The Feminine Mystique
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| Women: The Changing Image , which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (March 3, 1962), she asked: Why have we returned, despite our advances in technology, to the Stone Age picture?…Woman has gone back, each to her separate cave, waiting anxiously for her mate and children to return, guarding her mate jealously against other women, almost totally unaware of any life outside her door. In this retreat intofecundity, it is not the individual woman who is to blame. It is the climate of opinion that has developed in this country… Apparently Margaret Mead does not acknowledge, or perhaps recognize her own role as a major architect of that climate of opinion Apparently she has overlooked much of her own work, which helped persuade several generations of able modern American women in desperate cavewoman style, to devote their whole lives to narrow domesticity—first in schoolgirl dreaming and a search for roles which make them appealingly ignorant, then as mothers and then as grandmothers…restricting their activities to the preservation of their own private, and often boring existences.” Even though it would seem that Margaret Mead is now trying to get women out of the home, she still ascribes asexual specialness to everything a woman does. Trying to seduce them into the modern world of science as the teacher-mothers of infant scientists she is still translating the new possibilities open to women and the new problems facing them as members of the human race into sexual terms. But now those roles which have historically belonged to women are stretched to include political responsibility for nuclear disarmament—“to cherish not just their own but the children of the enemy Since, beginning with the same premise and examining the same body of anthropological evidence, she now arrives at a slightly different sexual role for women, one might seriously question the basis upon which she decides the roles a woman should play—and finds it so easy to change the rules of the game from one decade to the next. Other social scientists have arrived at the astonishing conclusion that being a woman was no more and no less than being human.” 28 But a cultural lag is built into the feminine mystique. By the time a few social scientists were discovering the flaws in “woman’s role,” American educators had seized upon it as a magic sesame. Instead of educating women for the greater maturity required to participate in modern society—with all the problems, conflicts, and hard work involved, for educators as well as women—they began educating them to play the role of woman.” |