The Feminine Mystique

somebody. She becomes a parasite, not only because the things she needs for status come ultimately from her husband’s work, but because she must dominate, own him, for the lack of an identity of her own. If her husband is unable to provide the things she needs for status, he becomes an object of contempt, just as she is contemptuous of him if he cannot fill her sexual needs. Her very dissatisfaction with herself she feels as dissatisfaction with her husband and their sexual relations. As a psychiatrist put it She demands too much satisfaction from her marital relations. Her husband resents it and becomes unable to function sexually with her at all.”
Could this be the reason for the rising tide of resentment among the new young husbands at the girls whose only ambition was to be their wives The old hostility against domineering moms and aggressive career girls may, in the long run, pale before the new male hostility for the girls whose active pursuit of the home career has resulted in anew kind of domination and aggression. To be the tool,
the sex-instrument, the man around the house is evidently no dream-come-true fora man.
In March, 1962, a reporter noted in Redbook anew phenomenon on the suburban scene that young fathers feel trapped”:
Many husbands feel that their wives, firmly quoting authorities on home management, child rearing and married love, have setup a tightly scheduled, narrowly conceived scheme of family living that leaves little room fora husband’s authority or point of view. (A husband said Since I’ve been married, I feel I’ve lost all my guts. I don’t feel like a man anymore. I’m still young, yet I don’t get much out of life. I don’t want advice, but I sometimes feel like something is bursting loose inside) The husbands named their wives as their chief source of frustration, superseding children, employers, finances,
relatives, community and friends. The young father is no longer free to make his own mistakes or to swing his own weight in a family crisis. His wife, having just read Chapter VII,
knows exactly what should be done.
The article goes onto quote asocial worker:

The modern wife’s insistence on achieving sexual satisfaction for herself may pose a major problem for her husband. A husband can be teased, flattered and cajoled into performing as an expert lover. But if his wife scorns and upbraids him as though he had proved unable to carry a trunk up the attic stairs, she is in for trouble. It’s alarming to note that five years after marriage, a sizable number of American husbands have committed adultery and a much larger proportion are seriously tempted to do so. Often, infidelity is less a search for pleasure than a means of self-assertion.
Four years ago, I interviewed a number of wives on a certain pseudo-rural road in a fashionable suburb. They had everything they wanted lovely houses, a number of children, attentive husbands.
Today, on that same road, there area growing spate of dream-houses in which, for various and sometimes unaccountable reasons, the wives now live alone with the children, while the husbands—
doctors, lawyers, account chiefs—have moved to the city. Divorce,
in America, according to the sociologists, is in almost every instance sought by the husband, even if the wife ostensibly gets it There are,
of course, many reasons for divorce, but chief among them seems to be the growing aversion and hostility that men have for the feminine millstones hanging around their necks, a hostility that is not always directed at their wives, but at their mothers, the women they work within fact, women in general.
According to Kinsey, the majority of the American middle-class males sexual outlets are not in relations with their wives after the fifteenth year of marriage at fifty-five, one out of two American men is engaging in extramarital sex This male sex-seeking—the office romance, the casual or intense affair, even the depersonalized sex- for-sex’s-sake satirized in the recent movie The Apartment—is, as often as not, motivated simply by the need to escape from the devouring wife. Sometimes the man seeks the human relationship that got lost when he became merely an appendage to his wife’s aggressive home career Sometimes his aversion to his wife finally makes him seek in sex an object totally divorced from any human relationship. Sometimes, in phantasy more often than in fact, he seeks a girl-child, a Lolita, as sexual object—to escape that grownup

