The Feminine Mystique

World Report, June 6, Chapter 8. THE MISTAKEN CHOICE Seethe United Nations Demographic
Yearbook, New York, 1960, pp. and pp. 476—490; p. 580. The annual rate of population increase in the US. in the years 1955—59 was far higher than that of other Western nations, and higher than that of India, Japan, Burma, and Pakistan. In fact, the increase for North America (exceeded the world rate (1.7). The rate for
Europe was .8; for the USSR 1.7; Asia Africa 1.9; and South America 2.3. The increase in the underdeveloped nations was,
of course, largely due to medical advances and the drop in death rate in America it was almost completely due to increased birthrate, earlier marriage, and larger families.
For the birthrate continued to rise in the
U.S. from 1950 to 1959, while it was falling in countries like France, Norway, Sweden,
the USSR, India and Japan. The US. was the only so-called advanced nation, and one of the few nations in the world wherein 1958, more girls married at ages 15 to than at any other age. Even the other

countries which showed arise in the birthrate Germany, Canada, the United
Kingdom, Chile, New Zealand, Peru—did not show this phenomenon of teenage marriage See The Woman with Brains (continued),”
New York Times Magazine, January 17,
1960, for the outraged letters in response to an article by Marya Mannes, “Female
Intelligence—Who Wants It New York
Times Magazine, January 3, 1960.
3.
See National Manpower Council,
Womanpower, New York, 1957. In more than half of all employed women in the US. were under 25, and one-fifth were over 45. In the speak participation in paid employment occurs among young women of 18 and and women over the great majority of whom hold jobs for which little training is required. The new preponderance of older married women in the working force is partly due to the fact that so few women in their twenties and thirties now work, in the US. Two out of five of all employed women are now over, most of them wives and mothers,
working part time at unskilled work. Those reports of millions of American wives

working outside the home are misleading in more ways than one of all employed women, only one-third hold full-time jobs,
one-third work full time only part of the year—for instance, extra saleswomen in the department stores at Christmas—and one- third work part time, part of the year. The women in the professions are, for the most part, that dwindling minority of single women the older untrained wives and mothers, like the untrained 18-year-olds, are concentrated at the lower end of the skill ladder and the pay scales, in factory, service,
sales and office work. Considering the growth in the population, and the increasing professionalization of work in America, the startling phenomenon is not the much- advertised, relatively insignificant increase in the numbers of American women who now work outside the home, but the fact that two out of three adult American women do not work outside the home, and the increasing millions of young women who are not skilled or educated for work in any profession. See also Theodore Caplow, The
Sociology of Work, 1954, and Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, Women’s Two Roles—
Home and Work, London, 1956.

4.
Edward Strecker, Their Mother’s Sons,
Philadelphia and New York, 1946, pp. 52—
59.
5.
Ibid., pp. 31 ff Farnham and Lundberg, Modern Woman:
The Lost Sex, p. 271. See also Lynn White,
Educating Our Daughters, p. Preliminary results of the careful study of American sex habits being conducted at the University of Indiana by Dr. A. C.
Kinsey indicate that there is an inverse correlation between education and the ability of a woman to achieve habitual orgastic experience in marriage. According to the present evidence, admittedly tentative,
nearly 65 percent of the marital intercourse had by women with college backgrounds is had without orgasm for them, as compared to about 15 percent for married women who have gone no further than grade school Alfred C. Kinsey, et al., Staff of the
Institute for Sex Research, Indiana
University, Sexual Behavior in the Human

Download 2.16 Mb.

Share with your friends: