The Feminine Mystique
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| Woman: The Lost Sex would forbid them even to teach) The brilliant scholar, who did not marry but inspired many generations of college women to the pursuit of truth, was sullied as an educator of women. She was not named president of the women’s college whose intellectual tradition she carried to its highest point the girls’ education was put in the hands of a handsome, husbandly man, more suitable to indoctrinating girls for their proper feminine role. The scholar often left the women’s college to head a department in a great university, where the potential Ph.D.’s were safely men, for whom the lure of scholarship, the pursuit of truth, was not deemed a deterrent to sexual fulfillment. In terms of the new mystique, the woman scholar was suspect, simply by virtue of being one. She was not just working to support her home she must have been guilty of an unfeminine commitment, to have kept working in her field all those hard, grinding, ill-paid years to the PhD. In self-defense she sometimes adopted frilly blouses or another innocuous version of the feminine protest. (At psychoanalytic conventions, an observer once noticed, the lady analysts camouflage themselves with pretty, flowery, smartly feminine hats that would make the casual suburban housewife look positively masculine.) M.D. or PhD, those hats and frilly blouses say, let nobody question our femininity. But the fact is, their femininity was questioned. One famous women’s college adopted in defense the slogan, We are not educating women to be scholars we are educating them to be wives and mothers (The girls themselves finally got so tired of repeating this slogan in full that they abbreviated it to “WAM.”) In building the sex-directed curriculum, not everyone went as far as Lynn White, former president of Mills College, but if you started with the premise that women should no longer be educated like men, but for their role as women, you almost had to end with his curriculum— which amounted to replacing college chemistry with a course in advanced cooking. The sex-directed educator begins by accepting education’s responsibility for the frustration, general and sexual, of American women. On my desk lies a letter from a young mother, a few years out of college: “I have come to realize that I was educated to be a successful man and must now learn by myself to be a successful woman.” The basic irrelevance of much of what passes as women’s education in America could not be more compactly phrased…. The failure of our educational system to take into account these simple and basic differences between the life patterns of average men and women is at least in part responsible for the deep discontent and restlessness which affects millions of women…. It would seem that if women are to restore their self-respect they must reverse the tactics of the older feminism which indignantly denied inherent differences in the intellectual and emotional tendencies of men and women. Only by recognizing and insisting upon the importance of such differences can women save themselves, in their own eyes, of conviction as inferiors. 4 The sex-directed educator equates as masculine our vastly overrated cultural creativity our uncritical acceptance of ‘progress’ as good in itself egotistic individualism “innovation,” “abstract construction quantitative thinking”—of which, of course, the dread symbol is either communism or the atom bomb. Against these, equated as feminine, are the sense of persons, of the immediate, of intangible qualitative relationships, an aversion for statistics and quantities the intuitive the emotional and all the forces that cherish and conserve what is good, true, beautiful, useful, and holy.” A feminized higher education might include sociology, anthropology, psychology. (These are studies little concerned with the laurel-crowned genius of the strongman praises the educational protector of femininity. They are devoted to exploring the quiet and unspectacular forces of society and of the mind. They embrace the feminine preoccupation with conserving and cherishing) It would hardly include either pure science (since abstract theory and quantitative thinking are unfeminine) or fine art, which is masculine, “flamboyant and abstract The applied or minor arts, however, are feminine ceramics, textiles, work shaped more by the hand than the brain. Women love beauty as much as men do but they want a beauty connected with the processes of living…the hand is as remarkable and as worthy of respect as the brain.” The sex-directed educator cites approvingly Cardinal Tisserant’s saying, Women should be educated so that they can argue with their husbands Let us stop altogether professional training for women, he insists all women must be educated to be housewives. Even home economics and domestic science, as they are now taught at college, are masculine because they have been pitched at the level of professional training.” 5 Here is a truly feminine education: One may prophesy with confidence that as women begin to make their distinctive wishes felt in curricular terms, not merely will every women’s college and coeducational institution offer a firm nuclear course in the Family, but from it will radiate curricular series dealing with food and nutrition, textiles and clothing, health and nursing, house planning and interior decoration, garden design and applied botany, and child- development. Would it be impossible to present a beginning course in foods as exciting and as difficult to workup after college, as a course in post-Kantian philosophy would be?… Let’s abandon talk of proteins, carbohydrates and the like, save inadvertently, as for example, when we point out that a British hyper-boiled Brussel sprout is not merely inferior in flavor and texture, but in vitamine content. Why not study the theory and preparation of a Basque paella, of a well-marinated shish kebob, lamb kidneys sauteed in sherry, an authoritative curry, the use of herbs, even such simple sophistications as serving cold artichokes with fresh milk. 6 The sex-directed educator is hardly impressed by the argument that a college curriculum should not be contaminated or diluted with subjects like cooking or manual training, which can be taught successfully at the high-school level. Teach them to the girls in high school, and with greater intensity and imagination again in college. Boys, also, should get some “family-minded” education, but not in their valuable college time early high-school manual training is enough to enable them, in future years to work happily at a bench in the garage or in the garden, surrounded by an admiring circle of children…or at the barbecue.” 7 This kind of education, in the name of life-adjustment, became a fact on many campuses, high-school as well as college. It was not dreamed up to turn back the growth of women, but it surely helped. When American educators finally began to investigate the waste of our national resources of creative intelligence, they found that the lost Einsteins, Schweitzers, Roosevelts, Edisons, Fords, Fermis, Frosts were feminine. Of the brightest forty percent of US. high-school graduates, only half went onto college of the half who stopped, two Download 2.16 Mb. Share with your friends:
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