woman who is devoting all her aggressive energies, as well as her sexual energies, to living through him. There is no doubt that male outrage against women—and inevitably, against sex—has increased enormously in the era of the feminine mystique As a man wrote in a letter to the Village Voice , New York’s Greenwich Village newspaper, in February, 1962: It isn’t a problem anymore of whether White is too good to marry Black, or vice versa, but whether women are good enough to marry men, since women are on the way out.”
The public symbol of this male hostility is the retreat of American playwrights and novelists from the problems of the world to an obsession with images of the predatory female, the passive martyred male heroin homo-or heterosexual clothes, the promiscuous childlike heroine, and the physical details of arrested sexual development. It is a special world, but not so special that millions of men and women, boys and girls cannot identify with it. Tennessee
Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer is a flagrant example of this world.
The aging homosexual hero from an old Southern family, haunted by the monstrous birds that devour baby sea turtles, has wasted his life in pursuit of his lost golden youth. He himself has been “eaten”
by his seductively feminine mother, just as, in the end, he is literally eaten by a band of young boys. It is significant that the hero of this play never appears he is without a face, without a body. The only undeniably real character is the man-eating mother. She appears again and again in Williams plays and in the plays and novels of his contemporaries, along with the homosexual sons, the nymphomaniacal daughters, and the revengeful male Don Juans. All of these plays are an agonized shout of obsessed love-hate against women. Significantly, a great many of these plays are written by
Southern writers, where the femininity which the mystique enshrines remains most intact.
This male outrage is the result, surely, of an implacable hatred for the parasitic women who keep their husbands and sons from growing up, who keep them immersed at that sickly level of sexual phantasy.
For the fact is that men, too, are now being drawn away from the large world of reality into the stunted world of sexual phantasy in which their daughters, wives, mothers have been forced to look for
“fulfillment.” And, for men too, sex itself is taking on the unreal character of phantasy—depersonalized, dissatisfying, and finally

inhuman.
Is thereafter all, a link between what is happening to the women in America and increasingly overt male homosexuality According to the feminine mystique, the “masculinization” of American women which was caused by emancipation, education, equal rights, careers,
is producing a breed of increasingly feminine men. But is this the real explanation As a matter of fact, the Kinsey figures showed no increase in homosexuality in the generations which saw the emancipation of women. The Kinsey report revealed in 1948 that percent of American men had had at least some homosexual experience, that 13 percent were predominantly homosexual (for at least three years between 16 and 55), and 4 percent exclusively homosexual—some 2,000,000 men. But there was no evidence that the homosexual group involved more males or fewer males today than it did among older generations.”
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Whether or not there has been an increase in homosexuality in
America, there has certainly been in recent years an increase in its overt manifestations I do not think that this is unrelated to the national embrace of the feminine mystique. For the feminine mystique has glorified and perpetuated in the name of femininity a passive,
childlike immaturity which is passed on from mothers to sons, as well as to daughters. Male homosexuals—and the male Don Juans,
whose compulsion to test their potency is often caused by unconscious homosexuality—are, no less than the female sex-seekers,
Peter Pans, forever childlike, afraid of age, grasping at youth in their continual search for reassurance in some sexual magic.
The role of the mother in homosexuality was pinpointed by Freud and the psychoanalysts. But the mother whose son becomes homosexual is usually not the emancipated woman who competes with men in the world, but the very paradigm of the feminine mystique—a woman who lives through her son, whose femininity is used in virtual seduction of her son, who attaches her son to her with such dependence that he can never mature to love a woman, nor can he, often, cope as an adult with life on his own. The love of men masks his forbidden excessive love for his mother his hatred and revulsion for all women is a reaction to the one woman who kept him from becoming a man. The conditions of this excessive mother-son love are complex. Freud wrote:

In all the cases examined we have ascertained that the later inverts go through in their childhood a phase of very intense but short-lived fixation on the woman (usually the mother) and after overcoming it, they identify themselves with the woman and take themselves as the sexual object that is, proceeding on a narcissistic basis, they look for young men resembling themselves in persons whom they wish to love as their mother loved them.
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Extrapolating from Freud’s insights, one could say that such an excess of love-hate is almost implicit in the relationship of mother and son—when her exclusive role as wife and mother, her relegation to the home, force her to live through her son. Male homosexuality was and is far more common than female homosexuality. The father is not as often tempted or forced by society to live through or seduce his daughter. Not many men become overt homosexuals, but a great many have suppressed enough of this love-hate to feel not only a deep repugnance for homosexuality, but a general and sublimated revulsion for women.
Today, when not only career, but any serious commitment outside the home, are out of bounds for truly feminine housewife-mothers,
the kind of mother-son devotion which can produce latent or overt homosexuality has plenty of room to expand to fill the time available.
The boy smothered by such parasitical mother-love is kept from growing up, not only sexually, but in all ways. Homosexuals often lack the maturity to finish school and make sustained professional commitments. (Kinsey found homosexuality most common among men who do not go beyond high school, and least common among college graduates The shallow unreality, immaturity, promiscuity, lack of lasting human satisfaction that characterize the homosexual’s sex life usually characterize all his life and interests. This lack of personal commitment in work, in education, in life outside of sex, is hauntingly
“feminine.” Like the daughters of the feminine mystique, the sons spend most of their lives in sexual phantasy; the sad “gay”
homosexuals may well feel an affinity with the young housewife sex- seekers.
But the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene is no less ominous than the restless, immature

