heroine—a happy career woman—nearly loses child as well as husband.

Chapter 3. THE CRISIS IN WOMAN'S IDENTITY

1.
Erik H. Erikson,
Young Man Luther, A Study in Psychoanalysis and History
, New York, 1958, pp. 15 ff. See also Erikson,
Childhood and Society
, New York, 1950, and Erikson, “The Problem of Ego Identity,”
Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association
, Vol. 4, 1956, pp. 56–121.

Chapter 4. THE PASSIONATE JOURNEY

1.
See Eleanor Flexner,
Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States
, Cambridge, Mass., 1959. This definitive history of the woman's rights movement in the United States, published in 1959 at the height of the era of the feminine mystique, did not receive the attention it deserves, from either the intelligent reader or the scholar. In my opinion, it should be required reading for every girl admitted to a U.S. college. One reason the mystique prevails is that very few women under the age of forty know the facts of the woman's rights movement. I am much indebted to Miss Flexner for many factual clues I might otherwise have missed in my attempt to get at the truth behind the feminine mystique and its monstrous image of the feminists.

2.
See Sidney Ditzion, Marriage,
Morals and Sex in America—A History of Ideas
, New York, 1953. This extensive bibliographical essay by the librarian of New York University documents the continuous interrelationship between movements for social and sexual reform in America, and, specifically, between man's movement for greater self-realization and sexual fulfillment and the woman's rights movement. The speeches and tracts assembled reveal that the movement to emancipate women was often seen by the men as well as the women who led it in terms of “creating an equitable balance of power between the sexes” for “a more satisfying expression of sexuality for both sexes.”

3.
Ibid
., p. 107.

4.
Yuri Suhl,
Ernestine L. Rose and the Battle for Human Rights
, New York, 1959, p. 158. A vivid account of the battle for a married woman's right to her own property and earnings.

5.
Flexner,
op. cit
., p. 30.

6.
Elinor Rice Hays,
Morning Star, A Biography of Lucy Stone
, New York, 1961, p. 83.

7.
Flexner,
op. cit
., p. 64.

8.
Hays,
op. cit.
, p. 136.

9.
Ibid
., p. 285.

10.
Flexner,
op. cit
., p. 46.

11.
Ibid
., p. 73.

12.
Hays,
op. cit
., p. 221.

13.
Flexner,
op. cit.
, p. 117.

14.
Ibid
., p. 235.

15.
Ibid
., p. 299.

16.
Ibid
., p. 173.

17.
Ida Alexis Ross Wylie, “The Little Woman,”
Harper's
, November, 1945.

Chapter 5. THE SEXUAL SOLIPSISM OF SIGMUND FREUD

1.
Clara Thompson,
Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Development
, New York, 1950, pp. 131 ff:

Freud not only emphasized the biological more than the cultural, but he also developed a cultural theory of his own based on his biological theory. There were two obstacles in the way of understanding the importance of the cultural phenomena he saw and recorded. He was too deeply involved in developing his biological theories to give much thought to other aspects of the data he collected. Thus he was interested chiefly in applying to human society his theory of instincts. Starting with the assumption of a death instinct, for example, he then developed an explanation of the cultural phenomena he observed in terms of the death instinct. Since he did not have the perspective to be gained from knowledge of comparative cultures, he could not evaluate cultural processes as such. . . . Much which Freud believed to be biological has been shown by modern research to be a reaction to a certain type of culture and not characteristic of universal human nature.

2.
Richard La Piere,
The Freudian Ethic
, New York, 1959, p. 62.

3.
Ernest Jones,
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud
, New York, 1953, Vol. I, p. 384.

4.
Ibid
., Vol. II (1955), p. 432.

5.
Ibid
., Vol. I, pp. 7–14, 294; Vol. II, p. 483.

6.
Bruno Bettelheim,
Love Is Not Enough: The Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children
, Glencoe, III., 1950, pp. 7 ff.

7.
Ernest L. Freud,
Letters of Sigmund Freud
, New York, 1960, Letter 10, p. 27; Letter 26, p. 71; Letter 65, p. 145.

8.
Ibid
., Letter 74, p. 60; Letter 76, pp. 161 ff.

9.
Jones,
op. cit
., Vol. I, pp. 176 ff.

10.
Ibid
., Vol. II, p. 422.

11.
Ibid
., Vol. I, p. 271:

His descriptions of sexual activities are so matter-of-fact that many readers have found them almost dry and totally lacking in warmth. From all I know of him, I should say that he displayed less than the average personal interest in what is often an absorbing topic. There was never any gusto or even savor in mentioning a sexual topic. . . . He always gave the impression of being an unusually chaste person—the word “puritanical” would not be out of place—and all we know of his early development confirms this conception.

