The Feminine Mystique

environment exerts an inhibiting influence as regards both her aggressions and her activity So, penis envy, deficient female anatomy, and society all seem to work together to produce femininity.”
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“Normal” femininity is achieved, however, only insofar as the woman finally renounces all active goals of her own, all her own
“originality,” to identify and fulfill herself through the activities and goals of husband, or son. This process can be sublimated in nonsexual ways—as, for instance, the woman who does the basic research for her male superior’s discoveries. The daughter who devotes her life to her father is also making a satisfactory feminine
“sublimation.” Only activity of her own or originality, on a basis of equality, deserves the opprobrium of masculinity complex This brilliant feminine follower of Freud states categorically that the women who by 1944 in America had achieved eminence by activity of their own in various fields had done so at the expense of their feminine fulfillment. She will mention no names, but they all suffer from the masculinity complex.”
How could a girl or woman who was not a psychoanalyst discount such ominous pronouncements, which, in the forties,
suddenly began to pour out from all the oracles of sophisticated thought?
It would be ridiculous to suggest that the way Freudian theories were used to brainwash two generations of educated American women was part of a psychoanalytic conspiracy. It was done by well-meaning popularizers and inadvertent distorters; by orthodox converts and bandwagon faddists by those who suffered and those who cured and those who turned suffering to profit and, above all, by a congruence of forces and needs peculiar to the American people at that particular time. In fact, the literal acceptance in the American culture of Freud’s theory of feminine fulfillment was in tragicomic contrast to the personal struggle of many American psychoanalysts to reconcile what they saw in their women patients with Freudian theory. The theory said women should be able to fulfill themselves as wives and mothers if only they could be analyzed out of their
“masculine strivings,” their penis envy But it wasn’t as easy as that. I don’t know why American women are so dissatisfied a
Westchester analyst insisted. Penis envy seems so difficult to eradicate in American women, somehow.”
A New York analyst, one of the last trained at Freud’s own

Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna, told me:
For twenty years now in analyzing American women, I have found myself again and again in the position of having to superimpose Freud’s theory of femininity on the psychic life of my patients in away that I was not willing to do. I have come to the conclusion that penis envy simply does not exist. I have seen women who are completely expressive, sexually, vaginally, and yet who are not mature, integrated, fulfilled. I had a woman patient on the couch for nearly two years before I could face her real problem—that it was not enough for her to be just a housewife and mother. One day she had a dream that she was teaching a class. I could not dismiss the powerful yearning of this housewife’s dream as penis envy. It was the expression of her own need for mature self-fulfillment. I told her I can’t analyze this dream away. You must do something about it.”
This same man teaches the young analysts in his postgraduate clinicum at a leading Eastern university If the patient doesn’t fit the book, throwaway the book, and listen to the patient.”
But many analysts threw the book at their patients and Freudian theories became accepted fact even among women who never lay down on an analyst’s couch, but only knew what they read or heard.
To this day, it has not penetrated to the popular culture that the pervasive growing frustration of American women may not be a matter of feminine sexuality. Some analysts, it is true, modified the theories drastically to fit their patients, or even discarded them altogether—but these facts never permeated the public awareness.
Freud was accepted so quickly and completely at the end of the forties that for over a decade no one even questioned the race of the educated American woman back to the home. When questions finally had to be asked because something was obviously going wrong, they were asked so completely within the Freudian framework that only one answer was possible education, freedom, rights are wrong for women.
The uncritical acceptance of Freudian doctrine in America was caused, at least in part, by the very relief it provided from uncomfortable questions about objective realities. After the depression, after the war, Freudian psychology became much more

than a science of human behavior, a therapy for the suffering. It became an all-embracing American ideology, anew religion. It filled the vacuum of thought and purpose that existed for many for whom
God, or flag, or bank account were no longer sufficient—and yet who were tired of feeling responsible for lynchings and concentration camps and the starving children of India and Africa. It provided a convenient escape from the atom bomb, McCarthy, all the disconcerting problems that might spoil the taste of steaks, and cars and color television and backyard swimming pools. It gave us permission to suppress the troubling questions of the larger world and pursue our own personal pleasures. And if the new psychological religion—which made a virtue of sex, removed all sin from private vice, and cast suspicion on high aspirations of the mind and spirit—
had a more devastating personal effect on women than men, nobody planned it that way.
Psychology, long preoccupied with its own scientific inferiority complex, long obsessed with neat little laboratory experiments that gave the illusion of reducing human complexity to the simple measurable behavior of rats in amaze, was transformed into a life- giving crusade that swept across the barren fields of American thought. Freud was the spiritual leader, his theories were the bible.
And how exciting and real and important it all was. Its mysterious complexity was part of its charm to bored Americans. And if some of it remained impenetrably mystifying, who would admit that he could not understand it America became the center of the psychoanalytic movement, as Freudian, Jungian and Adlerian analysts fled from
Vienna and Berlin and new schools flourished on the multiplying neuroses, and dollars, of Americans.
But the practice of psychoanalysis as a therapy was not primarily responsible for the feminine mystique. It was the creation of writers and editors in the mass media, ad-agency motivation researchers, and behind them the popularizers and translators of Freudian thought in the colleges and universities. Freudian and pseudo-Freudian theories settled everywhere, like fine volcanic ash. Sociology, anthropology,
education, even the study of history and literature became permeated and transfigured by Freudian thought. The most zealous missionaries of the feminine mystique were the functionalists, who seized hasty gulps of predigested Freud to start their new departments of
“Marriage and Family Life Education The functional courses in marriage taught American college girls how to play the role of

woman—the old role became anew science. Related movements outside the colleges—parent education, child-study groups, prenatal maternity study groups and mental-health education—spread the new psychological superego throughout the land, replacing bridge and canasta as an entertainment for educated young wives. And this
Freudian superego worked for growing numbers of young and impressionable American women as Freud said the superego works
—to perpetuate the past.
Mankind never lives completely in the present the ideologies of the supergo perpetuate the past, the traditions of the race and the people, which yield but slowly to the influence of the present and to new developments, and, so long as they work through the superego, play an important part in man’s life,
quite independently of economic conditions.
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The feminine mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, overprotective, life-restricting,
future-denying note for women. Girls who grew up playing baseball,
baby-sitting, mastering geometry—almost independent enough,
almost resourceful enough, to meet the problems of the fission-fusion era—were told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll’s house by Victorian prejudice. And their own respect and awe for the authority of science—anthropology, sociology, psychology share that authority now—kept them from questioning the feminine mystique.

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