sex-seeking of the young women who are the aggressors in the early marriages that have become the rule rather than the exception. Nor is it any less frightening than the passivity of the young males who acquiesce to early marriage rather than face the world alone. These victims of the feminine mystique start their search for the solace of sex at an earlier and earlier age. In recent years, I have interviewed a number of sexually promiscuous girls from comfortable suburban families, including a number—and this number is growing
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—of girls who marry in their early teens because they are pregnant. Talking to these girls, and to the professional workers who are trying to help them, one quickly sees that sex, for them, is not sex at all. They have not even begun to experience asexual response, much less
“fulfillment.” They use sex—pseudo-sex—to erase their lack of identity it seldom matters who the boy is the girl almost literally does not see him when she has as yet no sense of herself. Nor will she ever have a sense of herself if she uses the easy rationalizations of the feminine mystique to evade in sex-seeking the efforts that lead to identity.
Early sex, early marriage, has always been a characteristic of underdeveloped civilizations and, in America, of rural and city slums. One of the most striking of Kinsey’s findings, however, was that a delay in sexual activity was less a characteristic of socioeconomic origin than of the ultimate destination—as measured, for instance, by education. A boy from a slum background, who put himself through college and became a scientist or judge, showed the same postponement of sexual activity in adolescence as others who later became scientists or judges, not as others from the same slum background. Boys from the right side of the tracks, however, who did not finish college or become scientists or judges showed more of that earlier sexual activity that was characteristic of the slum.
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Whatever this indicates about the relationship between sex and the intellect, a certain postponement of sexual activity seemed to accompany the growth in mental activity required and resulting from higher education, and the achievement of the professions of highest value to society.
Among the girls in the Kinsey survey, there even seemed to be a relationship between the ultimate level of mental or intellectual growth as measured by education, and sexual satisfaction. Girls who married in their teens—who, in Kinsey’s cases, usually stopped

education with high school—started having sexual intercourse five or six years earlier than girls who continued their education through college or into professional training. This earlier sexual activity did not, however, usually lead to orgasm these girls were still experiencing less sexual fulfillment, in terms of orgasm, five, ten and fifteen years after marriage than those who had continued their education As with the promiscuous girls in the suburbs, early sexual preoccupation seemed to indicate a weak core of self which even marriage did not strengthen.
Is this the real reason for the kind of compulsive sex-seeking seen today in promiscuity, early and late, heterosexual or homosexual Is it a coincidence that the many phenomena of depersonalized sex—sex without self, sex for lack of self—are becoming so rampant in the era when American women are told to live by sex alone Is it a coincidence that their sons and daughters have selves so weak that they resort at an increasingly early age to a dehumanized, faceless sex-seeking? Psychiatrists have explained that the key problem in promiscuity is usually low self-esteem,” which often seems to stem from an excessive mother-child attachment the type of sex-seeking is relatively irrelevant. As Clara Thompson, speaking of homosexuality,
says:
Overt homosexuality may express fear of the opposite sex,
fear of adult responsibility…it may represent a flight from reality into absorption in bodily stimulation very similar to the auto-erotic activities of the schizophrenic, or it maybe a symptom of destructiveness of oneself or others.…People who have a low self-esteem…have a tendency to cling to their own sex because it is less frightening.…However, the above considerations do not invariably produce homosexuality, for the fear of disapproval from the culture and the need to conform often drive these very people into marriage. The fact that one is married by no means proves that one is a mature person. The mother-child attachment is sometimes found to be the important part of the picture. Promiscuity is possibly more frequent among homosexuals than heterosexuals, but its significance in the personality structure is very similar in the two. In both, the chief interest is in genitals and body stimulation. The person chosen to share the experience is not important. The sexual

activity is compulsive and is the sole interest.
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Compulsive sexual activity, homosexual or heterosexual, usually veils alack of potency in other spheres of life. Contrary to the feminine mystique, sexual satisfaction is not necessarily a mark of fulfillment, in woman or man. According to Erich Fromm:
Often psychoanalysts see patients whose ability to love and so be close to others is damaged and yet who function very well sexually and indeed make sexual satisfaction a substitute for love because their sexual potency is their only power in which they have confidence. Their inability to be productive in all other spheres of life and the resulting unhappiness is counterbalanced and veiled by their sexual activities.
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There is a similar undertone to the sex-seeking in colleges, even though the potential ability to be productive in all other spheres of life is high. A psychiatrist consultant for Harvard-Radcliffe students recently pointed out that college girls often seek security in these intense sexual relationships because of their own feelings of inadequacy, when, probably for the first time in their lives, they have to work hard, face real competition, think actively instead of passively—which is not only a strange experience, but almost akin to physical pain.”
The significant facts are the lowered self-esteem and the diminution in zest, energy, and capacity to function in a creative way. The depression seems to be a kind of declaration of dependence, of helplessness, and a muted cry for help as well.
And it occurs at sometime and in varying intensity in practically every girl during her career at college.
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All this may simply represent the first response of a sensitive,
naive adolescent to anew, frighteningly complicated and sophisticated environment the psychiatrist said. But if the adolescent is a girl, she evidently should not, like the boy, be