12.
Ibid
., Vol. I, p. 102.

13.
Ibid
., Vol. I, pp. 110 ff.

14.
Ibid
., Vol. I, p. 124.

15.
Ibid
., Vol. I, p. 127.

16.
Ibid
., Vol. I, p. 138.

17.
Ibid
., Vol. I, p. 151.

18.
Helen Walker Puner,
Freud, His Life and His Mind
, New York, 1947, p. 152.

19.
Jones,
op. cit
., Vol. II, p. 121.

20.
Ibid
., Vol. I, pp. 301 ff. During the years Freud was germinating his sexual theory, before his own heroic self-analysis freed him from a passionate dependence on a series of men, his emotions were focused on a flamboyant nose-and-throat doctor named Fliess. This is one coincidence of history that was quite fateful for women. For Fliess had proposed, and obtained Freud's lifelong allegiance to, a fantastic “scientific theory” which reduced all phenomena of life and death to “bisexuality,” expressed in mathematical terms through a periodic table based on the number 28, the female menstrual cycle. Freud looked forward to meetings with Fliess “as for the satisfying of hunger and thirst.” He wrote him: “No one can replace the intercourse with a friend that a particular, perhaps feminine side of me, demands.” Even after his own self-analysis, Freud still expected to die on the day predicted by Fliess' periodic table, in which everything could be figured out in terms of the female number 28, or the male 23, which was derived from the end of one female menstrual period to the beginning of the next.

21.
Ibid
., Vol. I, p. 320.

22.
Sigmund Freud, “Degradation in Erotic Life,” in
The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud
, Vol. IV.

23.
Thompson,
op. cit
., p. 133.

24.
Sigmund Freud, “The Psychology of Women,” in
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
, tr. by W. J. H. Sprott, New York, 1933, pp. 170 ff.

25.
Ibid
., p. 182.

26.
Ibid
., p. 184.

27.
Thompson,
op. cit.
, pp. 12 ff:

The war of 1914–18 further focussed attention on ego drives. . . . Another idea came into analysis around this period . . . and that was that aggression as well as sex might be an important repressed impulse. . . . The puzzling problem was how to include it in the theory of instincts. . . . Eventually Freud solved this by his second instinct theory. Aggression found its place as part of the death instinct. It is interesting that normal self-assertion, i.e., the impulse to master, control or come to self-fulfilling terms with the environment, was not especially emphasized by Freud.

28.
Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” in
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
, p. 149.

29.
Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg,
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
, New York and London, 1947, pp. 142 ff.

30.
Ernest Jones,
op. cit
., Vol. II, p. 446.

31.
Helene Deutsch,
The Psychology of Woman—A Psychoanalytical Interpretation
, New York, 1944, Vol. I, pp. 224 ff.

32.
Ibid
., Vol. I, pp. 251 ff.

33.
Sigmund Freud, “The Anatomy of the Mental Personality,” in
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
, p. 96.

Chapter 6. THE FUNCTIONAL FREEZE, THE FEMININE PROTEST, AND MARGARET MEAD

1.
Henry A. Bowman,
Marriage for Moderns
, New York, 1942, p. 21.

2.
Ibid
., pp. 22 ff.

3.
Ibid
., pp. 62 ff.

4.
Ibid
., pp. 74–76.

5.
Ibid
., pp. 66 ff.

6.
Talcott Parsons, “Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United States,” in
Essays in Sociological Theory
, Glencoe, Ill., 1949, pp. 223 ff.

7.
Talcott Parsons, “An Analytical Approach to the Theory of Social Stratification,”
op. cit
., pp. 174 ff.

8.
Mirra Komarovsky,
Women in the Modern World, Their Education and Their Dilemmas
, Boston, 1953, pp. 52–61.

9.
Ibid
., p. 66.

10.
Ibid
., pp. 72–74.

11.
Mirra Komarovsky, “Functional Analysis of Sex Roles,”
American Sociological Review
, August, 1950. See also “Cultural Contradictions and Sex Roles,”
American Journal of Sociology
, November, 1946.

12.
Kingsley Davis, “The Myth of Functional Analysis as a Special Method in Sociology and Anthropology,”
American Sociological Review
, Vol. 24, No. 6, December, 1959, pp. 757–772. Davis points out that functionalism became more or less identical with sociology itself. There is provocative evidence that the very study of sociology, in recent years, has persuaded college women to limit themselves to their “functional” traditional sexual role. A report on “The Status of Women in Professional Sociology” (Sylvia Fleis Fava,
American Sociological Review
, Vol. 25, No. 2, April, 1960) shows that while most of the students in sociology undergraduate classes are women, from 1949 to 1958 there was a sharp decline in both the number and proportion of degrees in sociology awarded to women. (4,143 B.A.'s in 1949 down to a low of 3,200 in 1955, 3,606 in 1958). And while one-half to two-thirds of the undergraduate degrees in sociology were awarded to women, women received only 25 to 43 per cent of the master's degrees, and only 8 to 19 per cent of the Ph.D.'s. While the number of women earning graduate degrees in all fields has declined sharply during the era of the feminine mystique, the field of sociology showed, in comparison to other fields, an unusually high “mortality” rate.

13.
Margaret Mead,
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
, New York, 1935, pp. 279 ff.

14.
Margaret Mead,
From the South Seas
, New York, 1939, p. 321.