The Feminine Mystique

kept many women of high ability from attempting it. But in 1962, the Harvard
Graduate School of Education letdown this barrier to encourage more able housewives to become teachers. A plan was also announced in New York to permit women doctors to do their psychiatric residencies and postgraduate work on a part-time basis,
taking into account their maternal responsibilities.
10.
Virginia L. Senders, The Minnesota Plan for Women’s Continuing Education in
“Unfinished Business—Continuing
Education for Women The Educational
Record, American Council on Education,
October, 1961, pp. 10 ff.
11.
Mary Bunting, The Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study Ibid., pp. 19 ff.
Radcliffe’s president reflects the feminine mystique when she deplores the use the first college graduates made of their advanced educations. Too often and understandably, they became crusaders and reformers, passionate, fearless, articulate,
but also, at times, loud. A stereotype of the educated women grew up in the popular mind and concurrently, a prejudice against both the stereotype and the education.”

Similarly she states:
That we have not made any respectable attempt to meet the special educational needs of women in the past is the clearest possible evidence of the fact that our educational objectives have been geared exclusively to the vocational patterns of men. In changing that emphasis, however,
our goal should not be to equip and encourage women to compete with men….
Women, because they are not generally the principal breadwinners, can be perhaps most useful as the trailblazers, working along the bypaths, doing the unusual job that men cannot afford to gamble on. There is always room on the fringes even when competition in the intellectual marketplaces is keen.
That women use their education today primarily on the fringes is a result of the feminine mystique, and of the prejudices against women it masks it is doubtful whether these remaining barriers will ever be overcome if even educators are going to discourage able women from becoming
“crusaders and reformers, passionate,
fearless, articulate,”—and loud enough to be heard.
12.
Time, November, 1961. See also

Housewives at the $2 Window New York
Times Magazine, April 1, 1962, which describes how babysitting services and
“clinics” for suburban housewives are now being offered at the race tracks.
13.
See remarks of State Assemblywoman
Dorothy Bell Lawrence, Republican, of
Manhattan, reported in the New York Times,
May 8, 1962. The first woman to be elected a Republican district leader in New York
City, she explained I was doing all the work, so I told the county chairman that I
wanted to be chairman. He told me it was against the rules fora woman to hold the post, but then he changed the rules In the
Democratic reform movement in New
York, women are also beginning to assume leadership posts commensurate with their work, and the old segregated “ladies”
auxiliaries” and “women’s committees are beginning to go.
14.
Among more than a few women I
interviewed who had, as the mystique advises, completely renounced their own ambitions to become wives and mothers, I
noticed a repeated history of miscarriages.
In several cases, only after the woman finally resumed the work she had given up,

or went back to graduate school, was she able to carry to term the long-desired second or third child.
15.
American women’s life expectancy—75
years—is the longest of women anywhere in the world. But as Myrdal and Klein point out in Women’s Two Roles, there is increasing recognition that, inhuman beings, chronological age differs from biological age at the chronological age of, the divergencies in biological age maybe as wide as between the chronological ages of 50 and 90.” The new studies of aging in humans indicate that those who have the most education and who live the most complex and active lives, with deep interests and readiness for new experience and learning, do not get old in the sense that others do. A close study of biographies (See Charlotte Buhler, “The
Curve of Life as Studied in Biographies,”
Journal of Applied Psychology, XIX,
August, 1935, pp. 405 ff) reveals that in the latter half of life, the person’s productivity becomes independent of his biological equipment, and, in fact, is often at a higher level than his biological efficiency—that is,
if the person has emerged from biological

living. Where spiritual factors dominated activity, the highest point of productivity came in the latter part of life where
“physical facts were decisive in the life of an individual, the high point was reached earlier and the psychological curve was then more closely comparable to the biological.
The study of educated women cited above revealed much less suffering at menopause than is considered normal in America today. Most of these women whose horizons had not been confined to physical housekeeping and their biological role, did not, in their fifties and sixties feel “old.”
Many reported in surprise that they suffered much less discomfort at menopause than their mothers experience had led them to expect. Therese Benedek suggests (in
“Climacterium: A Developmental Phase,”
Psychoanalytical Quarterly, XIX, 1950, p) that the lessened discomfort, and burst of creative energy many women now experience at menopause, is at least in part due to the emancipation of women.
Kinsey’s figures seem to indicate that women who have by education been emancipated from purely biological living,
experience the full peak of sexual

fulfillment much later in life than had been expected, and in fact, continue to experience it through the forties and past menopause. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is Colette—that truly human, emancipated Frenchwoman who lived and loved and wrote with so little deference to her chronological age that she said on her eightieth birthday If only one were 58, because at that time one is still desired and full of hope for the future.”

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