The Feminine Mystique
Download 2.16 Mb. View original pdf
|
| 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 case histories of American women showed that the number of females reaching orgasm in marriage, and the number of females reaching orgasm nearly 100 percent 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 onto graduate or professional school, was far more likely to achieve full orgasm nearly 100 percent 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 These data are not in accord with a preliminary, unpublished calculation which we made some years ago.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 apolitical 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 workingwomen 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 freelancing, 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 Actually, this mother, a woman with professional training who lived in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood, was equating herself with mothers in that study who, it turned out, not only lived in poor socioeconomic circumstances, but had in many cases been juvenile delinquents themselves. And they often had husbands who were emotionally disturbed. The researchers who did that study suggested that the sons of these women had emotional conflicts because the mother was motivated to her sporadic work not so much to supplement family income as to escape household and maternal responsibilities But another specialist, analyzing the same findings, thought the basic cause both of the mother’s sporadic employment and the son’s delinquency was the emotional instability of both parents. Whatever the reason, the situation was in noway comparable to that of most educated women who read themselves into it. In fact, as Dr. Stolz shows, many studies misinterpreted as proof that women cannot combine careers and motherhood actually indicate that, where other conditions are equal, the children of mothers who work because they want to are less likely to be disturbed, have problems in school, or to “lack a sense of personal worth than housewives children. The early studies of children of working mothers were done in an era when few married women worked, at day nurseries which served working mothers who were without husbands due to death, divorce or desertion. These studies were done by social workers and economists in order to press for such reforms as mothers pensions. The disturbances and higher death rate in such children were not found in studies done in this recent decade, when of the millions of married women working, only 1 out of 8 was not living with her husband. In one such recent study, based on 2,000 mothers, the only significant differences were that more housewife-mothers stated “the children make me nervous than working mothers and the housewives seemed to have more children A famous study in Chicago which had seemed to show more mothers of delinquents were working outside the home, turned out to show only that more delinquents come from broken homes. Another study of 400 seriously disturbed children (of a school population of 16,000) showed that where no broken home was involved, three times as many of the disturbed children’s mothers were housewives as working mothers. Other studies showed that children of working mothers were less likely to be either extremely aggressive or extremely inhibited, less likely to do poorly in school, or to lack a sense of personal worth than children of housewives, and that mothers who worked were more likely to be delighted at becoming pregnant, and less likely to suffer conflict over the “role of mother than housewives. There also seemed to be a closer and more positive relationship to children among working mothers who liked their work, than among housewife-mothers or mothers who did not like their work. And a study during the thirties of college- educated mothers, who are more able to choose work they like, showed no adverse effect of their employment on their marital and emotional adjustment, or on number or seriousness of children’s problems. In general, women who work shared only two attributes they were more likely to have higher education and to live in cities. 10 In our own era, however, as droves of educated women have become suburban housewives, who among them did not worry that their child’s bedwetting, thumbsucking, overeating, refusal to eat, withdrawal, lack of friends, inability to be alone, aggressiveness, timidity, slow reading, too much reading, lack of discipline, rigidity, inhibition, exhibitionism, sexual precociousness, or sexual lack of interest was a sign of incipient neurosis. If not actual abnormality or actual delinquency, they must beat least signs of parental failure, portents of future neurosis. Sometimes they were. Parenthood, and especially motherhood, under the Freudian spotlight, had to become a full-time job and career if not a religious cult. One false step could mean disaster. Without careers, without any commitment other than their homes, mothers could devote every moment to their children; their full attention could be given to finding signs of incipient neurosis—and perhaps to producing it. In every case history, of course, you can always find significant facts about the mother, especially if you are looking for facts, or memories, of those supposedly crucial first five years. In America, after all, the mother is always there she is supposed to be there. Is the fact that they are always there, and there only as mothers, somehow linked to the neuroses of their children Many cultures pass on their conflicts to children through the mothers, but in the modern cultures of the civilized world, not many educate their strongest, ablest women to make a career of their own children. Not long ago Dr. Spock confessed, a bit uneasily, that Russian children, whose mothers usually have some purpose in their lives besides motherhood—they work in medicine, science, education, industry, government, art—seemed somehow more stable, adjusted, mature, than American children, whose full-time mothers do nothing but worry about them. Could it be that Russian women are somehow better mothers because they have a serious purpose in their own lives At least, said the good Dr. Spock, these mothers are more sure of themselves as mothers. They are not, like American mothers, dependent on the latest word from the experts, the newest childcare fad It is clearly a terrible burden on Dr. Spock to have mothers so unsure of themselves that they bring up their children literally according to his book—and call piteously to him for help when the book does not work. No headlines marked the growing concern of psychiatrists with the problem of dependence in American children and grownup children. The psychiatrist David Levy, in a very famous study of “maternal overprotection,” studied in exhaustive detail twenty mothers who had damaged their children to a pathological extent by “maternal infantilization, indulgence and overprotection.” 12 Atypical div case was a twelve-year-old boy who had infantile temper tantrums in his eleventh year when his mother refused to butter his bread for him. He still demanded her help in dressing. He summed up his requirements in life very neatly by saying that his mother would butter his bread for him until he married, after which his wife would do so…” All these mothers—according to physiological indexes such as menstrual flow, breast milk, and early indications of a maternal type of behavior”—were unusually strong in their feminine or maternal instinctual base, if it can be described that way. All but two of the twenty, as Dr. Levy himself described it, were responsible, stable and aggressive the active or aggressive feature of the responsible behavior was regarded as a distinctly maternal type of behavior it characterized the lives of 18 of the 20 overprotecting mothers since childhood In none was there any tinge of unconscious rejection of the child or of motherhood. What made these twenty strongly maternal women (evidently strength, even aggression, is not masculine when a psychiatrist considers it part of the maternal instinct) produce such pathologically infantile sons For one thing, the child was utilized as a means of satisfying an abnormal craving for love These mothers freshened up, put lipstick on when the son was due home from school, as a wife fora husband or a girl for her date, because they had no other life besides the child. Most, Levy said, had thwarted career ambitions. The maternal overprotection” was actually caused by these mothers’ strength, by their basic feminine energy—responsible, stable, active and aggressive—producing pathology in the child when the mother was blocked from other channels of expression.” Most of these mothers also had dominating mothers and submissive fathers of their own, and their husbands had also been obedient sons of dominating mothers in Freudian terms, the castrativeness all around was rather extreme. The sons and mothers were given intensive psychoanalytical therapy for years, which, it was hoped, would break the pathological cycle. But when, some years after the original study, research workers checked on these women and the children they had pathologically overprotected, the results were not quite what was expected. Inmost cases psychotherapy had not been effective. Yet some of the children, miraculously, did not become pathological adults not because of therapy, but because by circumstance the mother had acquired an interest or activity in her own life and had simply stopped living the child’s life for him. Ina few other cases, the child survived because, through his own ability, he had staked out an area of independence of which his mother was not a part. Other clues to the real problem of the mother-child relationship in America have been seen by social scientists without ever penetrating the mystique. A sociologist named Arnold Green almost by accident discovered another dimension to the relationship between nurturing mother love, or its lack, and neurosis. It seems that in the Massachusetts industrial town where Green grew up an entire generation was raised under psychological conditions which should have been traumatic conditions of irrational, vengeful, even brutal parental authority, and a complete lack of love between parent and child. The parents, Polish immigrants, tried to enforce rigid old-world rules which their American children did not respect. The children’s ridicule, anger, contempt made the bewildered parents resort to a “vengeful, personal, irrational authority which no longer finds support in the future hopes and ambitions of the children.” In exasperation and fear of losing all control over their Americanized youngsters, parents apply the fist and whip rather indiscriminately. The sound of blows, screams, howls, vexations, wails of torment and hatred are so commonplace along the rows of dilapidated millhouses that the passersby pay them scant attention. 13 Surely, here were the seeds of future neuroses, as all good post- Freudian parents in America understand them. But to Green’s amazement, when he went back and checked as a sociologist on the neuroses which according to the book must surely be flourishing, he found no known case of Army rejection because of psychoneurosis in the local Polish community, and in the overt behavior of an entire generation in the village no expression of anxiety, guilty feelings, rigidity of response, repressed hostility—the various symptoms described as characteristic of the basic neurotic character Green wondered. Why didn’t those children become neurotic, why weren’t they destroyed by that brutal, irrational parental authority? They had none of that constant and watchful nurturing love that is urged on middle-class mothers by the child psychologizers; their mothers, like their fathers, worked all day in the factory they had been left in the care of older sisters or brothers, had run free infields and woods, had avoided their parents wherever possible. In these families, stress was placed upon work, rather than personal sentiment respect, not love is the tie that binds Demonstrations of affection were not altogether lacking, Green said, but they had little in common with the definitions of parent-child love found in the middle-class women’s magazines.” It occurred to the sociologist that perhaps the very absence of this omnipresent nurturing mother love might explain why these children did not suffer the neurotic symptoms so commonly found in the sons of middle-class parents. The Polish parents authority, however brutal and irrational, was external to the core of the self as Green put it. The Polish parents did not have the technique or opportunity to “absorb the personality of the child Perhaps, Green suggested, “lack of love and irrational authority do not in themselves cause neurosis, but only within a certain context of personality absorption”—the physical and emotional blanketing of the child which brings about that slavish dependence upon the parents found among children of the native white American urban college-educated middle class. Is lack of love the cause of neurosis, or the middle-class parental nurturing which absorbs the child’s independent self, and creates in him an excessive need for love Psychoanalysts had always concentrated on the seeds of neuroses Green wanted to find out what there is to being a modern middle-class parent that fertilizes the soil of the child’s neurosis, however the individual seed is planted.” As usual, the arrow pointed unerringly to the mother. But Green was not concerned with helping the modern American mother adjust to her role on the contrary, he found that she lacked any real “role” as a woman in modern society. She enters marriage and perhaps bears a child with no definite role and series of functions, as formerly. She feels inferior to man because comparatively she has been and is more restricted. The extent of the actual emancipation of women has been commonly exaggerated…. Through a good marriage the middle-class girl attains far more status than is possible through a career of her own. But the period of phantom dalliance with a career, or an embarkation upon one, leave her ill-fitted for the drudgery of housecleaning, diapers, and the preparation of meals. The mother has little to do, in or out of the home she is her single child’s sole companion. Modern scientific childcare enforces a constant supervision and diffused worrying over the child’s health, eating spinach, and ego development this is complicated by the fact that much energy is spent forcing early walking, toilet-training, talking, because in an intensively competitive milieu middle- class parents from the day of birth are constantly comparing their own child’s development with that of the neighbors’ children. Perhaps, Green speculates, middle-class mothers …have made love of supreme importance in their relation to the child, theirs for him and his for them, partly because of the love-complex of our time, which is particularly ramified within the middle class, and partly as a compensation for the many sacrifices they have made for the child. The child’s need for love is experienced precisely because he has been conditioned to need it…conditioned to a slavish emotional dependence…. Not the need for parental love, but the constant threat of its withdrawal after the child has been conditioned to the need, lies at the root of the most characteristic modern neuroses Mamma won’t like you if you don’t eat your spinach, or stop dribbling your milk, or get down from that davenport. To the extent that a child’s personality has been absorbed, he will be thrown into a panic by this sort of treatment. In such a child, a disapproving glance may produce more terror—than a twenty-minute lashing in little Stanislaus Wojcik. Green was only concerned with mothers in terms of their effect on their sons. But it occurred to him that personality absorption alone cannot, after all, explain neurosis. Because otherwise, he says, middle-class women of the previous generation would all have suffered such neuroses—and nobody recorded such suffering in those women. Certainly the personality of the middle-class girl of the late nineteenth century was absorbed by her parents, by the demands of “love” and unquestioning obedience. However, the rate of neurosis under those conditions was probably not too high the sociologist concludes, because even though the woman’s own personality was “absorbed,” it was consistently absorbed within a role which changed relatively slightly from childhood into adolescence, courtship, and finally into marriage she never could be her own person. The modern middle-class boy, on the other hand, is forced to compete with others, to achieve—which demands a certain degree of independence, firmness of purpose, aggressiveness, self-assertion. Thus, in the boy, the mother-nourished need for everyone to love him, the inability to erect his own values and purposes is neurotic, but not in the girl. It is provocative, this speculation made by a sociologist in but it never penetrated far beyond the inner circles of social theory, never permeated the bulwarks of the feminine mystique, despite increasing national awareness that something was wrong with American mothers. Even this sociologist, who managed to get behind the mystique and see children in terms other than their need for more mother love, was concerned only with the problem of the sons. But was not the real implication that the role of the middle-class American housewife forces many a mother to smother, absorb, the personality of both her sons and daughters Many saw the tragic waste of American sons who were made incapable of achievement, individual values, independent action but they did not see as tragic the waste of the daughters, or of the mothers to whom it happened generations earlier. If a culture does not expect human maturity from its women, it does not see its lack as a waste, or as a possible cause of neurosis or conflict. The insult, the real reflection on our culture’s definition of the role of women, is that as a nation we only noticed that something was wrong with women when we saw its effects on their sons. Is it surprising that we misunderstood what was really wrong? How could we understand it, in the static terms of functionalism and adjustment Educators and sociologists applauded when the personality of the middle-class girl was consistently absorbed from childhood through adulthood by her role as woman Long live the role, if adjustment is served. The waste of a human self was not considered a phenomenon to be studied in women—only the frustration caused by cultural inconsistencies in role-conditioning,” as the great social scientist Ruth Benedict described the plight of American women. Even women themselves, who felt the misery, the helplessness of their lack of self, did not understand the feeling it became the problem that has no name. And in their shame and guilt they turned again to their children to escape the problem. So the circle completes itself, from mother to sons and daughters, generation after generation. The unremitting attack on women which has become an American preoccupation in recent years might also stem from the same escapist motives that sent men and women back to the security of the home. Mother love is said to be sacred in America, but with all the reverence and lip service she is paid, mom is a pretty safe target, no matter how correctly or incorrectly her failures are interpreted. No one has ever been blacklisted or fired for an attack on the American woman Apart from the psychological pressures from mothers or wives, there have been plenty of nonsexual pressures in the America of the last decade—the compromising, never-ceasing competition, the anonymous and often purposeless work in the big organization—that also kept a man from feeling like a man. Safer to take it out on his wife and his mother than to recognize a failure in himself or in the sacred American way of life. The men were not always kidding when they said their wives were lucky to be able to stay home all day. It was also soothing to rationalize the rat race by telling themselves that they were in it for the wife and kids And so men recreated their own childhood in suburbia, and made mothers of their wives. Men fell for the mystique without a murmur of dissent. It promised them mothers for the rest of their lives, both as a reason for their being and as an excuse for their failures. Is it so strange that boys who grow up with too much mother love become men who can never get enough? But why did women sit still for this barrage of blame When a culture has erected barrier after barrier against women as separate selves when a culture has erected legal, political, social, economic and educational barriers to women’s own acceptance of maturity— even after most of those barriers are down it is still easier fora woman to seek the sanctuary of the home. It is easier to live through her husband and children than to make a road of her own in the world. For she is the daughter of that same mom who made it so hard for girl as well as boy to grow up. And freedom is a frightening thing. It is frightening to grow up finally and be free of passive dependence. Why should a woman bother to be anything more than a wife and mother if all the forces of her culture tell her she doesn’t have to, will be better off not to, grow up? And so the American woman made her mistaken choice. She ran back home again to live by sex alone, trading in her individuality for security. Her husband was drawn in after her, and the door was shut against the outside world. They began to live the pretty lie of the feminine mystique, but could either of them really believe it She was, after all, an American woman, an irreversible product of a culture that stops just short of giving her a separate identity. He was, after all, an American man whose respect for individuality and freedom of choice are his nation’s pride. They went to school together he knows who she is. Does his meek willingness to wax the floor and wash the dishes when he comes home tired on the 6:55 hide from both their guilty awareness of the reality behind the pretty lie? What keeps them believing it, in spite of the warning signs that have cropped up allover the suburban lot What keeps the women home? What force in our culture is strong enough to write “Occupation: housewife” so large that all the other possibilities for women have been almost obscured? Powerful forces in this nation must be served by those pretty domestic pictures that stare at us everywhere, forbidding a woman to use her own abilities in the world. The preservation of the feminine mystique in this sense could have implications that are not sexual at all. When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women’s passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell. Download 2.16 Mb. Share with your friends:
|