The Feminine Mystique

identity and are always ready to take on the personality of someone else. They have few personal convictions, and yield readily to the opinions of others. It is chiefly among such patients that coitus can be enjoyed only up to the point of orgasm. They dared not allow themselves uninhibited progression to orgasm with its concomitant loss of control, loss of awareness of the body, or death. In instances of uncertainty about the structure and boundaries of the body image, one might say that the skin does not serve as an envelope which sharply defines the transition from the self to the environment the one gradually merges into the other there is no assurance of being a distinct entity endowed with the strength to give of itself without endangering one’s own integrity.
32.
Lawrence Kubie, “Psychiatric
Implications of the Kinsey Report in
Sexual Behavior in American Society, pp ff:
This simple biologic aim is overlaid by many subtle goals of which the individual himself is usually unaware. Some of these are attainable some are not. Where the majority are attainable, then the end result

of sexual activity is an afterglow of peaceful completion and satisfaction. Where,
however, the unconscious goals are unattainable, then whether orgasm has occurred or not, there remains a post-coital state of unsated need, and sometimes of fear, rage or depression.
33.
Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society,
pp. 239—283, 367—380. See also Erich
Fromm, Escape from Freedom and Man for
Himself; and David Riesman, The Lonely
Crowd.
34.
See Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein
(Women’s Two Roles), who point out that the number of American women now working outside the home seems greater than it is because the base from which the comparison is usually made was unusually small a century ago the proportion of
American women working outside the home was far smaller than in the European countries. In other words, the woman problem in America was probably unusually severe because the displacement of
American women from essential work and identity in society was far more drastic—
primarily because of the extremely rapid growth and industrialization of the

American economy. The women who had grown with the men in the frontier days were banished almost overnight to
anomie—which is a very expressive sociological name for that sense of nonexistence or non-identity suffered by one who has no real place in society—when the important work left the home, where they stayed. In contrast, in France where industrialization was slower, and farms and small family-size shops are still fairly important in the economy, women a century ago still worked in large numbers—in field and shop—and today the majority of Frenchwomen are not full-time housewives in the
American sense of the mystique, for an enormous number still work in the fields, in addition to that one out of three who, as in
America, work in industry, sales, offices,
and professions. The growth of women in
France has much more closely paralleled the growth of the society, since the proportion of Frenchwomen in the professions has doubled in fifty years. It is interesting to note that the feminine mystique does not prevail in France, to the extent that it does here there is a legitimate image in France of a feminine career woman and feminine

intellectual, and Frenchmen seem responsive to women sexually, without equating femininity either with glorified emptiness or that man-eating castrative mom. Nor has the family been weakened—
in actuality or mystique—by women’s work in industry and profession. Myrdal and
Klein show that the French career women continue to have children—but not the great number the new educated American housewives produce.
35.
Sidney Ditzion, Marriage, Morals and

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