The Feminine Mystique

a blonde senior in cap and gown. Nuclear physics, maybe Modern art The civilizations of Africa Looking at meas if I were some prehistoric dinosaur, she said:
Girls don’t get excited about things like that anymore. We don’t want careers. Our parents expect us to go to college.
Everybody goes. You’re asocial outcast at home if you don’t.
But a girl who got serious about anything she studied—like wanting to goon and do research—would be peculiar,
unfeminine. I guess everybody wants to graduate with a diamond ring on her finger. That’s the important thing.
I discovered an unwritten rule barring shoptalk about courses,
intellectual talk, in some college houses. On the campus, the girls looked as if they were in such a hurry, rushing, rushing. Nobody,
except a few faculty members, sat around talking in the coffee dives or the corner drugstore. We used to sit for hours arguing what-is- truth, art-for-art’s-sake, religion, sex, war and peace, Freud and
Marx, and all the things that were wrong with the world. A cool junior told me:
We never waste time like that. We don’t have bull sessions about abstract things. Mostly, we talk about our dates. Anyhow,
I spend three days a week off campus. Theresa boy I’m interested in. I want to be with him.
A dark-eyed senior in a raincoat admitted, as a kind of secret addiction, that she liked to wander around the stacks in the library and pickup books that interest me.”
You learn freshman year to turn up your nose at the library.
Lately though—well, it hits you, that you won’t beat college next year. Suddenly you wish you’d read more, talked more,
taken hard courses you skipped. So you’d know what you’re interested in. But I guess those things don’t matter when you’re married. You’re interested in your home and teaching your children how to swim and skate, and at night you talk to your

husband. I think we’ll be happier than college women used to be.
These girls behaved as if college were an interval to begotten through impatiently, efficiently, bored but businesslike, so real life could begin. And real life was when you married and lived in a suburban house with your husband and children. Was it quite natural,
this boredom, this businesslike haste Was it real, this preoccupation with marriage The girls who glibly disclaimed any serious interest in their education with talk of when I’m married often were not seriously interested in any particular man, I discovered. The ones who were rushing to get their college work done, to spend three days a week off campus, sometimes had no real date they wanted to keep.
In my time, popular girls who spent many weekends at Yale were often just as serious about their work as the brains Even if you were temporarily, or quite seriously, in love, during the week at college you lived the life of the mind—and found it absorbing,
demanding, sometimes exciting, always real. Could these girls who now must work so much harder, have so much more ability to get into such a college against the growing competition, really be so bored with the life of the mind?
Gradually, I sensed the tension, the almost sullen protest, the deliberate effort—or effort deliberately avoided—behind their cool façades. Their boredom was not quite what it seemed. It was a defense, a refusal to become involved. As a woman who unconsciously thinks sex a sin is not there, is somewhere else, as she goes through the motions of sex, so these girls are somewhere else.
They go through the motions, but they defend themselves against the impersonal passions of mind and spirit that college might instill in them—the dangerous nonsexual passions of the intellect.
A pretty sophomore explained to me:
The idea is to be casual, very sophisticated. Don’t be too enthusiastic about your work or anything. People who take things too seriously are more or less pitied or laughed at. Like wanting to sing, being so intent about it you make other people uncomfortable. An oddball.

Another girl elaborated:
They might feel sorry for you. I think you can be serious about your work and not be looked down upon as a total intellectual, if you stop now and then and think isn’t this too hysterical. Because you do it with tongue in cheek, it’s O.K.
A girl with a fraternity pinon her pink sweater said:
Maybe we should take it more seriously. But nobody wants to graduate and get into something where they can’t use it. If your husband is going to bean organization man, you can’t be too educated. The wife is awfully important for the husband’s career. You can’t be too interested in art, or something like that.
A girl who had dropped out of honors in history told me:
I loved it. I got so excited about my work I would sometimes go into the library at eight in the morning and not come out till ten at night. I even thought I might want to goon to graduate school or law school and really use my mind. Suddenly, I was afraid of what would happen. I wanted to lead a rich full life. I
want to marry, have children, have a nice house. Suddenly I felt,
what am I beating my brains out for. So this year I’m trying to lead a well-rounded life. I take courses, but I don’t read eight books and still feel like reading the ninth. I stop and go to the movies. The other way was harder, and more exciting. I don’t know why I stopped. Maybe I just lost courage.
The phenomenon does not seem confined to any particular college one finds it among the girls in any college, or department of a college, which still exposes students to the life of the mind. A
junior from a Southern university said:
Ever since I was a little girl, science has had a fascination for me. I was going to major in bacteriology and go into cancer

