The Feminine Mystique
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| concerns with life, beyond the dead abstractions, into politics, and not just letters. And so, today, women are no longer a dark continent in literature or any academic discipline, though some feminist scholars continue to debate victim history Ina review of The Image of Man The Creation of Modern Masculinity by the eminent historian George L. Mosse (The New Republic, June 10, 1996), Roy Porter says: What remains hidden from history today is the male. Not that the accomplishments of men have been neglected. Historical research has always centered on men’s lives—tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman…The very term “men” could automatically serve a double function, referring equally to males or humans…when those who strutted on the historical stage were almost invariably male. Being a man— performing in the theater of works, politics, power—was simply assumed to be natural and when allegedly male traits such as fighting were occasionally questioned by pacifists or protesters, the dead white European males dominating the academy and the airwaves were deft at belittling such criticisms as hysterical or utopian, on the grounds that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. It was the women’s movement, not surprisingly, which first put maleness under cross-examination…. But the books so far that take on the masculine mystique and the so-called “men’s studies and “men’s movement have too often been literal copies in reverse of “women’s lib”—and thus, by definition, inauthentic. Ora revisionist desperate embrace of the outmoded, stunted, brutal youth-arrested machismo that still in America seems to define masculinity. Robert Bly in his poetry may exhort men to tears, but in those forest camps he led them to tribal chest-thumping, breast-beating exercises in caveman male impersonation, banging those drums in their fake-lion loincloths. The gun-obsessed militiamen have threatened the very foundation of society with that obsolete masculinity. We feminists have become so obsessed with the liberating force of our own authenticity, breaking through that obsolete feminine mystique, embracing the new possibilities of our own personhood, that we have lately regarded men mainly as they oppressed us—bosses, husbands, lovers, police —or failed to carry their share of the housework, childcare, the relationship, the feelings we now demanded of them, even as we learned the professional skills and political power games and started to carry the earning responsibilities once expected only of men. Those straight-line corporate and professional careers still structured in terms of the lives of the men of the past whose wives took care of the details of life, we now know, pose real, sometimes insuperable, problems for women today. What we haven’t noticed is the crisis, the mounting desperation of the men still defined in terms of those no longer reliable, downsized, outshifted, disappearing lifetime corporate and professional careers. Because we know men have all that power (dead white men did, we just don’t take seriously (and they don’t admit the seriousness of) those eight years American women now live longer than men seventy-two, men’s life expectancy today eighty, women’s. The research I explored for my 1993 book The Fountain of Age showed two things crucial for living vital long lives purposes and projects that use one’s abilities, structure one’s days, and keep one moving as apart of our changing society and bonds of intimacy. But for men whose project was laid out in that no-longer-to-be-relied-on lifetime career, there’s chaos now. They need the flexibility women were forced to develop, raising kids, fitting profession, job, and family together somehow, inventing a changing pattern for life as it came along. For that long lifetime, men desperately need now the ease in creating and sustaining bonds of intimacy and sharing feelings that used to be relegated as women’s business. For, let’s face it finally, what used to be accepted—man-as-measure-of-all-things— must now be reconsidered. Women and men are now both occupying the mainstream of society and defining the terms. The standards, the definitions, the very measures we live by, have to change, are changing, as women’s and men’s shared new reality sweeps aside the obsolete remnants of the feminine mystique and its machismo counterpart. And so, in a politics where women’s newly conscious voting power now exceeds men’s, life concerns—care of young and old, sickness and health, the choice when and whether to have a baby, family values—now define the agenda more than the old abstractions of deficit and the missiles of death. In August 1996, the New York Times reports a fashion crisis Women are no longer buying high- style clothes, men are. Ads and commercials sell dads night to cook perfume, and face-lifts for men. That baby in the backpack makes young men now strong enough to be tender. They may grow up, those men, out of the child-man that has defined masculinity until now. And those women athletes, taking the spotlight at the Olympics, what standards will they change The ads and the fashion magazines may still feature American prepubescent child-women, or push silicone-stuffed breasts that can’t even respond to human touch —but young girls growing up now are also sold the training shoes and the new ideals of strength. Will new women no longer need men to be taller, stronger, earn more? Grown-up men and women, no longer obsessed with youth, outgrowing finally children’s games, and obsolete rituals of power and sex, become more and more authentically themselves. And they do not pretend that men are from Mars or women are from Venus. They even share each other’s interests, talk a common shorthand of work, love, play, kids, politics. We may now begin to glimpse the new human possibilities when women and men are finally free to be themselves, know each other for who they really are, and define the terms and measures of success, failure, joy, triumph, power, and the common good, together. BETTY FRIEDAN Washington, D.C. April 1997 |