The Feminine Mystique

are no longer objects for the acquisitive consumer but are peer-groupers themselves. Today, millions of women,
freed by technology from many household tasks, given by technology many aids to romance, have become pioneers with men on the frontiers of sex. As they become knowing consumers, the anxiety of men lest they fail to satisfy the women also grows….
It is mainly the clinicians who have noted that the men are often less eager now than their wives as sexual consumers The late
Dr. Abraham Stone, whom I interviewed shortly before his death, said that the wives complain more and more of sexually
“inadequate” husbands. Dr. Karl Menninger reports that for every wife who complains of her husband’s excessive sexuality, a dozen wives complain that their husbands are apathetic or impotent. These problems are cited in the mass media as additional evidence that American women are losing their “femininity”—and thus provide new ammunition for the mystique. See John
Kord Lagemann, The Male Sex Redbook,
December, 1956.
2.
Albert Ellis, The Folklore of Sex, New
York, 1961, p. 123.

3.
Seethe amusing parody, The Pious
Pornographers,” by Ray Russell, in The
Permanent Playboy, New York, 1959.
4.
AC. Spectorsky, The Exurbanites, New
York, 1955, p. 223.
5.
Nathan Ackerman, The Psychodynamics of
Family Life, New York, 1958, pp. 112—
127.
6.
Evan Hunter, Strangers When We Meet,
New York, 1958, pp. 231—235.
7.
Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the
Human Female, pp. 353 ff, p. 426.
8.
Doris Menzer-Benaron MD, et al.,
“Patterns of Emotional Recovery from
Hysterectomy,” Psychosomatic Medicine,
XIX, No. 5, September, 1957, pp. 378—
388.
9.
The fact that 75 percent to 85 percent of young mothers in America today feel negative emotions—resentment, grief,
disappointment, outright rejection—when they become pregnant for the first time has been established in many studies. In fact,
the perpetrators of the feminine mystique report findings to reassure young mothers that they are only normal in feeling this strange rejection of pregnancy—and that the only real problem is their guilt over

feeling it. Thus Redbook magazine, in “How
Women Really Feel about Pregnancy”
(November, 1958), reports that the Harvard
School of Public Health found 80 to 85 percent of normal women reject the pregnancy when they become pregnant Long Island
College Clinic found that less than a fourth of women are happy about their pregnancy a New Haven study finds only of 100 women pleased about having a baby. Comments the voice of editorial authority:
The real danger that arises when a pregnancy is unwelcome and filled with troubled feelings is that a woman may become guilty and panic-stricken because she believes her reactions are unnatural or abnormal. Both marital and mother-child relations can be damaged as a result….
Sometimes a mental-health specialist is needed to allay guilt feelings. Nor is there anytime when a normal woman does not have feelings of depression and doubt when she learns that she is pregnant.
Such articles never mention the various studies which indicate that women in other countries, both more and less advanced than the United States, and even American

career women, are less likely to experience this emotional rejection of pregnancy. Depression at pregnancy maybe normal for the housewife-mother in the era of the feminine mystique, but it is not normal to motherhood. As Ruth Benedict said, it is not biological necessity, but our culture which creates the discomforts,
physical and psychological, of the female cycle. See her Continuities and

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