expected to face the challenge, master the painful work, meet the competition. The psychiatrist considers it normal that the girl seeks her security in love even though the boy himself maybe strikingly immature, adolescent, and dependent”—“a slender reed,
at least from the point of view of the girl’s needs The feminine mystique hides the fact that this early sex-seeking, harmless enough for the boy or girl who looks for no more than it offers, cannot give these young women that clearer image of themselves”—the self- esteem they need and the vigor to lead satisfying and creative lives.”
But the mystique does not always hide from the boy the fact that the girl’s dependence on him is not really sexual, and that it may stifle his growth. Hence the boy’s hostility—even as he helplessly succumbs to the sexual invitation.
A Radcliffe student recently wrote a sensitive account of a boy’s growing bitterness at the girl who cannot study without him—a bitterness not even stilled by the sex with which they nightly evade study together.
She was bending down the corner of a page and he wanted to tell her to stop the little mechanical action irritated him out of all proportion, and he wondered if he was so tense because they hadn’t made love for four days…I bet she needs it now, he thought, that’s why she’s so quivery, close to tears, and maybe that’s why I loused up the exam. But he knew it was not an excuse he felt his resentment heating as he wondered why he had not really reviewed. The clock would never let him forget the amount of time he was wasting…he slammed his books closed and began to stack them together. Eleanor looked up and he saw the terror in her eyes…
“Look, I’m going to walk you back now he said…“I’ve got to get something done tonight”…He remembered that he had along walk back, but as he bent hurriedly to kiss her she slipped her arms around him and he had to pullback hard in order to getaway. She let goat last, and no longer smiling, she whispered:
“Hal, don’t go He hesitated. Please, don’t go, please She strained up to kiss him and when she opened her mouth he felt tricked, for if he put his tongue between her lips, he would not be able to leave. He kissed her, beginning half-consciously to forget that he should go…he pulled her against him, hearing her moan with pain and excitation. Then he drew back and said, his

voice already labored “Isn’t there anywhere we can go?”…She was looking around eagerly and hopefully and he wondered again, how much of her desire was passion and how much grasping girls used sex to get a hold on you, he knew—it was so easy for them to pretend to be excited.
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These are, of course, the first of the children who grew up under the feminine mystique, these youngsters who use sex as such a suspiciously easy solace when they face the first hard hurdles in the race. Why is it so difficult for these youngsters to endure discomfort,
to make an effort, to postpone present pleasure for future long-term goals Sex and early marriage are the easiest way outplaying house at nineteen evades the responsibility of growing up alone. And even if a father tried to get his son to be masculine to be independent,
active, strong, both mother and father encouraged their daughter in that passive, weak, grasping dependence known as “femininity,”
expecting her, of course, to find security in a boy, never expecting her to live her own life.
And so the circle tightens. Sex without self, enshrined by the feminine mystique, casts an ever-darkening shadow over man’s image of woman and woman’s image of herself. It becomes harder for both son and daughter to escape, to find themselves in the world,
to love another inhuman intercourse. The million married before the age of nineteen, in earlier and earlier travesty of sex-seeking, betray an increased immaturity, emotional dependence, and passivity on the part of the newest victims of the feminine mystique. The shadow of sex without self maybe dispelled momentarily in a sunny suburban dream house. But what will these childlike mothers and immature fathers do to their children, in that phantasy paradise where the pursuit of pleasure and things hides the loosening links to complex modern reality What kind of sons and daughters are raised by girls who became mothers before they have ever faced that reality, or sever their links to it by becoming mothers?
There are frightening implications for the future of our nation in the parasitical softening that is being passed onto the new generation of children as a result of our stubborn embrace of the feminine mystique. The tragedy of children acting out the sexual phantasies of their housewife-mothers is only one sign of the progressive dehumanization that is taking place. And in this acting out by the

children, the feminine mystique can finally be seen in all its sick and dangerous obsolescence.

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