research. Now I’ve switched to home economics. I realized I
don’t want to go into something that deep. If I went on, I’d have been one of those dedicated people. I got so caught up in the first two years, I never got out of the laboratory. I loved it, but I
was missing so many things. If the girls were off swimming in the afternoon, I’d be working on my smears and slides. There aren’t any girls in bacteriology here, sixty boys and me in the lab. I couldn’t get on with the girls anymore who don’t understand science. I’m not so intensely interested in home economics as I was in bacteriology, but I realize it was better for me to change, and get outwith people. I realized I shouldn’t be that serious. I’ll go home and work in a department store until
I get married.
The mystery tome is not that these girls defend themselves against an involvement with the life of the mind, but that educators should be mystified by their defense, or blame it on the student culture ascertain educators do. The one lesson a girl could hardly avoid learning, if she went to college between 1945 and 1960, was not to get interested, seriously interested, in anything besides getting married and having children, if she wanted to be normal, happy,
adjusted, feminine, have a successful husband, successful children,
and a normal, feminine, adjusted, successful sex life. She might have learned some of this lesson at home, and some of it from the other girls in college, but she also learned it, incontrovertibly, from those entrusted with developing her critical, creative intelligence her college professors.
A subtle and almost unnoticed change had taken place in the academic culture for American women in the last fifteen years the new sex-direction of their educators. Under the influence of the feminine mystique, some college presidents and professors charged with the education of women had become more concerned with their students future capacity for sexual orgasm than with their future use of trained intelligence. In fact, some leading educators of women began to concern themselves, conscientiously, with protecting students from the temptation to use their critical, creative intelligence
—by the ingenious method of educating it not to be critical or creative. Thus higher education added its weight to the process by which American women during this period were shaped increasingly

to their biological function, decreasingly to the fulfillment of their individual abilities. Girls who went to college could hardly escape those bits and pieces of Freud and Margaret Mead, or avoid a course in Marriage and Family Life with its functional indoctrination on
“how to play the role of woman.”
The new sex-direction of women’s education was not, however,
confined to any specific course or academic department. It was implicit in all the social sciences but more than that, it became apart of education itself, not only because the English professor, or the guidance counselor, or the college president read Freud and Mead,
but because education was the prime target of the new mystique—the education of American girls with, or like, boys. If the Freudians and the functionalists were right, educators were guilty of defeminizing
American women, of dooming them to frustration as housewives and mothers, or to celibate careers, to life without orgasm. It was a damning indictment many college presidents and educational theorists confessed their guilt without a murmur and fell into the sex- directed line. There were a few cries of outrage, of course, from the old-fashioned educators who still believed the mind was more important than the marriage bed, but they were often near retirement and soon to be replaced by younger, more thoroughly sex- indoctrinated teachers, or they were so wrapped up in their special subjects that they had little say in overall school policies.
The general educational climate was ripe for the new sex- directed line, with its emphasis on adjustment. The old aim of education, the development of intelligence through vigorous mastery of the major intellectual disciplines, was already in disfavor among the child-centered educators. Teachers College at Columbia was the natural breeding ground for educational functionalism. As psychology and anthropology and sociology permeated the total scholarly atmosphere, education for femininity also spread from Mills,
Stephens and the finishing schools (where its basis was more traditional than theoretical) to the proudest bastions of the women’s
Ivy League, the colleges which pioneered higher education for women in America, and were noted for their uncompromising intellectual standards.
Instead of opening new horizons and wider worlds to able women, the sex-directed educator moved into teach them adjustment within the world of home and children. Instead of teaching truths to counter the popular prejudices of the pastor critical ways of thinking

against which prejudice cannot survive, the sex-directed educator handed girls a sophisticated soup of uncritical prescriptions and presentiments, far more binding on the mind and prejudicial to the future than all the traditional do’s and don’ts. Most of it was done consciously and for the best of helpful reasons by educators who really believed the mystique as the social scientists handed it to them.
If a male professor or college president did not find this mystique a positive comfort, a confirmation of his own prejudices, he still had no reason not to believe it.
The few college presidents and professors who were women either fell into line or had their authority—as teachers and as women
—questioned. If they were spinsters, if they had not had babies, they were forbidden by the mystique to speak as women. (Modern

Download 2.16 Mb.

Share with your friends: