Universit€ Nancy 2, Centre de T€l€-enseignement Universitaire

Ma•trise d’anglais - TER par Charlotte de Jong sous la direction de M. Philippe Mahoux Pauzin

WOMEN’S RESPONSIBILITY IN THEIR OWN FULFILMENT A STUDY BASED ON BETTY FRIEDAN’S THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE

Mai 2005

Contents INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................ 3 I.

BETTY FRIEDAN AND THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE............................................ 5 BIOGRAPHY AND INFORMATION .......................................................................................... 5 Childhood, youth and college ......................................................................................... 5 Writing........................................................................................................................... 7 THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE................................................................................................... 11

II.

PLAUSIBLE AGENTS AND CAUSES................................................................. 14

FACTS FROM THE SIXTIES .................................................................................................. 14 MEN ................................................................................................................................. 16 Fellow Victims ............................................................................................................. 16 Different functioning of men......................................................................................... 16 Different possibilities in society.................................................................................... 18 SOCIETY ........................................................................................................................... 20 The Missing Identity-Image .......................................................................................... 21 Education..................................................................................................................... 25 Media........................................................................................................................... 29 Advertisement............................................................................................................... 33 PHILOSOPHIES ................................................................................................................... 35 Freud ........................................................................................................................... 37 Margaret Mead ............................................................................................................ 39 III.

WOMEN’S RESPONSIBILITY ............................................................................ 41

WOMEN'S PASSIVE WAITING .............................................................................................. 42 Immanence in Le Deuxi€me Sexe II: ............................................................................. 44 Abandoning education.................................................................................................. 45 The ‘marriage is everything’ dream.............................................................................. 47 THE MISTAKEN CHOICE .................................................................................................... 50 The Sex-Seekers............................................................................................................ 52 Living through someone else ........................................................................................ 53 Girls questioning The Feminine Mystique..................................................................... 56 PROPOSALS FOR SOLUTIONS: ............................................................................................. 59 Maslow’s Pyramid ....................................................................................................... 60 IV.

A BRIEF STATEMENT OF THINGS TODAY ................................................... 64

FACTS TODAY ................................................................................................................... 64 COMPARISON AND ANALYSIS ............................................................................................. 66 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................. 70 APPENDICES.................................................................................................................... 72 SOURCES .......................................................................................................................... 72 FRIEDAN - QUOTE ............................................................................................................. 78

2

Introduction Nowadays, in the twenty-first century, more and more women separate or become divorced, which creates a social phenomenon difficult to explain as well as to live with for its concerned subjects. The parting of more or less long-lasting couples now directly concerns around half the population of western countries without mentioning those indirectly touched through relations. During my studies, I discovered a book written more than fifty years ago by Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique1, and in it, I recognized my own personal feelings and those shared with numerous other feminine colleagues, friends and relatives. It treated subjects frequently brought up in everyday conversations or existential reflections of the modern woman. What was then described by women from the nineteen-sixties still seemed so true, though years have passed by since the book was written and the way people usually think has supposedly changed. As writes Anna Quindlen in her 2001 introduction to the new edition, “Four decades later, millions of individual transformations later, there is still so much to learn from this book.”(XIII) In her book, Betty Friedan cites various causes and personalities as factors for the problem she calls the Feminine Mystique: the aftermaths of World War II, a sex-directed education, media, Freud, Margaret Mead… Besides she most interestingly argues that women were choosing marriage in order to avoid their fears about establishing their own identity and I believe this idea deserves more attention than given in the book, especially as it appears to represent a new point of view when exposed to women today and therefore might not have been developed sufficiently by Friedan. One must admit, as did thousands of women in the nineteen-sixties, that Friedan was right about many things and it is all the more difficult to understand why these are still going that wrong today, since the main reasons for the problems women encounter seem to have been given already fifty years ago. That is why I have chosen to take a closer look at Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and more particularly on the detailed causes she gives of women’s ill being and further in my work on their validity in our actual society. Who is to be blamed –if anybody, and what could and should be changed? The wealth of ideas in this book was noticed in the nineteen-sixties 1

All references to the text of The Feminine Mystique rely on the W.W. Norton & Company edition, 2001

3

but seems to have been forgotten since and it might be really worth bringing up its essential points once again in order to try and explain why women have kept suffering and still do half a century after the publishing of the book. The correctness of Betty Friedans’ analysis of feminine condition is undeniable. Nevertheless the lasting of the mystique suggests the persistent existence of some other quite mysterious cause, probably more profound than the concrete causes stipulated by Friedan and we will try to exploit the evolution of society and thoughts since the sixties, or its absence, in order to be able to look further than Friedan. The author might have been under influence of her time of big changes of women’s rights, which were thought to resolve the problems (but obviously did not). In her preface to The Feminine Mystique, Friedan herself writes: “But whether or not the answers I present here are final— and there are many questions which social scientists must probe further—the dilemma of the American woman is real.” Today we are freed from hypothesises concerning eventual equality between men and women, the matter being widely spread and nearly accepted. We will not question this equality, but rather try to understand why a difference persists between the ways of behaving of the two sexes at a time where no social excuses no longer exist. In order to clarify who or what carries the responsibilities of the so-called Feminine Mystique, and which is the part of women’s own responsibility, we shall begin with a closer view at the author Betty Friedan and define what she means by “Feminine Mystique”. We will then analyse the causes cited by Friedan in her book because most of them remain true today in a more or less disguised manner and we must keep in mind that women continue to suffer for the same reasons as fifty years ago. We will more particularly develop the responsibility of women themselves as suggested by Friedan and other authors and then move on to analyse this responsibility and its concrete realizations (through education, choices, efforts and conceptions of life and love). This ought to explain what is done wrong and to suggest how it could be changed. Finally, we will make a brief statement of things as they are today and of what might have changed since Friedan wrote her book. Our conclusion should bring a complete answer to the question of why women keep feeling unfulfilled at a time where all possibilities seem open to them and equality with men is obtained and all this despite the answers already furnished by Friedan and other personalities. Moving a step further in the analysis of the modern Feminine Mystique will hopefully suggest a new solution towards feminine happiness and eventually help women and men not to fight and suffer for wrong reasons.

4

I. Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique Biography and Information

Half a century after the writing of her first best-seller, Betty Friedan has imposed herself as a prominent American author and multiple information is available about her, notably on the internet where I have selected various websites1 and made up a resume constituting what seems to me the most important about Betty Friedan and her life. Childhood, youth and college Betty Naomi Goldstein Friedan was born in Peoria, Illinois on February 4th in 1921. Her parents came to the United States as part of the great wave of Jewish emigrants who came to this country in response to anti-Semitic persecution in Eastern Europe in the late 19th century. Her father, very much a self-made man, developed a successful jewellery business in Peoria and, in time, her family numbered among the wealthiest in town. While Friedan's childhood was financially secure, she experienced several disappointments which had a farreaching impact upon her later life. As a young woman, she was not considered particularly attractive, and grew up in the shadow of a mother and sister who were much more conventionally pretty than she. Moreover, as a member of the Jewish minority in a predominantly white, Protestant Midwestern town, she experienced many anti-Semitic social

1

http://www.americanwriters.org/writers/friedan.asp

http://www.awm-math.org/bookreviews/SepOct99.html http://www.rambles.net/friedan_gender.html http://www.cwfa.org/articles/4178/BLI/dotcommentary/ http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/F/Friedan.asp http://www.salon.com/books/sneaks/1999/03/29sneaks.html http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99sep/9909friedan.htm

5

slights, the most painful of which was her exclusion from participating in the local high school sorority. What set Betty apart from her peers was her incisive intelligence, her sharp wit, and her skill as a writer and organizer. College In 1938, she turned her back on the provincial world of Peoria and enrolled as a freshman at Smith College. In those days, she asserted, "I want to do something with my life -- to have an absorbing interest. . . . I want success and fame" (Horowitz: 32). At Smith, she developed an intense fascination with the field of psychology. At the same time, she became deeply involved in both theatre and journalism. But, in Horowitz' view, the most important development during Friedan's years at Smith was her increasing involvement in radical politics. Coming from a privileged background, Friedan's increasing interest in pacifism, labour union activism, and rapprochement with the Soviet regime seems somewhat paradoxical. Yet it was in the political arena that her skills as a writer and speaker found their most impassioned expression.

Upon graduation from Smith in 1942, Friedan went on to graduate school in psychology at Berkeley, where she continued her political activism and won a prestigious scholarship that would have fully funded her dissertation research. Yet, after just one year at Berkeley, she dropped out of graduate school, never to return. Biographer Hennessee asserts that Friedan left Berkeley in frustration over her inability to find a satisfying balance between personal and professional life. Although she had had many boyfriends and lovers, Friedan believed that increasing intellectual achievement would diminish her chances for marriage. Horowitz, by contrast, believes that Betty left Berkeley because she could not abide the strong disjunction between the cool academic world of psychology and the passionate allure of radical political activism. Whatever the reason for her departure, Friedan moved from Berkeley to New York City, where she worked for several years as a trade union journalist and where, in 1947, she met and married Carl Friedan. Horowitz is fascinated by her involvement, during the years 1946 to 1952, as a writer for the UE News, the official organ of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America. Writing under her maiden name, Betty Goldstein, she participated in political activism on specific issues, including racial equality, access to health care, and the needs of working women. As the Cold War and McCarthyism gathered

6

momentum, her social and professional contacts brought her dangerously close to the Communist party. Indeed, largely because she had not written under the name Betty Friedan, she never became a major target for McCarthyist redbaiting in the 1950s. She left the UE News at about the same time as the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Horowitz speculates that Friedan was, perhaps, "relieved to quit the world of radical labour journalism [because] it was getting too hot there" (Horowitz, 152).

Writing Discovering in 1957 that several of her college classmates were as dissatisfied with their lives as she was with her own, she began a series of studies that eventually resulted in the landmark work The Feminine Mystique (1963). The book's thesis was that women were victims of a pervasive system of delusions and false values that urged them to find their fulfilment and identity vicariously, through their husbands and children. An immediate and controversial best-seller, it is now regarded as one of the most influential American books of the 20th century.

Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique is credited with starting the modern women's movement 30 years ago, delivered a highly charged, highly political talk at Millersville (Pa.) University, where Friedan's energetic and rambling speech followed a ribbon-cutting ceremony opening the MU Women's Center.

Key issues facing women today include child care, health care, gun control and the economy, Friedan said. "If we cannot solve some of these problems, women's rights will not survive," she said. "One good child care centre in a community is worth 10, 100 marches and slogans." Friedan said the women's movement is at a "critical time." Although she congratulated Millersville on its progress, she said, "I hope you won't waste a lot of time meandering in the rhetoric of 20 years ago. In the last few years, it seems to me that the women's movement has undergone a transformation, sort of a paradigm shift that we're not all quite aware of yet. We can stop wallowing in the victim stage." That's not to say oppression against women does not exist, she stressed. Women still do not have the right to make choices about their bodies, she said, citing as an example the recent murder of an abortion clinic doctor and the recent rash of

7

violence against women and abortion clinics across the country. But the backward movement of the Reagan/Bush years seems to be at an end, she said. Friedan lauded President Clinton's commitment to social equity and family care as a step in the right direction "so we do not have to spend year after year after year marching for rights we thought we had won 20 years ago."

In 1966 Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), which was dedicated to achieving equality of opportunity for women and she also co-founded the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). In 1969 she divorced Carl Friedan. A founding member of the National Women's Political Caucus (1971), she was a leader of the campaign for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The Second Stage (1981) assessed the status of the women's movement. In it, she argued that feminists must reclaim the family and bring more men into the movement by addressing child care, parental leave, and flexible work schedules.

The new empowerment of women became highly visible in the political arena of 1992. Although Friedan is ecstatic about the number of women elected to the U.S. House and Senate, she bristles at the popular label "Year of the Woman." "We don't like that phrase," she said. "That makes it sound like something that's going to go away, some little fad. Next year will be the Year of the Squirrel." She also spoke about the early days of 20th century feminism. A 100-year battle for women's rights ended in the 1920s, she said, when women were given the right to vote. With that victory in hand, the majority of women returned to their homes and the daily concerns of pressing their husbands shirts, diapering the baby and keeping the sink sparkling white. "The image of the happy suburban housewife was everywhere," Friedan said. "The blinders had to come off to become aware of our own existence."

The return of women's issues to the political front in the 1960s carried its own problems, she said, some as basic as "Who's going to make dinner if we went off to Washington?"

8

The Commission on the Status of Women, created during the Kennedy administration, was floundering under President Johnson, Friedan said. Women were getting pats on the head and were sent home to the kitchens with little to show for their efforts. "Nobody wanted to rock the boat and everyone was very ladylike," she said of the early participants in the movement. Full of humour and reminiscences, she rattled off the names, places and significant dates of the early days of the National Organization for Women, a group founded and named by Friedan as an "NAACP for women." "We take for granted now the way things are," she said. It took 12 years of the Reagan/Bush era to ignite the fires again and make women angry with the establishment. "It was, 'Women, go home again,'" she said. Then came the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and the testimony of Anita Hill. "The nation saw an all-male judiciary committee disgracing the United States government," Friedan said. "All the women across this country were saying, 'They just don't get it.'" Although that led to vast political change in November 1992, Friedan said the battle is no longer women vs. men. "We don't need more empty rhetoric of sexual warfare," she said. "This is not a bedroom war and it will not be solved in the bedroom." She said she doesn't know where women will be in the 21st century. "We can't be arrogant," Friedan said. "We move incrementally. But all that incremental movement has made a big change."

The Fountain of Age (1993) addresses the psychology of old age, seeking to counter the notion that aging means loss and depletion. In it, Friedan criticized “the age mystique” and society's frequently patronizing treatment of the elderly; she advocated new, positive roles for older citizens.

In 1999, one of Friedan’s Biographers, Judith Hennessee, wrote in her book Betty Friedan: Her Life1: Friedan was a woman of profound contradictions. She was a woman who yearned for a happy marriage and family life, yet urged others to fulfil themselves outside the family. A conventional woman who shook male-female relationships to the core. A reformer who started a revolution. A revolutionary who wanted to be part of the Establishment. An elitist who fought for working women; a class snob who fought for equality; a humanitarian who treated individuals, particularly women, badly. 1

Judith Tenessee. Betty Friedan Her life. 1999 edition.

9

She was a feminist . . . who deferred to [men], and did not even like most women. She was rude and nasty, self-serving and imperious ... But the movement she ushered in is immense ... What she did for women outweighs the rest.

Betty Friedan “never found ‘the boy who would like her best’ [and] she never gave up the search.” […] but “none of the men lasted very long.” She wrote, “I feel a sense of failure about my marriage... I envy people whose marriages have evolved rather than dissolved.” She claims to have a really good “Geiger counter” that now tells her that the women’s movement has been reduced to nothing more than a “special interest group.” Now her message has changed, “None of us will be advanced much farther unless we start a new movement.” All that her “power” produced was a strife-ridden special interest group that she considers so irrelevant that she wants to start, at this late stage of her life, a new movement. But Friedan also translated the ideas of academics –many of them European refugees from Nazism-- into the language of popular culture. An outstanding student at Smith College, who for a time pursued a graduate degree in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, Friedan introduced her readers to the nature-versus-nurture debate and functionalist sociology1. Americans, for all their cynical anti-intellectualism, crave the authority of experts. And Friedan cited experts aplenty, as her copious and very academic footnotes attest. Freud came in for sustained criticism in her pages; Abraham Maslow came in for extended praise. Friedan also paid close attention to the writings of other scholars, including Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, and Bruno Bettelheim. Her memoir, Life So Far, appeared in 2000.

2

1

In the social sciences specifically sociology and sociocultural anthropology, functionalism also functional analysis, is a sociological philosophy that originally attempted to explain social institutions as collective means to fill individual biological needs. Later it came to focus on the ways social institutions fill social needs, especially social solidarity. http://www.iridis.com/glivar/Functionalism_(sociology) 2 http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99sep/9909friedan.htm

10

The Feminine Mystique

In the beginning of the 1960s, Betty Friedan, a married woman and mother of four children, still occasionally working as a freelance journalist, interviews hundreds of housewives and encounters “the silent question – ‘Is this all?’”(15). She thereby defines the “problem that has no name” and calls it The Feminine Mystique. This is how she summarizes its appearance: For over fifteen years, there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfilment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. […] They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights –the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children. (15-16)

Once Friedan has detected the existence of a problem in American women’s life, she begins a series of more than a thousand interviews in order to define the problem and in these, women exclaim themselves with words as “I just don’t feel alive.” (22) or “the problem is always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife, but never being myself.” […] “very little of what I’ve done has been really necessary or important.”(28). Friedan puts the finger on the problem of defining women’s identity, even for themselves. Talking about her own life, and using it as an example for her thesis, she writes concerning the search for a goal when she was a young student: There was a question that I did not want to think about. ‘Is this really what I want to be?’ […] But if I wasn’t sure, what did I want to be? I felt the future closing in – and I could not see myself in it at all. I had no image of myself, stretching beyond college. […] But now that the time had come to make my own future, to take the deciding step, I suddenly did not know what I wanted to be. (69)

And she goes on repeating the crucial question that so many women deliberately avoid: ‘Is this really what I want to be?’ and remembers the state she was in when trying to figure out the answer and how she finally circumvented it: The decision now truly terrified me. I lived in terror of indecision for days, unable to think of anything else. The question was not important, I told myself. No question was important to me that year but love. […] I never could explain, hardly knew myself, why I gave up this career. […] I married, had children, lived […] But still the question haunted me. I could sense no purpose in my life, I could find no peace, until I finally faced it and worked out my own answer. […] I discovered, talking to Smith seniors in 1959, that the question is no less terrifying to girls today. (70)

11

Having come closer to the basis of the problem (being the fear of girls having to face their own life), as well as to the understanding of its consequences (most often marriage as an easy way of evading the issue, resulting on a feeling of emptiness), Friedan then writes: “We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’” (32).

Friedan does not want her or the other adepts of her theory to be pointed at as extremists of feminism and besides hopes to ally many people to her cause and to open their eyes. That is why she also quotes men able to define the problem and complaining about it, thus sharing the role as the fellow victim with women. She insists on the fact that men are not the cause of The Feminine Mystique, not even partially and never accuses the genre or contributes to the traditional war of sexes.

The question is to find out how to solve the problem, and in order to do this, to discover what the real cause is. Friedan considers one of the causes to be that “no other road to fulfilment was offered to American women in the middle of the twentieth century.”(26) and she explains the idea in the following words: In The Feminine Mystique there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future.1 There is no way she can even dream about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife. (62)

But why did women of a free and modern society believe this to be the only possibility? They had the choice to decide what to do with their own life, to work or to follow whatever road they wanted to and would make them happy, but instead they chose not to take any profit of this liberty and to return home. This is one of the main questions Friedan asks herself and the one we are trying to find the answer to in this analysis. The question is described later in Friedan’s book in the following words: This is the real mystery: why did so many American women, with the ability and education to discover and create, go back home again, to look for ‘something more’ in housework and rearing children? (67)

Though she brilliantly analyses the problem in The Feminine Mystique and manages to touch millions of women through the States and the world, Friedan does obviously not 1

My underlining.

12

completely reach her goal of making women aware of their responsibilities. Nearly fifty years later, the problem still exists and in her later book Beyond Gender,1 written in 1997, Betty Friedan herself continues to ask women the same question and writes: Why are American women so frustrated in their role as women? ... What keeps American women from moving, participating, as full equals in every area of American society? (3)

1

Beyond Gender – The New Politics of Work and Family. Edited by Brigid O’Farrell, 1997.

13

II. Plausible agents and causes Facts from the sixties

Friedan tries to concretely analyse what happened in the years after the first feminist movements at the end of the nineteenth century, to make women return home again. She says “the average age of first marriage, in the last fifteen years [1945-1960], has dropped to the youngest of the history of this country, the youngest in any of the countries of the Western world.” (163) and moreover notices that the moral, in 1939, was that “if she kept her commitment to herself, she did not lose the man, if he was the right man.” (39) This statement of course shows the importance of independence for women at that time. Apparently, women are conscious of the importance of their faith in themselves and their fidelity to their own ideas and aspirations. This does not mean they reject men, but only that they are not ready to sacrifice themselves for “love” or rather for a traditional role as wife and mother. Women then seem aware of the indispensability of staying true to oneself in order to find happiness, fulfilment and, as a part of this, a man and a love relationship. But then some years later, “In the late fifties, a sociological phenomenon was suddenly noticed: a third of American women now worked, but most were no longer young and very few were pursuing careers. They were married women who held part-time jobs, selling or secretarial, to put their husbands through school, their sons through college, or to help pay the mortgage.” (17) Friedan also remarks that “Fewer and fewer women were entering professional work.” (17) Then she copies some surprising facts about women and their “desperate search for a man” in the sixties from Look magazine: The year American women's discontent boiled over, it was also reported (Look) that the more than 21,000,000 American women who are single, widowed, or divorced do not cease even after fifty their frenzied, desperate search for a man. And the search begins early –for seventy per cent of all American women now marry before they are twenty-four. A pretty twenty-five-year-old secretary took thirty-five different jobs in six months in the futile hope of finding a husband. Women were moving from one political club to another, taking evening courses in accounting or sailing, learning to play golf or ski, joining a number of churches in succession, going to bars alone, in their ceaseless search for a man. (28)

Quite paradoxically though, women did not study less, as the following study shows it: From nearly half the nation’s professional force in 1930, women had dropped to only 35 per cent in 1960, despite the fact that the number of women college graduates had nearly tripled. The

14

phenomenon was the great increase in the numbers of educated women choosing to be just housewives. (242)

So on the contrary, they studied more. The dilemma lays in the fact that they did so without any obvious purpose, as they would not use their gained knowledge in their matrimonial and non professional life as adult women, but instead chose to live passively at the side of a man and through the latter.

15

Men

Fellow Victims Though Betty Friedan is the founder of NOW and thus a true feminist, this does not mean she is “anti-men” or engaged in some argument opposing sexes, nor has she officially the slightest to reproach men for. In all her studies she never questions the responsibility of men as a particular category: “Blaming men, Friedan told Denis Watson, was a ‘perversion of feminism’, one she found to be ‘ideologically and politically and actually fallacious.’ […] Man was not the enemy, but the fellow victim.”1 By continually referring to this statement, Friedan managed to more or less ally men to her cause and proved her sincere hope to be that of permitting men and women to live together, but in a better way, thus not separating them or wanting to create a war between sexes. In The Feminine Mystique she gives the example of a man sharing the weight of the situation of his couple where everything relies on him, and she quotes “the husband complains to the marriage counsellor: ‘…the way I see it, marriage takes two people, each living his own life and then putting them together. Mary seems to think we both ought to live one life: mine. (Redbook, June, 1955)” (63) So some men are conscious of the problem and even go as far as to perceive its reason. But do men and women really function differently? It is commonly thought and encouraged by ridiculous jokes and still today by popular psychiatrists and authors as for example John Gray in his Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus2. Different functioning of men In Women In Love3, David Herbert Lawrence gives us a marvellous account of what a man most often intimately thinks about when considering his fulfilment: Was he a good director? If he were, he had fulfilled his life. The rest was by-lay. (258) No, women, in that sense, were useless to him any more. He felt that his mind needed acute stimulation, before he could be physically roused. (269)

1

Janann Sherman. Interviews with Betty Friedan xiv. 2002 edition. John Gray. Les hommes viennent de Mars, les femmes viennent de V„nus. Edition 2003. 3 David Herbert Lawrence. Women In Love. 1996 edition. We will refer to this reference along the analysis. 2

16

This shows how men’s functioning is the complete contrary of the one of women. While women need men to feel fulfilled, men need to feel fulfilled (through work for example) to find and even feel like finding a woman. Betty Friedan shows us the difference by attributing two big categories of preoccupations to the two sexes, women being preoccupied with “phantasy” and men with “reality”: But for boys, the educators are not concerned with sexual ‘phantasy’, they are concerned with ‘reality’ and boys are expected to achieve personal autonomy and identity by committing themselves in the sphere of […] work. […] Girls are not expected to change. (165)

Girls are taught to live and thus do live in the same world their whole life: that of depending on a male person (father and then husband) and never facing real responsibilities themselves. It is an accepted fact that girls remain in their fairy-tail world and rely on men, while this would never be accepted for the later. In ‘The American College Study’, the idea is confirmed and we can read the following: In that thousand-page study, when ‘motivational factors in college entrance’ are analysed from research among 1045 boys and 1925 girls. The study recognizes that it is the need to be independent, and find identity to society not primarily through the sex role but through work, which makes boys grow in college. The girl’s evasion is explained by the fact that for a girl, identity is exclusively sexual. […] Self-definition for the girl depends more directly on marriage […] The girl’s identity centres more exclusively on her sex-role—whose wife will I be, what kind of family will we have; while the boy’s self-definition forms about two nuclei; he will be a husband and a father (his sex-role identity), but he will also and centrally be a worker. (164)

The problem of women’s happiness is not ignored, but their traditional role is so widely spread that even specialist studying it become unable to cast an objective view on it: The new theorists of the self, who are men, have usually evaded the question of self-realization for a woman. Bemused themselves by The Feminine Mystique, they assume that there must be some strange ‘difference’ which permits a woman to find self-realization by living through her husband and children, while men must grow to theirs. (326)

Elisabeth Gaskell in her Wives and Daughters1 makes one of her male characters define women in the following simple way “…just like a woman’s idea –all kindness, and no common sense.” (p.78), resuming what society commonly thinks about women. Simone de Beauvoir wrote her famous Le Deuxi€me Sexe2 in 1949, fourteen years before Friedan finished her Feminine Mystique, and she already defined the existence of a main difference in the conception of life for women versus men as we can see it in the following extracts: 1 2

Elisabeth Gaskell. Wives and Daughters. 1996 edition. Simone de Beauvoir. Le Deuxi€me Sexe. Edition 2003. We will refer to this reference along the analysis.

17

Le pr€sent ne lui appara•t que comme une transition ; elle n’y d€couvre aucune fin valable mais seulement des occupations. D’une mani‰re plus ou moins d€guis€e, sa jeunesse se consume dans l’attente. Elle attend l’Homme. Certes l’adolescent aussi rŠve ‹ la femme, il la d€sire; mais elle ne sera jamais qu’un €l€ment de sa vie : elle ne r€sume pas son destin ; depuis l’enfance, la fillette, qu’elle souhaitŒt se r€aliser comme femme ou surmonter les bornes de sa f€minit€, a attendu du mŒle accomplissement et €vasion… (88) • Chose douloureuse ‹ penser, €crit Michelet, la femme, l’Štre relatif qui ne peut vivre qu’‹ deux, est plus souvent seule que l’homme. Lui, il trouve partout la soci€t€, se cr€e des rapports nouveaux. Elle, elle n’est rien sans la famille. Ž […] La femme enferm€e, s€par€e, ne conna•t pas les joies de la camaraderie qui implique la poursuite en commun de certains buts ; son travail n’occupe pas son esprit, sa formation ne lui a donn€ ni le go•t ni l’habitude de l’ind€pendance, et cependant elle passe ses journ€es dans la solitude. (404) Le mot amour n’a pas du tout le mŠme sens pour l’un et l’autre sexe et c’est l‹ une source grave de malentendus qui les s€parent. Byron a dit justement que l’amour n’est dans la vie de l’homme qu’une occupation, tandis qu’il est la vie mŠme de la femme. C’est la mŠme id€e qu’exprime Nietzche dans Le Gai Savoir : […] ‡ Ce que la femme entend par amour, c’est un don total de corps et d’ˆme, sans restriction, sans nul ‰gard pour quoi que ce soit. C’est cette absence de condition qui fait de son amour une foi, la seule qu’elle ait. Quant Š l’homme, s’il aime une femme c’est cet amour lŠ qu’il veut d’elle… (539)

Here lies the whole difference between the two sexes: while a woman constructs her entire life around a man, a man will only include a women in his life as a part of it, at the side of many other things. Love will of course be an important part of a man’s life, but it will not be the only part and rarely the sole main part. The woman often isolates herself or is isolated by her situation as a wife and mother not working: she stays alone at home the whole day through waiting for her family to come home and fill her life. She has inevitably immense difficulty facing a loneliness she has never been taught to face. And even when a woman finally tries to break the tradition and to achieve an identity through something else than a man or her children, she will face the disadvantage of her education, which has never taught her, as it has the man, how to think, argue and defend herself: Il a sur la femme l’avantage de la culture ou du moins d’une formation professionnelle ; depuis l’adolescence, il s’int‰resse aux affaires du monde : ce sont ses affaires ; il conna‹t un peu de droit, il est au courant de la politique, il appartient Š un parti, Š un syndicat, Š des associations ; travailleur, citoyen, sa pens‰e est engag‰e dans l’action ; il conna‹t l’‰preuve de la r‰alit‰ avec laquelle on ne peut pas tricher : c’est dire que l’homme a la technique du raisonnement, le goŒt des faites et de l’exp‰rience, un certain sens critique ; c’est ce qui manque encore Š quantit‰ de jeunes filles. […] ce n’est pas par la suite un vice c‰r‰bral qu’elles savent mal raisonner : c’est que la pratique ne les y a pas contraintes ; pour elles, la pens‰e est plut•t un jeu qu’un instrument ; mŽme intelligentes, sensibles, sinc•res, elles ne savent pas, faute de technique intellectuelle, d‰montrer leurs opinions et en tirer les cons‰quences. C’est par lŠ qu’un mari –mŽme beaucoup plus m‰diocre –prendra facilement barre sur elles ; il saura prouver qu’il a raison, mŽme s’il a tort. (291)

Different possibilities in society Feminists have fought for years in the beginning of the century in order to obtain equality and more rights for women. Nevertheless, if laws have been adopted and theory

18

offers this social equality, the facts are often different in reality and most new rules are only respected on papers but much less applied by companies or integrated in daily-life. In Women In Love, David Herbert Lawrence lets one of the heroines express her awareness of the restrictions society then offers her condition in womanhood: ’The freedom, the liberty, the mobility!’ cried Gudrun […] ‘You’re a man, you want to do a thing, you do it. You haven’t the thousand obstacles a woman has in front of her.’ (63)

Simone de Beauvoir as well gives a literary example of a woman who has managed to escape the role then imposed by society and still has ambition but does not know how to realize herself in a world of men. A l’ˆge de dix-huit ans, elle [Marie Bashkirtseff] note lucidement : ‡ J’‰cris Š C…que je voudrais Žtre un homme. Je sais que je pourrais devenir quelqu’un ; mais avec des jupes, o• voulezvous qu’on aille ? Le mariage est la seule carri•re des femmes ; les hommes ont trente-six chances, la femme n’en a qu’une, le z‰ro, comme Š la banque. ‘ Elle a donc besoin de l’amour d’un homme. (114)

Though the fifties and sixties much less discriminate women than former periods in history did it and offer many civil rights to women in western countries, women still have to fight to get these rights respected. Women are thus confronted to a double or even triple battle and have to fight against: -

society and tradition,

-

common beliefs and philosophies,

-

their own temptation of choosing the easier life of staying at home.

It seems superfluous to insist on the importance of exceptional motivational needs and ambitions to succeed in such a process for a decent and respectful life and can probably be comprehensible that most women abandon without even trying to obtain independence in such a society.

19

Society

The extreme difficulty of liberating oneself does not lie so much in the will itself as in the fact of recognizing the having of this will. Every individual has specific needs but is more or less influenced by the society surrounding him. When this society reaches a certain point of standardisation, helped by education, the media and respected specialists, needs can be guided to the extent of having individuality disappear and people believe common thoughts to be their own. This kind of society does not resemble the democratic views extolled by the modern America of the nineteen-sixties and Betty Friedan goes as far as to describe the condition of the women as a “comfortable concentration camp” (Chapter 12). The manipulation of women’s ideas reminds us of a sort of an indoctrination, but then who is the guru responsible for this movement? It appears that there is no one person responsible but a complex whole made up pf by a combination of various factors including women themselves. We shall try to identify these in a closer analysis in this part as they hide in the habits of everyday life and adopted by the citizens. Nevertheless, such a procedure cannot be accepted and carries dangers for women as individuals as well as for the entire society itself as Friedan explains it in the following extract: It was not an American, but a South African woman, Mrs. Olive Schreiner, who warned at the turn of the century that the quality and quantity of women’s functions in the social universe were decreasing as fast as civilization was advancing; that if women did not win back their right to a full share of honoured and useful work, woman’s mind and muscle would weaken in a parasitic state; her offspring, male and female, would weaken progressively, and civilization itself would deteriorate.1 The feminists saw clearly that education and the right to participate in the more advanced work of society were women’s greatest needs. They fought for and won the rights to new, fully human identity for woman. But how very few of their daughters and granddaughters have chosen to use their education and their abilities for any large creative purpose, for responsible work in society? (335)

Anyone having experienced a celibate period may have noticed how friend’s and people’s general behaviour toward one changes. This probably remains unconscious reactions as none would admit behaving otherwise to a friend according to his status as single or not, nevertheless, the difference exists and is translated as a social anti-single pressure. It simply is not considered normal not to be with or at least to be searching to be with someone. As Friedan says: Not only is spinsterhood viewed as a personal tragedy but offspring are considered essential to the full life. […] That the female should attempt, in their thinking, to usurp the prerogatives of the male

1

Sidney Ditzion, Marriage, Morals and Sex in America, A History of Ideas, New York, 1953, 227.

20

is a distasteful notion which would seriously disrupt their own projected role of helpmate and faithful complement to the man of the house. (152)

Kathleen Demarco describes the experience in Cranberry Queen1: “When I was lamenting the loss of my ex-boyfriend, the Monster, I was not considered good dinner company. I was told it was unbecoming for me to be so disappointed.”(19) Whether singles actually might be less agreeable company considering disappointment from a fresh a painful break from a relationship or not is not the question. Even when there is no such problem, couples continue to invite couples and if not, try to arrange couples by inviting plausible accordable singles. This is an obvious neglect of respect toward a person who willingly or not has decided to be single and should be accepted as a person in its whole and not as the half part of a missing couple. This is a current problem even in the twenty-first century as shown as well in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary2, where Bridget, a thirty year old spinster has a hard time facing society and relations as a single, appearing as abnormal to them. Unfortunately, society has always expected people to go by two and continues to do so, with a particular rise of the pressure in the nineteen-sixties due to certain tendencies that we will now detail.

The Missing Identity-Image Every little child grows up with the need for examples to follow in order to create his own identity. Usually these examples are taken from the father for boys and from the mother for girls. But what happens when there is no example to take? If the parents do not seem happy in their life and the role they are playing in it, a child would not possibly want to follow the same road and end up as unhappy as the parents. The child would then prefer to search for another, more positive example. Another possibility is the absence of examples altogether as could happen in times of societal changes. In the nineteen-forties, many fathers were absent from home, away to fight the war in Europe, and mothers were endorsing a new role and themselves searching for their marks. Moreover, feminism saw a considerable raise in the beginning of the twentieth century, opening the door to new possibilities for women: An American woman no longer has a private image to tell her who she is or can be, or wants to be. The public image, in the magazines and television commercials is designed to sell […] American women no longer know who they are. They are solely in need of a new image to help them find their 1 2

Kathleen Demarco. Cranberry Queen. 2002 edition. Helen Fielding. Bridget Jones’ Diary. 1999 edition.

21

identity. As the motivational researchers keep telling the advisers, American women are so unsure of who they should be, that they look to this glossy public image to decide every detail of their lives. They look for the image they will no longer take from their mothers. […] Strangely, many mothers, who loved their daughters—and mine was one—did not want their daughters to grow up like them either. They knew we needed something more. (72)

Years later, in 1982, Alice Munro, born in Canada to a mother victimized by “The Feminine Mystique”, underlines the importance of mother in the daughter’s search for her self and the ‘pro-Mystique’ way of thinking of her own mother in her autobiographic novel Lives of Girls and Women1: She [her mother] and all these other girls were firmly set towards marriage; older women who had not married, whether they were perfect old maids or discreet adventuresses could not respect any sympathy from them. (180)

So all in all, in the nineteen-sixties, the traditional role of women is fading away and new ones are beginning to appear, but none has been precisely defined yet and that is why there is no concrete example to follow for little girls. These then feel more or less at a loss and eventually long for the only precise and well defined image of a women they have witnessed and which is encouraged by society: that of their ancestors, the traditional role as mother and wife, which is sure and easily reachable for everyone without taking too many risks: And so The Feminine Mystique began to spread through the land, grafted onto old prejudices and comfortable conventions which so easily give the past a stranglehold on the future. (43)

In the end of the nineteen-forties, men returning from war, naturally regaining their ancient jobs and hoping to achieve the dreams of home they had nourished during their absence, contributed to the comeback of this traditional role: As the young men returned from the war, a great many women writers dropped out of the field. The young women started having a lot of children, and stopped writing. The new writers were all men, back from the war, who had been dreaming about home, and a cozy domestic life. (54)

And of course, women still undergo the influence of old-fashioned and conservative thinking uttered essentially by men, believing it to be potentially dangerous for a women and more indirectly for a man to become too independent. A good example of the typical fear of a man and father is expressed by Elizabeth Gaskell who makes the early twentieth century English father of Mary tell us his point of view about his daughter’s future in Mary Barton: ’That’s the worst of factory work, for girls. They can earn so much when work is plenty, that they can maintain themselves anyhow. My Mary shall never work in a factory, that I’m determined on.’ (17)

1

Alice Munro. Lives of Girls and Women. 1982 edition.

22

Another potential cause is the role taught by religion. We will not develop this point as its ideological consequences primarily touch the catholic part of American people, thus not a major part. Nevertheless, this part, convinced by its conservative ideas could have had an influence on the rest of people and if not a direct cause of the mystique a least constitutes a contribution in encouraging it. Friedan shortly points it out like this: And the American housewife is reminded that Catholic countries in the Middle Ages ‘elevated the gentle and inconspicuous Mary into the Queen of heaven and built their loveliest cathedrals to Notre Dame—Our Lady.’ (42)

So private images and education offered by family and friends in women’s childhood of course have a major role to play in the search for the self. The girl is traditionally taught to adopt a passive role and is not expected to nourish ambitions other than those of belonging to a man as a wife and mother, thus anyhow, always related to someone else. As Simone de Beauvoir explains it in Le Deuxi€me Sexe II, showing how the difference between sexes is only a mere creation of early education in the nineteen-fifties in France: Chez la femme il y a, au d€part, un conflit entre son existence autonome et son • Štre-autre Ž ; on lui apprend que pour plaire il faut chercher ‹ plaire, il faut se faire objet ; elle doit donc renoncer ‹ son autonomie. On la traite comme une poup€e vivante et on lui refuse la libert€ ; ainsi se noue un cercle vicieux ; car moins elle exercera sa libert€ pour comprendre, saisir et d€couvrir le monde qui l’entoure, moins elle trouvera en lui de ressources, moins elle osera s’affirmer comme sujet ; si l’on l’y encourageait, elle pourrait manifester la mŠme exub€rance vivante, la mŠme curiosit€, le mŠme esprit d’initiative, la mŠme hardiesse qu’un gar•on. (29)

The idea of women’s early apprenticeship of non-expectation is confirmed by Carol Shields & Blanche Howard in their novel A Celibate Season1: “I guess invading space must be next, that’s what the little boys dream of now. (Little girls? I notice no on ever cleans space up).” (12)

The book also shows us the difficulties encountered by the ones who actually try to change the traditional roles by adopting atypical situations and are confronted to their family’s reactions of disbelief and rapid attempt to restore the models: “I told him about Greg’s sudden surliness, and he said, ‘Do you think it might have something to do with the changed role models?’ I said no, that I’ve always worked (outside the home, I’d better train myself to add that when Jessica’s around), at least since Greg was quite young. ‘Maybe,’ George said, ‘he can manage his mother in a secondary role, eh? But not in the breadwinner’s shoes.’ Good Lord, I thought. Our children would be much too enlightened for that, I mean, remember when we got Mia the truck for Christmas and gave the Cabbage Patch Doll to Greg? Remember the disbelief—nay, outrage—on the faces of The Mothers? (Remember—oh Lord—how fast truck got 1

Carol Shields & Blanche Howard. A Celibate Season. 2000 edition.

23

traded out for doll?) Society’s expectations again—with the added weight of not one but two dedicated grand-mothers.” (58)

Of course, some women face their life and make the choice not to depend on a man, but to do what they like and what makes them happy. The problem then encountered is another one: once the choice of independence is made, the traditional role does not seam possible any longer and society does not allow a women to do both: have career and children. In Family Trust, Amanda Brown draws the portrait of a successful career woman whom everyone tries to marry: Becca couldn’t understand why capable professionals were always trying to get her married. […] Didn’t they see how busy she was? It had gotten worse since she turned thirty-one last year. Even for her mother, for whom marriage had never done any favors, was constantly after her to give a nice boy like G.Y. a chance. (9)

Not only do people refuse to admit the possibility of a women finding fulfilment, just as a man, in her career, but the career women is also a strange creature whose capacities of being a mother nearly everyone questions as this specialist in Amanda Brown’s Family Trust: ‘As a clinical matter,’ he [the therapist] felt compelled to add, ‘I have never seen anyone named as a guardian whom I consider less fit to become a parent than you, Ms Becca Reinhart.’ […] ‘How do you plan to care for a four-year old child between your phone calls’—he pointed to Becca— ‘and your social life,’ he said, shaking his head at Edward, ‘is beyond me.’(103)

The difficulties of a woman who chooses to have an interesting work are doubled: first she is to face the problems of scheduling and finding energy to occupy to full-time jobs (parenting being the second one), secondly she has to live with the pressure exerted upon her by society which judges impossible to lead both roles correctly and awaits a large investment in children’s life as a proof of being a good mother. This is for example how a specialist advises a woman to get the right mother-profile in Amanda Brown’s Family Trust: All the top preschools really frown upon working mothers. That’s what’s hiding under ‘parent participation.’ (168) Becca sighed, slumping in her chair. ‘What do I have to do?’ ‘One: quit your job. Two: Read ten issues of Parents magazine. Cover to cover. Three: Ten issues of Good Housekeeping.’ (169)

24

Education As we have seen it, women did not quit studying despite their lack of professional ambition and even attended college more than in the past. But somehow they did not use their education or chose not to go through it. We are going to develop these points in this part on education. One of the causes of women’s dropping out is summed up in the following words: “By the mid-fifties, 60 per cent dropped out of college,” (16) “either to marry, or as David Riesman says, because they fear too much education would be a marriage bar.”(163)

Women’s lack of ambition:

It can be difficult to understand how The Feminine Mystique made its way and managed to persuade women that any ambition other than being a wife and mother was unnecessary. In a questionnaire sent to alumnae of all ages we learn the following about women’s points of view on their studies: The great majority were satisfied with their non-sex-directed education; but a minority complained that their education had made them overly conscious of women’s rights and equality with men, too interested in careers, possessed of a nagging feeling that they should at least keep on reading, studying, developing their own abilities and interests. Why hadn’t they been educated to be happy housewives and mothers? (167)

This complaining minority is constituted by housewives, restricted in their lives to the only tasks of being mothers and wives, and probably frustrated not to use any other competences, especially after having spent time learning some at college. These women might feel unable to escape their limited role and the only choice left is then to gratify this role and to try to find recognition in it. And somehow they managed to change more than their own way of considering their role: they draw back the whole system of America education and society concerning women’s role. So women themselves contributed to obliging colleges to adopt this attitude by reproaching them not to have taught them real womanhood, thus establishing a sort of vicious circle and making things worse. As writes a young mother, a few years out of college: ‘I have come to realize that I was educated to be a successful man and must now learn by myself to be a successful woman.’ (158-159) And the results are for example those of a questionnaire made later in colleges, in which we learn that “Seventy percent of freshmen women at a Midwestern university

25

answered the question “‘What do you hope to get out of college?’ with, among other things, ‘the man for me.’” (165) And then in the nineteen-sixties’ America, The Mystique even dropped as early as to concern high-schools, teaching girls as young and credulous as teenagers that the only important thing in life was marriage: The influence of sex-directed education was perhaps even more insidious on the high-school level […] it gives functional ‘do’s and don’ts for dating’ to girls of eleven, twelve, thirteen—a kind of early forced recognition of their sexual function. […] It is hardly surprising that by the sophomore year, many bright girls in this high-school are more than conscious of their sexual function, bored with all the subjects of school, and have no ambition other than to marry and have babies. (162)

Sex-directed educators:

As for college, the mentality was no better and the few women who had the courage to choose to attend would once more have to confront difficulties in their search for their self. Of course, as the majority, college professors became aware of the phenomenon and began to integrate the mystique and then made an attempt to adopt their courses and “a new degree was instituted for the wives—‘Ph.T.’ (Putting Husband Through).” (16), which constitutes the appearance of what Friedan calls “sex-directed educators.” This is how education and colleges become transmitters and thus partly responsible of The Feminine Mystique instead of playing its essential eye- and mind-opening role, helping women to escape the Mystique. Friedan explains how the sex-directed educators were created in the following extract: The one lesson a girl could hardly avoid learning, if she went to college between 1945 and 1960, was not to get interested, seriously interested, in anything besides getting married and having children, if she wanted to be normal, happy, adjusted, feminine, have a successful husband, successful children, and a normal, feminine, adjusted successful sex life. She might have learned some of this lesson at home, and some of it from the other girls in college, but she also learned it, incontrovertibly, from those entrusted with the development of her critical, creative intelligence: her college professors. […] A subtle and almost unnoticed change had taken place in the Academic culture for women over the last fifteen years: the new sex-direction of their educators. Under the influence of The Feminine Mystique, some college presidents and professors charged with the education of women had become more concerned with their students’ future capacity for sexual orgasm than with their future use of trained intelligence. (155)

It is obvious that a real change is taking place in education and even if “there were a few cries of outrage, of course, from the old-fashioned educators who still believed the mind was more important that the marriage bed” (157) the new educators managed to overtake traditional education: The old aim of education, the development of intelligence through vigorous mastery of the major intellectual disciplines, was already in disfavour among the child-centred educators. […] Instead of opening new horizons and wider worlds to able women, the sex-directed educator moved in to teach

26

them adjustment within the world of home and children. Instead of teaching truths to counter the popular prejudices of the past, or critical ways of thinking against which prejudices cannot survive, the sex-directed educator handed girls a sophisticated soup of uncritical prescriptions and presentiments, far more binding on the mind and prejudicial to the future than all the traditional do’s and don’ts. (157)

So college professors forgot their initial role and adopted a prescriptive way of teaching under the pressure of the Mystique. Another pressure was that of femininity and it became common to think that femininity was incompatible with studies, obliging colleges to go as far as to promote the promise not to educate women against femininity and even to help them develop as women, that is wives and mothers: “One famous women’s college adopted in defence the slogan, ‘We are not educating women to be scholars, we are educating them to be wives and mothers.’”(158-159) Women’s only ambition from then on was thus to find a man and get married and educators concentrated their courses on this unique desire: Instead of stimulating what psychologists have suggested might be a ‘latent’ desire for autonomy in the girls, the sex-directed educators stimulated their sexual fantasy of fulfilling all desire for achievement, status, and identity vicariously through a man. […] For women, the sex-directed educators say with approval, college is the place to find a man. (166)

Conclusion on the responsibility of education:

It remains difficult to determine exactly to what extent education was responsible for women’s evolution (or rather regression) but we can be sure of the following facts: The sex-directed educators have played a dual role in this trend: by actively educating girls to their sexual function […]; and by abdicating their responsibility for the education of women, in the strict intellectual sense. With or without education, women are likely to fulfil their biological role, and experience sexual love and motherhood. But without education, women or men are not likely to develop deep interests that go beyond biology. (163)

Yet the next sentence of this extract must be pointed out as it insists on women’s own responsibility in her choice to follow the sex-directed education or not. The main barrier to such growth in girls is their own rigid preconception of woman’s role, which sex-directed educators reinforce, either explicitly or by not facing their own ability, and responsibility, to break through it.1 (163)

So it might be too easy an excuse only to blame educators. Women were not forced to attend any courses nor obliged to blindly follow whatever was taught in these courses, they were individuals with the physical and legal possibility to stand up and face the ideas they did

1

I underline

27

not approve of. Friedan reminds us about this and also that some educators tried to fight against the new ideology: Still, it is too easy to make education the scapegoat. Whatever the mistakes of the sex-directed educators, other educators have fought a futile, frustrating rear-guarded battle trying to make able women ‘envision new goals and grow by reaching for them.’ In the last analysis, millions of able women in this free land chose, themselves, not to use the door education could have opened for them. The choice—and the responsibility—for the race back home was finally their own.1 (181)

The result of this change of minds was the difficulty for the rare women who still cared about real education, to reach it, bypassing the mounting obstacles as for example her teachers. But the following extract nevertheless shows that a girl can manage to get through with her ideas and ambition in spite of the obstacles on her way, if only she chooses not to follow the wrong guides, to listen to her own longings and to slightly fight for them: Sometimes a girl wanted to take a hard subject, but was advised by a guidance counsellor or teacher that it was a waste of time—as, for instance, the girl in a good Eastern high school who wanted to be an architect. Her counsellor strongly advised her against applying for admission anywhere in architecture, on the grounds that women are rare in that profession, and she would never get it anyhow. She stubbornly applied to two universities who give degrees in architecture; both, to her amazement, accepted her. (161-162)

The same can be concluded concerning Molly in Elisabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters2, the young girl wants education and fights for it and against her father’s (and probably society’s) opinion on women’s needs and she finally obtains it: “It was only by fighting and struggling hard, that bit by bit, Molly persuaded her father to let her have French and drawing lessons. He was always afraid of her becoming too educated…” (p.34)

To conclude, we will admit the importance of education in The Feminine Mystique, but only to a certain extent. If sex-directed educators did not help women to find their identity or enlarge their ideas as they were originally supposed to, the ones to blame on the basis remain women themselves, as they still evolve in a free county with the legal and social possibilities to be independent, but unexplainably choose not to seize the occasion. We shall therefore continue to analyse the American society around the nineteen-sixties and more precisely the influence of media, which usually offers a mirror of society and trends.

1 2

I underline Elisabeth Gaskell. Wives and Daughters. 1996 edition.

28

Media Media widely expanded in the middle of the twentieth century with television becoming universally accessible, radio being a natural part of the goods of the household and magazines increasing in quantity and coverage. This phenomenon initially meant bringing information closer to people and conveying ideas and news from the American society and the world. Nevertheless, the development of media, and more particularly magazines, gained such a scale as to literally invade consumers by its numerous offers as well as to propose a vast repertory of subjects. The difficulty then became to select the media of proper quality and the danger that of readers blindly believing the content of any written article and follow any recommended way of thinking. Nevertheless, the media not only inspired and spread new ideas, but they were also a reflection of society and its changes so let us first of all take a look at the image of American society offered by the magazines and observe the evolution around the nineteen-sixties.

A change in the image of the American woman: 

Before the mystique:

We shall begin with an example of the image of women shown in a magazine before the Mystique made its way and invaded the columns. The description given of women is supposed to make feminine readers dream and eventually identify and is here that of an independent career woman, having ambition and various occupations of her own. The image does not exclude love nor men, but it does not centre women’s entire life upon these sole areas. On the contrary, the more interest women have, the better, and the vision of happiness is not restricted to marriage and children, but offers a much saner and completer variety of places in the global world for women. Friedan points out several qualities socially admitted and wanted by women before the mystique: In 1939, the majority of the heroines in the four major women’s magazines (The Ladies’ Home journal, Mc Call’s, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s home Companion) were career women: happily, proudly, adventurously, attractively career women –who loved and where loved by men. And the spirit, courage, independence, determination—the strength of character they showed in their work as nurses, teachers, artists, actresses, copywriters, saleswomen—were part of their charm. There was a definite aura that their individuality was something to be admired. […] There heroines were usually marching toward some goal or vision of their own, struggling with some problem of work or the world, when they found their man. And this new woman, less fluffily feminine, so independent and determined to find a new life of her own, was the heroin of a different

29

kind of love story. She was less aggressive in pursuit of a man. Her passionate involvement with the world, her own sense of herself as an individual, her self-reliance, gave a different flavour to her relationship with the man. (37)

One magazine ran a success story about a woman gaining her independence and captured its audience without the slightest hint at a love story, thus proving that women had the desire to be interested in other things that love: ‘It’s a greater crime than not pleasing others, not doing justice to yourself.’ (Sarah and the Seaplane in The Ladies Home Journal in 1949) […] She was answerable to herself alone, and she was sufficient. […] She was not afraid of discovering her own way of life. She was Sarah. And that was sufficient. (41)



The mystique:

The remaining problem was that many women were housewives and this was going to constitute a basis for the creation of the mystique. These women were lonely, bored and unable to reach the dreams of fulfilment proposed through career or other ambitions and thus frustrated and unhappy. They found a means of getting themselves heard in letters written to the magazines, where they afterwards read about other women sharing their sense of lack of personal value. As Friedan writes: And then suddenly the image blurs. […] ‘Occupation: Housewife’ that started to appear in the women’s magazines, paeans that resounded throughout the fifties. They usually began with a woman complaining that when she had to write ‘housewife’ on the census blank, she gets an inferiority complex. (41)

And even better than not feeling alone in the despair of emptiness, they received answers to their letters from specialists affirming they had no reason not to be happy with their situation, as for example Dorothy Thompson, a columnist in The Ladies’ Journal in 1949, who answered a letter from a complaining housewife: “‘I simply refuse to share your self-pity. You are one of the most successful women I know.’”(42). And thereafter, women began to feel better about their status, but the power of the change went as far as to make women who were not housewives feel themselves bad and envy the latter. Friedan resumes that woman’s “solo fight to find her own identity was forgotten […] Her limitless world shrunk to the cozy walls of home.”(44). Throughout the fifties, the magazines’ articles changed their subjects toward something closer to a new feminine identity: the one restricted to the biological role. Friedan gives us an overview of the titles in the following lines: ‘Femininity begins at home”, ‘It’s a man’s world Maybe”, ‘Have Babies while you’re young”, ‘How to snare a male”, ‘Should I stop work when we marry?”, ‘Are you training your daughter to be a wife?”, ‘Careers at home”, ‘Do women have to talk so much?”, ‘Why GI’s prefer those German girls”, ‘What women can learn from mother Eve”, ‘Really a man’s world, Politics”, ‘How to hold on to a

30

happy marriage”, ‘Don’t be afraid to marry young”, ‘The doctor talks about breast feeding”, ‘Our baby was born at home”, ‘Cooking to me is poetry”, ‘The business of running a home.’ (44)

After just ten years, with the help of magazines, the mystique had thus managed to implant itself in most spirits. The opinions commonly expressed were no longer those of satisfied independent girls having achieved professional ambitions or taken up a challenge, but those of women satisfied with their biological role and not needing to go beyond it and use their mind any longer. Newsweek publishes the following statement on March 7, 1960: “‘I have had college and I've worked, but being a housewife is the most rewarding and satisfying role....’”(24) Give up the world and go back home

From then on, the image of femininity no longer admitted the fact of independence and women began to be considered in another way as Friedan explains it: The image of women that emerges from this big, pretty magazine is young and frivolous, almost childlike, fluffy and feminine, passive, gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home. The magazine surely does not leave out sex, the only passion, the only pursuit, the only goal a woman is permitted is the pursuit of a man. It is crammed full of food, clothing, cosmetics, furniture, and the physical bodies of young women, but where is the world of thought and ideas, the life of the mind and spirit? In the magazine, women do not work except housework and word to keep their bodies beautiful and to get and keep a man.[…] Almost no mention of the world beyond the home […] woman’s world was confined to her own body and beauty, the charming of man, the bearing of babies, and the physical care and serving of husband, children, and home. (36)

In the same way as we saw it with educators, some journalists or readers did not blindly accept this change and kept trying to propose other subjects. But these were a minority and editors would no more accept articles, which did not correspond to the mystique’s way of thinking. This is how editors outlined the needs of women’s magazines: ‘Our readers are housewives, full time. They’re not interested in the broad public issued of the day. They are not interested in national or international affairs. They are only interested in the family and the mediate need in the home. They aren’t interested in politics, unless it’s related to an immediate need in the home, like the prize of coffee. Humour? Has to be gentle, they don’t get satire. Travel? We have almost completely dropped it. Education? That’s a problem. Their own education level is going up. They’ve generally all had a high-school education and many, college. They’re tremendously interested in education for their children –fourth-grade arithmetic. You just can’t write about ideas or broad issues of the day for women. That’s why we’re publishing 90 per cent service now and 10 per cent general interest.’ […] At this point, the writers and editors spent an hour listening to Thurgood Marshall on the inside story of the desegregation battle, and its possible effect on the presidential election? ‘Too bad I can’t run that story,’ one editor said. ‘But you just can’t link it to woman’s world.’ As I listened to them a German phrase echoed in my mind –‘Kinder, Kuche, Kirche,’ the slogan by which the Nazis decreed that woman must once again be confined to their biological role. But this was not Nazi Germany. This was America. The whole world lies open to American women. Why,

31

then, does the image deny the world? Why does it limit women to “one passion, one role, one occupation?” Not long ago, women dreamed and fought for equality, their own place in the world. What happened to their dreams; when did women decide to give up the world and go back home?

Few people remained as objective as Betty Friedan to be able to question the Mystique and keep aware of something abnormal going on. Those who eventually doubted the limits of women to be those of home did not actively fight for their ideas and as no one resisted, those who questioned the mystique could not find other voices and thought themselves alone. And the resistance thus died out. Even Friedan herself lived for years trying to conform to the exemplary housewife, quitting work in order to raise her children and take care of her husband. But as she felt too unsatisfied by her sole biological role, she could not resist taking up work again, but had to do so in secret and she chose to work at home as soon as her children were in school. This is to tell the difficulty of the resistance to the mystique and the determination needed to fight against it and thus against society in its whole. Friedan brings up another reason than that of housewives’ frustration as being the basis of the mystique in the magazines: advertisers. These quickly sensed the beginning of a new era for women, meaning also a change in behaviour and thus in needs. And then, as says Friedan, “there was a new kind of woman’s editor or publisher, less interested in ideas to reach women’s minds and hearts, than in selling them the things that interest advertisers.”(54)

32

Advertisement So advertisers saw these housewife-women as new customers for new needs and then invented new needs for the new customers… Friedan writes, “the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house.”(206) Producers prospering in the period after the second world war had to maintain their production and hired advertisers to help them continue increasing their sales. Thus began the time of consumerism. Friedan shares the conclusions of a market-study from the late nineteen-fifties: “Since the Balanced Homemaker represents the market with the greatest future potential, it would be to the advantage of the appliance manufacturer to make more women aware of the desirability of belonging to this group. Educate them through advertising that it is possible to have outside interests and become alert to wider intellectual influences (without becoming a Career Woman). The art of good housemaking should be the goal of every normal woman.”(210)

The career woman was a danger for consumerism as she was able to find fulfilment through her own ideas and did not need material placebos to pretend to obtain an identity. She needed to be evicted and advertisers made their possible to comfort housewives in continuing to follow the right and most gratifying feminine way of life. And in a couple of years they managed to eradicate beliefs that women might be more than housewives and may need more than commercial goods to be happy: By the mid-fifties, the surveys reported with pleasure that the Career Woman (‘the woman who clamoured for equality—almost for identity in every sphere of life, the woman who reacted to ‘domestic slavery’ with indignation and vehemence’) was gone, replaced by the ‘less worldly, less sophisticated’ woman whose activity in PTA gives her ‘broad contacts with the world outside her home,’ but who ‘finds in housework a medium of expression for her femininity and individuality.’ She’s not like the old-fashioned self-sacrificing housewife; she considers herself the equal of man. But she still feels ‘lazy, neglectful, haunted by guilt feelings’ because she doesn’t have enough work to do. The advertiser must manipulate her need for a ‘feeling of creativeness’ into the buying of his product. (213)

This extract speaks for itself and our attention should now be drawn to the word “manipulate”. Because it was of course difficult for women to feel profoundly fulfilled through buying and some questioned the mystique, but advertisers found an answer to that problem too. As Friedan says it: “creativeness is the modern woman’s dialectical answer to the problem of her changed position in the household. Thesis: I’m a housewife. Antithesis: I hate drudgery. Synthesis: I’m creative.”(214) Advertisers thus do have a part of guilt in The Feminine Mystique: To their own profit and that of their clients, the manipulators discovered that millions of supposedly happy American housewives have complex needs which home-and-family, love-and-

33

children, cannot fill. But by a morality that goes beyond the dollar, the manipulators are guilty of using their insights to sell woman things which, no matter how ingenious, will never satisfy those increasingly desperate needs. They are guilty of persuading housewives to stay at home, mesmerized in front of a television set, their nonsexual human needs unnamed, unsatisfied, drained y the sexual sell into the buying of things. (227-228)

As long as the most obvious daily needs of the housewife are completed, recreated and so on endlessly in order for the market to persist, the later never gets a moment to think about the legitimacy of the procedure. As says Friedan, “those unfulfilled promises can keep her endlessly hungry for things, keep her from ever knowing what she really needs or wants.”(229) Whenever she feels to have satisfied one need, another superficial need appears and this continues during her whole existence and thus never leaves a place for a profound asking on ones real needs, which are other than simply material. We can conclude that the “housewife is often an unaware victim” (230) of advertisers, but still, as says Friedan, “perhaps the housewife has no one but herself to blame if she lets the manipulators flatter or threaten her into buying things that neither fill her family’s needs nor her own.”(230) Because advertisement, however pertinent and efficient it may be, stays suggestive and in no way obliges anyone to follow its way. The housewife as any other person remains free to follow these suggestions or not, but what Friedan does not suggest is that women might lack personality or other interests and become an easier pray. This difference (from men) could be explained by women’s habit of evicting difficulties and their having got used to a certain laziness in conducting their thoughts far enough. And the basis problem is thus accordingly their incapacity to reach the limits beyond commonness, meaning the acquiring of a true individual identity and then, once again, they escape from the difficult but essential procedure of creating their own self.

34

Philosophies

In the years following the second world war, prosperity developed in the United States and consumerism gained in importance, offering households increasing objects and creating a new and easier way of living: the American Way of Life, a model of envy to the rest of the world. The image of the happy suburb family became famous with its housewife taking care of the healthy children and the working husband. It even became a dream and the goal of nearly every American girl and soon most of society adopted this lifestyle. But then women began not to feel well, but “ if a woman had a problem in the 1950's and 1960's, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself.”(19) She never questioned any other reason for her discomfort and moreover, “she was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never knew how many other women shared it.”(19) The era of consulting psychologists and other specialists of the mind then started and it became nearly common to seek help by professionals whenever one felt something was wrong. And women searching for help mostly encountered the same tendencies of Freudian inspired thoughts, thus spending years “on the analyst's couch, working out their ‘adjustment to the feminine role,’ their blocks to ‘fulfilment as a wife and mother.’”(21) The phenomenon of the unhappy housewife became so common that “no month went by without a new book by a psychiatrist or sexologist offering technical advice on finding greater fulfilment through sex.”(23) and all attention was focused on this sole problem of women’s fulfilment as a housewife. Some results nevertheless revealed an incoherence as “a number of psychiatrists stated that, in their experience, unmarried women patients were happier than married ones.”(25) And some counsellors were aware of another reason than sex being the real problem of housewives: ‘We have made women a sex attire,’ said a psychiatrist at the Margaret Sanger marriage counselling clinic. ‘She has no identity except as a wife and mother. She does not know who she is herself. She waits all day for her husband to come home at night to make her feel alive. And now it is the husband who is interested. It is terrible for the women, to lie there, night after night, waiting for her husband to make her feel alive.’ […] ‘a devastating boredom with life. (29)

The key words in this passage are “identity”, “waiting” and “boredom” as women’s identity no more exist other than through her husband and she spends her time waiting for him to come home and make her exist, which she is unable to do without him, not being anyone herself. How comes psychologists kept trying to reduce women’s problem to the one of sex instead of discovering what was really wrong? And why did women themselves accept this

35

boredom of life? Women were probably afraid of not resembling the model and those who sensed the wrongness of the model were quickly reasoned by specialists who themselves followed a model of thought. In this extract from Lives of Girls and Women1, Alice Munro describes a young girl who senses the problem and does not want to accept the narrow housewife-role society proposes for her, but nevertheless can not find the way to conceal love and mind in a woman’s life: […] everything from advertisements to F. Scott Fitzgerald to a frightening song on the radio— ‘the girl that I marry will have to be, as soft and pink as a nursery’—was telling me I would have to, ‘have to’, learn. Love is not for the undepilated.[…] I started to read an article in a magazine, on the subject of the basic difference between the male and female habits of thoughts, relating chiefly to their experience of sex […] The author was a famous New York psychiatrist, a disciple of Freud. He said that the difference between the male and female modes of thought were easily illustrated by the thoughts of a boy and a girl, sitting on a park bench, looking at the full moon. The boy thinks of the universe, its immensity and mystery; the girl thinks, ‘I must wash my hair’ […] I new if I showed it to my mother she would say, ‘Oh, it is just that maddening male nonsense, women have no brains.’ That would not convince me; surely a New York psychiatrist must know. Moreover I did not want to be like my mother, with her virginal brusqueness, her innocence. I wanted men to love me, and I wanted to think of the universe when I looked at the moon. I felt trapped, stranded; it seemed there had to be a choice where there couldn’t be a choice. (177-178)

This young girl is directly confronted to the Mystique and though she has a mother who sees through the false image and relativizes it, she is also under the influence of references to specialists and has difficulty to choose whom of them she should believe. The most important figure of psychoanalysis is of course Freud so we shall have a closer look upon his way of dealing with the Mystique and eventual responsibility in its creation.

1

Alice Munro. Lives of Girls and Women. 1982 edition.

36

Freud The middle of the twentieth century witnessed the expansion of therapies and consultations became quite commonplace. The master of psychological thinking who was followed by most specialists was Freud and this is how it influenced the society: Freudian thought helped create a new super-ego that paralyses educated modern American women a new tyranny of the 'shoulds', which chains women to an old image, prohibits choice and growth, and denies them individual identity. […] Without Freud's definition of the sexual nature of woman to give the conventional image of femininity new authority, I do not think several generations of educated, spirited American women would have been so easily diverted from the dawning realisation of who they were and what they could be. (104)

Friedan moreover explains how sexuality got introduced in women’s life as a main activity and concludes that “The psychosocial rule that begins to take form, then, is this: the more educated the woman is, the greater chance there is of sexual disorder, more or less severe.” (119-120) Some psychoanalysts are aware of the danger of generalizing Freudian thought without even adapting it to modern society or each individual case as the one interviewed by Friedan: A New York analyst, one of the last trained at Freud's own Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna, told me: ‘For twenty years now in analysing American women, I have found myself again and again in the position of having to superimpose Freud's theory of femininity on the psychic life of my patients in a way that I was not willing to do. I have come to the conclusion that penis envy simply does not exist. I have seen women who are completely expressive, sexually, vaginally, and yet who are not mature, integrated, fulfilled. I had a woman patient on the couch for nearly two years before I could face her real problem - that it was not enough for her to be just a housewife and mother. One day she had a dream that she was teaching a class. I could not dismiss the powerful yearning of this housewife's dream, as penis envy. It was the expression of her own need for mature self-fulfilment. I told her: ' I can't analyse this dream away. You must do something about it.'’(122)

Unfortunately, the majority of analysts blindly followed Freud and never told women or helped them discover by themselves what the real problem was and that they had to face it themselves in stead of making up problems as sex serving as excuses for the real one. Friedan also accuses functionalists: The most zealous missionaries of The Feminine Mystique were the functionalists, who seized hasty gulps of pre-digested Freud to start their new departments of 'Marriage and Family-Life Education '. The functional courses in marriage taught American college girls how to ' play the role ' of woman - the old role became a new science. (124)

37

How could theories become as important to public mind as to make people forget who they were and what they initially wanted? Once again, the role of Freud and his followers in the guilt of The Feminine Mystique must be relativized as it already existed in the beginning of the century but did not have the same impact at all and did not prevent women’s liberalisation at that moment. In order to get heard, there must have been a silent demand from the interested, i.e. women, who faced to the search for their self, were ready to listen to any advice and to choose the easiest one. The answer to our question might be that women’s personality was not sufficient to counter professional preached rules of living. And whereas they were still free to decide what to do with their own lives, the task was made much more difficult since it became nearly a revolution not to follow the common image, taught by respectable and intelligent specialists: The Feminine Mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, over-protective, life-restricting, future-deriving note for women. Girls who grew up playing baseball, baby-sitting, mastering geometry almost independent enough, almost resourceful enough, to meet the problems of the fission-fusion era - were told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll's house by Victorian prejudice. And their own respect and awe for the authority of science - anthropology, sociology, psychology share that authority now - kept them from questioning The Feminine Mystique. (125)

38

Margaret Mead Friedan cites the responsibilities of eminent functionalists as Parsons and Maslow but more regularly refers to Margaret Mead stating that she “and the lesser functionalists gave the new mystique its scientific authority.” (146-147) The influence of functionalists reached women directly toward publications of their work in magazines as in 1949: The Ladies’ Home Journal also ran Margaret Mead’s Male and Female. All the magazines were echoing Farnham and Lundberg’s Modern Woman: the Lost Sex, which came out in 1942, with its warning that careers and higher education were leading to the ‘masculinization of women with enormously dangerous consequences to the home, the children dependent on it and the ability of the woman, as well as her husband, to obtain sexual gratification.’ (42)

A famous anthropologist and sometimes understood as a feminist, Mead nevertheless mainly followed the ideas of her master, the anthropologist Franz Boas, who believed in cultural relativism: the differences in peoples were the results of historical, social and geographic conditions. Margaret Mead was known as a remarkable scientist and hard-working women, whose “interpretation is subtly transformed into a glorification of women in the female role—as defined by their sexual biological function,”(137) her work was often misunderstood and too literally adopted, as Friedan explains it: And she was able to say with conviction: it’s good to be a woman, you don’t have to copy man, you respect yourself as a woman.[…] It was, perhaps, not her fault that she was taken so literally that procreation became a cult, a career, to the exclusion of every other kind of creative endeavour […] Those who found in her work confirmation of their own unadmitted prejudices and fears ignored not only the complexity of her total work, but the example of her complex life […] she has never retreated from the hard road to self-realizing so few women have travelled since. (146-147)

In order not to make the same mistake as readers in the nineteen-fifties, we shall take a closer look on some of Margaret Mead’s very interesting work. Though her writings often contents expressions as “biological role”, as a functionalist, she believes society to model personhood and thus does not initially believe in an innate feminine or masculine role. She first of all questions the existence of a model for women (or men) in their search for their self, made more difficult in the twentieth century, at a time when nearly everything seems possible, and in Male and Female1, she writes in chapter 1 (The Significance of the Question we ask): How are men and women to think about their maleness and their femaleness in this twentieth century, in which so many of our old ideas must be made new? […] The old certainties of the past are gone, and everywhere there are signs of an attempt to build a new tradition, which like the old traditions that have been cast aside will again safely enfold growing boys and girls, so that they may grow up to 1

Male and Female. Margaret Mead. 1962 Pelican Books Edition

39

chose each other, marry and have children. […] What is it to be a man? What is it to be a woman?” (2728)

Margaret Mead raises another interesting explanation to the problems in finding identity for young Americans and particularly young American women. In the following extract from part four from The two sexes in contemporary America: chapter 12 (Our complex American culture), she shows how the standard presented by society might in fact be some unreachable ideal that women thus all get frustrated not to reach whereas in fact it is a quite impossible task and nobody actually reach it. By the very nature of the dream, none can attain it, and each particular household falls short of the ideal. Each house lacks some detail that is included in the ideal house which no one lives in. No mother can be all that an American mother should be, no romance have all the qualities that true love should show. And this, not because the ideal is so high, but because it is a dream of the future rather than an attempt to reproduce the past. (237) ‘This discrepancy between the actuality and the ideal is experienced as a discrepancy between ‘myself and the others’… and also a discrepancy between what one should be and feel and what one does feel. ‘I have a husband I am devoted to, a lovely child, plenty of money, brains and beauty, but’ complains the young wife, ‘I am not one hundred percent happy.’ ‘Somehow I don’t seem to be getting what I should out of life’. ‘I feel as if life were passing me by.’ ‘Am I as happy as I ought to be?’ The old perfectly realizable Puritan imperative for the moment, ‘Work, save, deny the flesh,’ has shifted to a set of unrealizable imperatives for the future, ‘Be happy, be fulfilled, be the ideal.’ (238-239)

The conclusion to our study of Margaret Mead is the confirmation of the existence of a real identity-problem and raises the embarrassing question of knowing if women are not finally asking for too much, questing for a perfect life where they would succeed in all domains and always be happy. This statement is all the more interesting as we tended to discover that women might not be offering enough themselves, which of courses creates an enormous anticlimax in women’s lives, with their wanting all but not doing much to obtain it and certainly not fighting for it. We shall now try to explain this strange paradox of women’s own responsibilities in a life they cannot bear to live with and which makes them unhappy but does not force a change for improvement.

40

III. Women’s responsibility

In the last part of our work, we have shown that many factors in the beginning and middle of the twentieth century influence women in their conception of life and of themselves and thus in their decisions. Nevertheless we have also shown that these factors remain only influences and cannot be held as sole responsible for women’s wrong choices. The only ones to blame and carry the real responsibility on the basis problem are definitely women themselves, so let us now try to explain why they have such a contradictory behaviour and try to understand the process leading to the lack of fulfilment and the Feminine Mystique. We shall first see how women refuse to make a choice in their life and passively wait for someone else to make it for them and why it might be so. We shall develop their deliberate abandoning of education and their illusory dream of marriage as constituting a final objective in life. Then we will have a look at what happens once a choice, which is often wrong, has been made: the misunderstandings and consequences. A closer approach will be carried on the confusion of women’s problems with sex-problems and the too easy possibility of living true someone else. It will next be interesting to see how some women question the Feminine Mystique and manage or not to escape it in time, that is while they are young and not yet engaged in the traditional and restricted feminine role. Finally we shall, with the help of extracts from various writers, philosophers and psychoanalysts try to bring some suggestions to the way women could and probably should handle their lives in order to avoid the imminent negative consequences of not facing their responsibilities themselves.

41

Women's passive waiting The refusal to choose which way to follow in one’s life can in some cases be unconscious and when it is, excuses such as marriage and children, can quickly be taken up as a false good reason not to choose any thing else, by being much easier to handle as not presenting anything unknown. Women may be afraid to fail, just like anyone else –that is, just like men, nevertheless, men have no easy way of avoiding to face the risk whereas women still have the possibility of abandoning their individual social success and returning home without anyone making real reproaches toward her (after all her image is not going to blur because of her desire to be more available for her husband and children). We shall just cite one example of this obvious behaviour given by Betty Friedan in her book: Betty Ann Countrywoman (housewife writer for the magazine Redbook) had planned to be a doctor. But just before graduation from Radcliffe cum laude, she shrank from the though that such a dedication might shut her off from what she really wanted, which was to marry and have a large family. (57)

The concerned woman turns her reasons upside down: whereas she had plans and was obviously capable of realizing them, she suddenly chose not to put them through because it could represent the obligation of her not founding a family. But first of all, no study has proved that intelligent women with studies had fewer abilities to found families, or that most men would prefer rather docile and passive wives and second of all, this abandoning intervenes just before her graduation thus as a matter of fact demonstrating a disguised fear of failure. The presence of a certain fear of choosing wrongly for herself and the possibility of a too easy way out through marriage are evidence and the sole responsible for these are women. Simone de Beauvoir brilliantly analyses this functioning of women and their surprising ability to passively wait, in her book Le Deuxi€me Sexe I1 and writes: “Comment le mythe de Cendrillon ne garderait-il pas toute sa valeur ? Tout encourage encore la jeune fille ‹ attendre du • prince charmant Ž fortune et bonheur plut‘t qu’‹ en tenter seule la difficile et incertaine conquŠte.” (233) The fairytale-like education most girls are given is unfortunately becoming permanent evidence and as girls grow up they tend to dramatically confuse reality and dream world, effectively believing in the possibility of a life where everything is love and happiness 1

Simone de Beauvoir. Le deuxi€me sexe I. 2003 Publication.

42

all the time and marriage being sufficient to make and fill an entire living. Though somehow conscious of the utopia of such a way of living and often aware of many real difficulties of life, women still continue to believe in these dreams of fairytales and to compare them with what they have themselves, with an obvious result of a permanent feeling of dissatisfaction in an imperfect world. It nearly seems as if girls never grow up and somewhere stay the small girls they once were, with their dreams of magical happiness and hopes for more (much more) than ordinary lives. In Le Deuxi€me Sexe II, Simone de Beauvoir writes: Si l’avenir l’effraie, le pr‰sent ne la satisfait pas ; elle h‰site Š devenir femme ; elle s’agace de n’Žtre qu’une enfant ; elle a d‰jŠ quitt‰ son pass‰ ; elle n’est pas engag‰e dans une vie nouvelle. Elle s’occupe, mais elle ne fait rien : parce qu’elle ne fait rien, elle n’a rien, elle n’est rien. (127)

The problem that will occur once the women trapped in the condition of the feminine mystique, is that marriage has nothing magical and all the dreams she nourished since her childhood quickly vanish, leaving place for nothing new to take their place. Her dream was to get married and get children. But once she has succeeded in these goal, what will be next? She has no other expectance of life and nothing to hope for or to motivate her life. Once women realize their mistake, they are married and have already abandoned any possibility they might have had of evading the monotone life of a housewife through studies leading to career. It is too late to change what they did wrong and to come back on their misunderstandings of life. Simone de Beauvoir resumes the sad state of mind of a married woman in Le Deuxi€me Sexe II: Maintenant elle est mari€e, il n’y a plus devant elle d’avenir autre. Les portes du foyer se sont referm€es sur elle : ce sera l‹ toute sa part sur terre. Elle sait exactement quelles tŒches lui sont r€serv€es : celles mŠmes qu’accomplissait sa m‰re. Jour apr‰s jour, les mŠmes rites se r€p‰teront. Jeune fille, elle avait les mains vides : en espoir, en rŠve, elle poss€dait tout. Maintenant elle a acquis une parcelle du monde et elle pense avec angoisse : ce n’est que cela, ‹ jamais. […] Elle n’a plus rien ‹ attendre, plus rien d’important ‹ vouloir. (279)

But how could a woman know she was supposed to take action herself? All her life, she has been told that the way toward happiness inevitably goes through love and marriage and that all she had to do was to wait for a prince charming to deliver her from her pale everyday life and make her happy. As writes Simone de Beauvoir in Le Deuxi€me Sexe II: Elle apprend que pour Štre heureuse, il faut Štre aim€e ; pour Štre aim€e, il faut attendre l’amour. La femme c’est la Belle au bois dormant, Peau d’’ne, Cendrillon, Blanche Neige, celle qui re•oit et subit. […] il combat des g€ants ; elle est enferm€e dans un tout, un palais, un jardin, encha•n€e ‹ un rocher, captive, endormie : elle attend. (43) La suprŠme n€cessit€ pour la femme, c’est de charmer un cœur masculin ; mŠme intr€pides, aventureuses, c’est la r€compense ‹ laquelle toutes les h€ro”nes aspirent. (44)

43

And once women have successfully waited for a man to find them, they begin a new life of waiting for him to come home and entertain their empty lives. Simone de Beauvoir develops this point in the extracts we will analyse next. Immanence in Le Deuxi€me Sexe II: First of all it is necessary to understand a certain definition of marriage as regularly adopted by a traditional or conservative part of the population as a result of certain habits of life: A certaines ‰poques […] ils visaient non la conquŽte de l’avenir et du monde, mais la conservation paisible du pass‰, le statu quo. Une m€diocrit€ dor€e sans ambition ni passion, des jours qui ne m‰nent nulle part et qui ind€finiment se recommencent, une vie qui glisse doucement vers la mort sans se chercher de raisons. […] Mais le mariage traditionnel n’invite pas la femme ‹ se transcender avec lui ; il la confine dans l’immanence. Elle ne peut donc rien se proposer d’autre que d’€difier une vie €quilibr€e o• le pr€sent prolongeant le pass€ €chappe aux menaces du lendemain, c’est ‹ dire pr€cis€ment d’€difier un bonheur. A d€faut d’amour, elle €prouvera pour son mari un sentiment tendre et respectueux appel€ amour conjugal ; entre les murs du foyer, qu’elle sera charg€e d’administrer, elle enfermera le monde ; elle perp€tuera l’esp‰ce humaine ‹ travers l’avenir. (256-257)

More concretely, this represents the following daily aspects and significations for a married woman in search for a justification of her stationary existence and explains her attachment to material richness: Son foyer, c’est donc pour elle le lot qui lui est d‰volu sur terre, l’expression de sa valeur sociale, et de sa plus intime v‰rit‰. Parce qu’elle ne fait rien, elle se recherche avidement dans ce qu’elle a. […] De l’administration de sa demeure, elle tire sa justification sociale. […] Ainsi, se r‰alise-t-elle, elle aussi, comme une activit‰. Mais c’est, on va le voir, une activit‰ qui ne l’arrache pas Š son immanence et qui ne lui permet pas une affirmation singuli•re d’elle-mŽme. (260-261) La m‰nag•re s’use Š pi‰tiner sur place ; elle ne fait rien ; elle perp‰tue seulement le pr‰sent ; elle n’a pas l’impression de conqu‰rir un Bien positif mais de lutter ind‰finiment contre le mal. (264)

This is how women’s lives continue to be made of continual waiting and obligatory conscious acceptance of the wasting of their time in passivity and inessential chores: Quotidien, ce travail [le m€nage] devient monotone et machinal ; il est trou€ d’attentes : il faut attendre que l’eau bouille, que le r‘ti soit ‹ point, le linge sec ; mŠme si on organise les diff€rentes tŒches, il reste de longs moments de passivit€ et de vide ; elles s’accomplissent la plupart du temps dans l’ennui ; elles ne sont entre la vie pr€sente et la vie de demain qu’un interm€diaire essentiel. […] c’est pourquoi les corv€es quotidiennes semblent beaucoup moins tristes quand elles sont effectu€es par des hommes ; elles ne repr€sentent pour eux qu’un moment n€gatif et contingent dont ils se hŒtent de s’€vader. Mais ce qui rend ingrat le sort de la femme-servante, c’est la division du travail qui la voue tout enti‰re au g€n€ral et ‹ l’inessentiel ; l’habitat, l’aliment sont utiles ‹ la vie mais ne lui conf‰rent pas de sens : les buts imm€diats de la m€nag‰re ne sont que des moyens, non des fins v€ritables et en eux ne se refl‰tent que des projets anonymes. (272)

We shall see more about these essential human needs with the help of Maslow’s Pyramid in our part on proposals for solutions.

44

Unfortunately, few women come to realize these facts and if they do it is often too late as they have not got any other choices than to financially depend on men, being too old to study and get able to take care of themselves.

Abandoning education Another possibility than only marriage nevertheless exists and was already open to most girls in the nineteen-sixties: education. Though some colleges did still not accept girls and that it was not always favourably looked upon for a girl to attend certain domains, any girl who really wanted to, could make herself a way through education and obtain an occupation other than love. But girls themselves refused to let this road open as explained by Friedan and a therapist in the Feminine Mystique: But they just won’t let themselves get interested. They seem to feel it will get in their way when they marry the young executive and raise all those children in the suburbs. (152) A therapist at another college told me of girls who had never committed themselves, either to their work or any other activity of the college and who felt that they would ‘go to pieces’ when their parents refused to let them leave college to marry the boys in whom they found ‘security’.[…] And yet the fact is, today most girls do not let their education ‘take’; they stop themselves before getting this close to identity. (176)

Other specialists were aware of the problem caused by the lack of education in women’s lives: “In summing up the Vassar study, its director could not avoid the psychological paradox: education for women does not make them less feminine, less adjusted—but it makes them grow.”(175) If women refuse to go through the state of education, they simply remain the small girls they once were, nourishing the same hopes and dreams as children and unconscious of needs and implications of real adult life. As we saw it earlier in our analysis, some women thus tried to escape the traditional role and actually wanted education, but they were such a minority that they could not find any answers to their demands anymore and that education chose to abandon them in its turn. The changes in education did not stop at this point and “American girls began getting married in high school.” (15-16), before they have even had a chance to grow up, evolve and be able to think about their own life. Nevertheless, at this point it becomes difficult to define the responsible and a vicious circle is forming itself with women choosing not to study seriously, professors losing ambition in educating them or having no other choice if wanting to catch their interest, adapting the curses, with the result of women dropping out even more and so on. Friedan describes the facts this way:

45

Out of loyalty to that more and more futile illusion—the importance of higher education for women […] the departure of the male presidents, scholars, and educators from women’s colleges; in the disillusionment, the mystified frustration or cool cynicism of the ones who stayed; and in the scepticism, finally, in colleges and universities, about the value of a professional investment in any girl or woman, no matter how apparently able and ambitious. Some women’s colleges went out of business; some professors, at coeducational universities, said one of the three college places should no longer be wasted on women. […] In the preliminary report of the psychological-sociological-anthropological Melon Foundation study of Vassar girls in 1956: Strong commitment to an activity or career other than that of housewife is rare. Many students, perhaps a third, are interested in graduate schooling and in careers, for example, teaching. Few, however, plan to continue with a career if it should conflict with family needs… As compared to previous periods, however, e.g., the “feminist era,” few students are interested in the pursuit of demanding careers, such as law or medicine, regardless of personal or social pressures. […] Vassar girls, by and large, do not expect to achieve fame, make an enduring contribution to society, pioneer any frontiers, or otherwise create ripples in the placid order of things. (151)

The Feminine Mystique creates a whole new and totally narrow-minded way of thinking, being and behaving for girls and women. Their only and almost desperate preoccupation is finding a man and getting married and nothing else seems to matter. Completely indoctrinated in the Mystique, girls are unable to focus on their life with an objective view and are obsessed with this sole finality of marriage, which of course should not be anything else than a part of their future. Friedan quotes a young student who explains her ideas: ‘Girls don’t get excited about things like that anymore [nuclear physics, Modern Art, civilizations of Africa]. We don’t want careers. Our parents expect us to go to college. Everybody goes. You’re a social outcast at home if you don’t. But a girl who got serious about anything she studied— like wanting to go on and do research—would be peculiar, unfeminine. I guess everybody wants to graduate with a diamond ring on her finger. That’s the important thing.’ […] We never waste time like that. We don’t have bull sessions about abstract things. Mostly, we talk about our dates. Anyhow, I spend three days a week off campus. There’s a boy I’m interested in. I want to be with him. (153) These girls behaved as if college were an interval to be gotten through impatiently, efficiently, bored but businesslike, so ‘real’ life could begin. And real life was when you married and lived in a suburban house with your husband and children. […] Could these girls […] really be so bored with the life of mind? […] They go through the motions, but they defend themselves against the impersonal passions of mind and spirit that college might install in them—the dangerous nonsexual passions of the intellect. (154)

Women do not consider college or work to be of any importance in their life, other than eventually a temporary step in the way to find a husband. They deliberately refuse to use their minds or to get interested in anything else than that related to family-life. They more or less consciously acknowledge the fact that they will not use any of their knowledge in their future role as mother and wife and probably even prevent the frustration of being too educated to be satisfied with daily chores by preventing themselves from the possibility to attain a risky education. Once again, the indoctrination of the Mystique is so powerful that girls abandon any chance of realizing their dreams or even have any dreams and passively accept what is taught to be the right feminine way to live. They are so blinded that they do not even try to

46

protest or express any kind of reaction, refusing to take any responsibility at all in thinking about their own life or anything that could implicate it. A girl […] said: Maybe we should take it more seriously. But nobody wants to graduate and get into something where they can’t use it. If your husband is going to be an organization man, you can’t be too educated. The wife is awfully important for the husbands career. You can’t be too interested in art, or something like that. A girl who had dropped out of honours in history told me: I got so exited about my work I would sometimes go into the library at eight in the morning and not come out till ten at night. I even thought I might want to go on to graduate school or law school. I wanted to lead a rich full life. I want to marry, have children, have a nice house. Suddenly I felt, what am I beating my brains out for. So this year I’m trying to lead a well-rounded life. I take courses, but I don’t read eight books and still feel like reading the ninth…The other way was harder and more exciting. I don’t know why I stopped, maybe I just lost courage. […] A junior from a Southern university said: science has had a fascination for me. I was going to major in bacteriology and go into cancer research. Now I’ve switched to home economics. I realized I don’t want to go into something that deep If I went on, I’d have been one of those dedicated people. I got so caught up in the first two years, I never got out of the laboratory. I loved it, but I was missing so many things… I realize it was better for me to change, and get out with people. I realized I shouldn’t be that serious. I’ll go home and work in a department store until I get married. (155)

Why did this intelligent girl believe she was “missing so many things?” She was happy and passionate, but suddenly felt too different from the global lot of girls pretending to be brainless and only interested in love. Despite her intelligence, she was too weak and did not resist the global tendency and so she chose to become like the others and to live normally: dreaming only of marriage.

The ‘marriage is everything’ dream Women trained by a fairytale education become unable to see any other goal in their life than that of marriage and once they actually fall in love, they are ready to abandon everything else for the man who will make their dream become real by marrying them. In the nineteen-sixties this dream is currently viewed as no dream but a reality and a perfect reality, a dream coming through: All she wanted, she said, was what every other American girl wanted--to get married, have four children and live in a nice house in a nice suburb. […] The suburban housewife--she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. […] She had found true feminine fulfilment. As a housewife and mother […]; she had everything that women ever dreamed of. […] Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers […] They gloried in their role as women, and wrote proudly on the census blank: ‘Occupation: housewife.’ (18)

Women were so blinded by the obsession of marriage that were unable to think about anything else or to appreciate their life while waiting to marriage to finally occur for them. In the meantime, they waited and eventually studied or worked, but with no pleasure or goal other that to pass time until their marriage and “real life”:

47

They are women whose greatest ambition has been marriage and children, […] no other dream was possible. […] the ones who quit high-school and college to marry, or marked time in some job in which they had no real interest until they married. (27)

This is why statistics showing a growing majority of women studying are to be handled carefully. The following lines show that women did not study effectively and often did not end their studies, because they did not intend to use them for a carrier: The shock, the mystery […] was that more American women that ever were going to college— but fewer of them were going on from college to become physicists, philosophers, poets, doctors, lawyers, stateswomen, social pioneers, even college professors. Fewer women in recent college graduating classes have gone on to distinguish themselves in a career or profession than those in the class graduated before World War II, the Great Divide. Fewer and fewer college women were preparing for any career of profession requiring more than the most casual commitment. Two out of three girls who entered college were dropping out before they even finished. In the 1950’s those who stayed, even the most able, showed no signs of wanting to be anything more than suburban housewives and mothers. […] the girls seemed suddenly incapable of any ambition, any vision, any passion, except the pursuit of a wedding ring1 . (150)

In Women In Love, David Herbert Lawrence writes about the intelligent and cultivated Ursula who, to briefly resume, usually had many plans about her life, arts and travelling and was a very independent girl with views of her own that she never hesitated to defend. But she suddenly falls in love and enters the passive state where nothing else than love and marriage has importance anymore. Her sister describes her new attitude in the following lines: Ursula was deeply and passionately in love with Birkin, and she was capable of nothing. […] She merely sat by herself, whenever she could and longed to see him again. She wanted him to come to the house—she would not have it otherwise, he must come at once. She was waiting for him. She stayed indoors all day, waiting for him to knock at the door. Every minute, she glanced automatically at the window. He would be there. (221)

Developing the theme of relations and love, Lawrence then gives the voice to a man (the friend of Ursula’s sister) and lets him give his opinion on marriage and the state the beloved and generally all women in love fall into: ‘It is awful to think what her life will be like unless she does find a means of expression, some way of fulfilment. You can see what mere leaving it to fate brings. You can see how much marriage is to be trusted to—look at your own mother.’ ‘Do you think mother is abnormal?’ ‘No! I think she only wanted something more, or other than the common rule of life. (241)

Lawrence thus shows that men were actually attracted to women with spirits, mind and character and do not wish to marry a woman who will totally rely on him and not be anyone herself. He narrator explains how any normal person will need a way of expression in order to feel fulfilled and that the entering the norm without searching for anything else is not enough and will irremediably cause problems. 1

my underlining

48

The idea of marriage as the only possibility for women is confirmed by Carol Shields & Blanche Howard in A Celibate Season1 where the authors briefly describe the image awaited of women: But in that decade, when housework and husband-support was raised to what Galbraith dubbed a ‘convenient social virtue,’ it seemed a natural thing to do and be. Indeed, to yearn otherwise carried social disapprobation. When entering the hospital in labour, Erma Bombeck attempted to have ‘writer’ entered under vocation, but a no-nonsense nurse scratched it out and put in ‘housewife.’ (4-5)

They thereby come back to the so-called “occupation housewife” largely referred to by Friedan herself in The Feminine Mystique, a frustrating title for those who feel worth more but thus a glorifying title for the great majority of women in the early nineteen-sixties who made the choice to abandon their education and return home.

1

Carol Shields & Blanche Howard. A Celibate Season. 2000 edition.

49

The Mistaken Choice We have seen that women too often choose the easiest way out of in their lives by refusing to make an effort and actually think through what they would really like to do or to be. Maybe they unconsciously refuse to make the choice or at least the effort to make the choice and tired as much as scared, finally blindly follow the crowd. While interviewing women, Friedan recalls her own youth and how the questioning frightened her and her comrades: We don’t like to be asked what we want to do. None of us know. None of us even like to think about it. The ones who are going to be married right away are the lucky ones. They don’t have to think about it1 . […] The tragedy was, nobody ever looked us in the eye and said you have to decide what you want to do with your life, besides being your husband’s wife and your children’s mother. […] I realized that I had to make my own life. I still had to decide what I wanted to be. I hadn’t finished evolving at all. But it took me ten years to think it through. […] But I don’t think the mystique would have such power over American women if they did not fear this terrifying blank which makes them unable to see themselves after twenty-one. (71)

Another middle-aged married women suffering from her condition thinks back on her life and confides her conclusions to Friedan: Suddenly you wish you’d read more, talked more, taken hard courses you skipped. So you’d know what you’re interested in. But I guess those things don’t matter when you’re married. You’re interested in your home and teaching your children how to swim and skate, and at night you talk to your husband. (153)

It seems obvious that two categories exist: the one of marriage and children and the one containing all the rest. The two appear impossible to be mixed together or reconciled in any way and a choice obligingly has to be made between the two. Some girls were conscious of this difficulty as Ursula in David Herbert Lawrence’s Women In Love where she discusses the problem with her friends and lover who answers ‘She is both,’ said Gerald. ‘She is a social being, as far as society is concerned. But for her own private self, she is a free agent, it is her own affair, what she does,’ leading to Ursula questioning ‘But won’t it be rather difficult to arrange the two halves?’ (124) This means women have to choose between family-life or identity but in their conditions for happiness, the two are interdependent which makes the eventual choice absurd. Nevertheless, in the middle of the twentieth century it becomes expected that women make this choice and that they choose to deny themselves in order to found families and permit their husband and children’s happiness. After the war the times are difficult which also explains this easy way to apparent satisfaction: 1

my underlining

50

[After the War] The needs of sex and love are undeniably real in men and women, boys and girls, but why at this time did they seem to so many the only needs? We were all vulnerable, homesick, lonely, frightened. A pent-up hunger for marriage, home and children was felt simultaneously by several different generations; a hunger which, in the prosperity of postwar America, everyone could suddenly satisfy. (182)

Though this need for security to excess was probably founded, it also constituted the perfect occasion for evicting other problems as says Friedan “We found excuses for not facing the problems we once had the courage to face,”(186) and again later with the statement that “Thousands of women, reduced to biological living by their environment, lulled into a false sense of anonymous security in their comfortable concentration camps, have made a wrong choice.” (317) Specialists confirm the analysis: The millions of American youngsters who, in the 1960’s, were marrying before they were twenty, betrayed an immaturity and emotional dependence which seeks marriage as a magic short-cut to adult status, a magic solution to problems they cannot face themselves1 , professionals in the childand-family field agreed. […] Many girls will admit that they want to get married because they do not want to work any longer. They harbor dreams of being taken care of for the rest of their lives without worry, with just enough furnishing, to do little housework, interesting downtown shopping trips, happy children, and nice neighbours. […] I think it will not end, as long as The Feminine Mystique masks the emptiness of the housewife role, encouraging girls to evade their own growth by vicariously living, by non-commitment. […] Why aren’t girls forced to grow up—to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humaneness that is implied in The Feminine Mystique? (302)

The problem then is that at some point, most women wake up and understand something is wrong with their lives. Still they have no idea of how to escape the prison they have themselves contributed to build and though there might be a way out of it, they simply refuse to make the effort to think far enough as to actually get out: The Feminine Mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. There is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps, except by finally putting forth an effort—that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the narrow walls of home, to help shape the future. Only by such a personal commitment to the future can American women break out of the housewife trap and truly find fulfilment as wives and mothers—by fulfilling their own unique possibilities as separate human beings. (336-337)

Simone de Beauvoir as well brings up the idea of women’s choice of the easiest way of living and thus laziness and writes in Le Deuxi€me Sexe II: Le mariage est non seulement une carri‰re honorable et moins fatigante que beaucoup d’autres : seul, il permet ‹ la femme d’acc€der ‹ son int€grale dignit€ sociale et de se r€aliser sexuellement comme amante et m‰re. C’est sous cette figure que son entourage envisage son avenir et qu’elle l’envisage elle-mŠme. (89)

The main reason for this mistaken choice resides in the lack of responsibility of women themselves in their own choices, because though they are accountable themselves, 1

my underlining

51

they keep coming up with excuses and hope for someone else to make the choices for them. This abandoning might be an unconscious way of not having to face the difficulty of a problem that seems lost before even tempted to be resolved and also of not having to risk not to be able to make the right choice and thus relying on someone else to take the risk on ones behalf. It might even be a vengeance toward the ones who reproduce the passive image of womanhood the young girls discover with awe and accept with a silent cry to the ones who love her and will inevitably see her suffer and thus not leave her alone in the sorrow and pain of forgetting herself. La raison profonde de ce d‰faitisme c’est que l’adolescente ne se pense pas responsable de son avenir ; elle juge inutile d’exiger beaucoup d’elle-mŽme puisque ce n’est pas d’elle finalement que doit d‰pendre son sort. Bien loin qu’elle se voue Š l’homme parce qu’elle se sait inf‰rieure Š lui, c’est parce qu’elle lui est vou‰e qu’acceptant l’id‰e de son inf‰riorit‰ elle la constitue. (97)

The Sex-Seekers In spite of the abilities to hide their initial desires and forget their dreams once engaged in their adult and married life, the Feminine Mystique finally appears as a global feeling of something missing. And continuing to close one’s eyes in front of the basis of the problem, other causes are invented, the main one being that of sex in a post-Freudian society with liberated women imprisoned at home. Sex and its complexities, which are openly discussed by specialists and celebrities, suddenly become the main interest of women and accordingly the main responsible for their pleasures and sorrows. This is a domain where they are authorised to complain openly, giving them a modern image with a suffering of modern society, much more valorised than the simple feeling of needing expression through a real activity. Friedan records the following witnessing: A thirty-eight-year-old mother of four told me sex was the only thing that made her ‘feel alive.’ But something had gone wrong; her husband did not give her that feeling anymore. … ‘I need sex to feel alive, but I never really feel him,’ she said. (258)

Everything in women’s lives has to turn around men and love or sex and in nearly every case this is the first plausible problem discussed and accused as by this same women adding ‘I was looking for something, I’m not sure what, but the only way I get that feeling is when I’m in love with someone.’ (259) As Friedan herself writes, “in terms of The Feminine Mystique, if a woman feels a sense of personal ‘emptiness’, if she is unfulfilled, the cause must be sexual. But why, then, doesn’t sex ever satisfy her?” (260) The real responsible for this addiction to sex were probably as we have already seen it, the fact that “The mounting

52

sex-hunger of American women has been documented ad nauseam—by Kinsey, by the sociologists and novelists of suburbia, by the mass media, ads, television, movies, and women’s magazines that pander to the voracious female appetite for sex phantasy.” (261) But the problem nevertheless came to concern many women who believed in it’s real responsibility of their empty lives and could not get out of the vicious circle it created. Living through someone else One of Friedan’s most famous sentences is known as “It is easier to live through someone else than to become completely yourself”. She indefatigably repeated this evidence in various interviews and the same idea is also find in The Feminine Mystique as for example “It is easier to live through her husband and children than to make a road of her own in the world.” (204) As we have seen it, this lack of knowledge of women’s own personality is partly due to the society they grow up in and partly to their own refusal to make the effort to think the thought through. Women simply cannot imagine a happy live without love and they cannot imagine love without fusion and dependence and even submission to the object of love. This is where lies the essential difference in feminine and masculine way of loving and what creates continual misunderstandings between the two sexes. It is also this eroded feminine idea of almighty love that makes her unhappy. In Women In Love David Herbert Lawrence describes the way man defines the mistaken view of love as being a dependence on men: The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage, a sort of conscription. […] The way they shut their doors, these married people, and shut themselves into their own exclusive alliance with each other, even in love, disgusted him. […] And he wanted to be single in himself, the woman single in herself. […] He wanted a further conjunction, where man had being, where woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other. […] But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. (231–232)

In Le Deuxi€me Sexe II, Simone de Beauvoir also explains the feminine way of defining love as a total abandonment of their own self and living only for a man, as an issue of a non pertinent reflection on her own life: Elle ne veut Žtre que cette femme aim‰e, rien d’autre n’a de prix Š ses yeux. Pour exister, il lui faut donc que l’amant soit aupr•s d’elle, occup‰ par elle ; elle attend sa venue, son d‰sir, son r‰veil : et, d•s qu’il l’a quitt‰e, elle recommence Š l’attendre. […] C’est la dure punition inflig‰e Š qui n’a pas pris son destin entre ses propres mains. (564-565)

53

The reflection continues in Lawrence’s novel in the following terms with an endeavour to define a more perfect and ideal kind of love, which would be respectful of both parts and preserve individuality: And passion is […] leaving two single beings constellated together like two stars. […] The man is pure man, the woman pure woman, they are perfectly polarized. But there is no longer any of the horrible merging, mingling self-abnegation of love. There is only the pure duality of polarization, each one free from any contamination of the other. In each, the individual is primal, sex is subordinate, but perfectly polarized. Each has a single, separate being with its own laws. (233)

It should be pointed out that not all men have such an open-minded point of view on the subject and this due to their education and final role as fellow victims in the Feminine Mystique. So when someone finally has the clear-sightedness to realise and try to adopt a better way of behaving it comes as a huge and frightening surprise to a woman who might once again not seize the possibility of a better life for herself, preferring to remain hid in the easy role of a victim. David Herbert Lawrence’s characters continue their attempt to create a stronger couple, united by their differences and largely debates the efforts that have to be made, especially by the woman: ‘You want yourself, really, and your own affairs. And you want me just to be there, to serve you.’ [she said] ‘No,’ he said, outspoken with anger. ‘I want you to drop your assertive will, your frightened apprehensive self-insistence, that is what I want. I want you to trust yourself so implicitly that you can let yourself go. (288-289)

In these lines, the woman who is offered a relation of liberty and individuality without any limits for her own desires and development, she faints to reject the faults upon her male friend and in this provokes him in order to hear him say she is wrong and correct her, thus regaining the traditional roles of women relying on men and obeying them. Nevertheless, he does not let her fall back into this traditional and narrow-minded role where she does not have to decide for herself and as he pushes her further in her thoughts, refuses her letting him decide and not deciding and thinking herself. Unfortunately few women are lucky enough to meet someone who will insist that much on their pushing their thoughts through, but Ursula, once she really thinks about her condition and possibilities herself, becomes able to draw the following conclusions about herself, her friend and their mutual conceptions of love: She knew what kind of love, what kind of surrender he wanted. And she was not at all sure that this was the kind of love that she herself wanted. She was not at all sure that it was this mutual unison in separateness that she wanted. She wanted unspeakably intimacies. She wanted to have him, utterly, finally to have him as her own, oh so unspeakably, in intimacy. […] She new he would never abandon himself finally to her. […] For she believed that love far surpassed the individual. He said the individual was more than love, or any relationship. For him, the bright, single soul accepted love as one of its conditions, a condition of its own equilibrium. She believed that love was everything. (305)

54

So she is aware of their difference of conception of love and the same is he as he explains it in the following lines: Fusion, fusion, this horrible fusion of two beings, which every woman and most men insisted on, was it not nauseous and horrible anyhow, whether it was a fusion of the spirit or of the emotional body? […] Why should they not remain individuals, limited by their own limits? Why this dreadful allcomprehensiveness, this hateful tyranny? Why not leave the other being free, why try to absorb, or melt, or merge. One might abandon oneself utterly to the moments, but not to any other being. (353)

As the narrator concludes, “every woman and most men” believe in this intensely close love, nearly a fusion, to be the only real love. Few are able to elevate their relation to a more subtle love based on human qualities as respect, confidence and thus individuality instead of a raw, animal-like attraction remaining on the level of physical attraction and possessiveness. As early as in 1890, William Morris wrote in News from Nowhere 1 concerning his theory of women’s independence and divorce being unnecessary as soon as possessions are abolished: "Again, many violent acts came from the artificial perversion of the sexual passions, which cause over-weening jealousy and the like miseries. Now, when you look carefully into these, you will find that what lay at the bottom of them was mostly the idea (a law-made idea) of the woman being the property of man, whether he were husband, father, brother, or what not. That idea has of course vanished with private property, as well as certain follies about the 'ruin' of women following their natural desires in an illegal way, which of course was a convention caused by the laws of private property." (113)

As for modern society, Matthieu Ricard advices readers on how to reach happiness in Plaidoyer pour le Bonheur2, by describing a part of his liberal concept of love according to a Buddhist ideology trying to detach itself from possession: Qu'est-ce qui empŠcherait de se r€jouir en voyant une personne aim€e trouver davantage de bonheur avec quelqu'un d'autre ? Ce n'est certes pas une tŒche ais€e, mais si l'on souhaite vraiment le bonheur de quelqu'un, on ne peut exiger de d€finir la fa•on dont l'autre doit Štre heureux. [...] Comme l'€crit Svami Prajnanpas : "Quand vous aimez quelqu'un, vous ne pouvez esp€rer qu'il fasse ce qu'il vous pa•t, ce qui revient ‹ vous aimer vous-mŠme." [...] Une Œme en paix peut partager son bonheur mais n'a que faire de la jalousie.(208-209)

The expression “Une Œme en paix” probably deserves attention, drawing us back to respect for oneself and personal fulfilment as a vital ingredient for happiness and ability to love. However, some women do question the Feminine Mystique and the idea of love as a self-abnegation, but they face many difficulties to get their ideas through, even to impose them on themselves.

1 2

William Morris. News from Nowhere and Other Writings. 1998 edition. Matthieu Ricard. Plaidoyer pour le Bonheur. 2003 Edition.

55

Girls questioning The Feminine Mystique Not all women blindly fell into the trap of the Feminine Mystique and at mainly two periods of their lives, girls and women tend to question their role in their own life. The first period is in their teens, while discovering life, world and themselves and questioning their possibilities or at least being supposed to do so. The second period, concerning those who failed to finalise their search for a self in the teens, is after marriage and the birth and eventually education of small children, when nothing else is to be awaited of life and the encounter with the Feminine Mystique developed by Friedan. As for the first period, let us see how David Herbert Lawrence in Women In Love, permits one of his characters, a young woman called Gudrun, to understand that the traditional and limited role of a life as a housewife cannot be satisfying (in her words “impossible”): But with the ordinary man, who has his life fixed in one place, marriage is just impossible. There may be, and there are, thousand of women who want it, and could conceive of nothing else. But the very thought of it sends me mad. One must be free, above all, one must be free. One may forfeit anything else, but one must be free—one must not become 7 Pinchbeck Street—or Sommerset Drive— or Shortlands. No man will ever be sufficient to make that good—no man! To marry, one must have a free lance or nothing, a comrade-in-arms, a Gl–cksritter. A man with a position in the social world— well, it is just impossible, impossible! (425)

Carol Shields & Blanche Howard write in A Celibate Season1 about a youth wondering about the examples of womanhood she has from her mother and one of their neighbours (Marjorie) and asking her mother for more information: “We talked a bit about Marjorie’s preoccupation with ‘making everything nice.’ ‘Do you think it’s important, Mom? I mean, Mrs. Finstead says that a man should really look forward to coming home at night, and wives and mothers have to make the house and everything nice and sort of…exciting, too, so that he’ll really want to.’ Does Marjorie greet old Gus at the door wrapped in Sarah Wrap? But all I said was that I supposed it depended on the couple, some marriages were structured like a master-servant relationship with the one spouse working to please the other, and some were more like partnerships where the exchange of feelings and ideas is what counts.” (189)

In this case, the modern mother briefly exposes two opposite cases and leaves it to her daughter to make a choice for herself. The daughter has the luck to be faced to two opposite examples of feminine behaviour and therefore asks herself which one she is going to adopt herself. Nevertheless, not all girls are made conscious of the existence of different models and some blindly follow the only direct one they have got, without questioning any other possibility or their own desire. But this is not fatality and there are girls who though not directly confronted to the example of fulfilled mothers, somehow do not accept to follow the 1

Carol Shields & Blanche Howard. A Celibate Season. 2000 edition.

56

same path and desperately try to discover more in hope of finding their own self and way to achieve it’s fulfilment. The Canadian writer Alice Munro thus writes in Lives of Girls and Women1 about a teenager who hopes to get an answer about happiness from her mother in the following dialog: ‘Why did you fall in love?’ ‘Your father was always a gentleman.’ Was that all? I was troubled here by a lack of proportion, though it was hard to say what was missing, what was wrong. In the beginning of her story was dark captivity, suffering, then daring and defiance and escape. Struggle, disappointment, more struggle, godmothers and villains. Now I expected as in all momentous satisfying stories—the burst of Glory, the Reward. Marriage to my father? I hoped this was it. I wished she would leave me no doubt about it. (78)

The girl does obviously not get the answer she was hoping for, but nevertheless does not interrupt her search for answers at this point as most girls might unfortunately do and later she admits “Her [the mother] speaking of my children amazed me too, for I never meant to have any. It was glory I was after…” (141) She is perfectly aware of the limits of a life restraining herself to the role of a mother, which is surely not enough to satisfy her, as well as of the incompatibility of the two goals: motherhood and glory. But this girl remains an exception as she herself points it out later in the novel with reference to other girls, more classical and considered to be the models to follow: Did we hate those girls, to whom we were unfailingly obsequiously pleasant? No. Yes. We hated their immunity, well-bred lack of curiosity, whatever kept them floating, charitable and pleased on the surface of life in Jubilee, and would float them on to sororities, engagements, marriages to doctors or lawyers in more prosperous places far away. (154)

The young girl continues her quest and her mother finally agrees to talk sincerely about the feminine condition, being surprisingly perceptive and advising her daughter even more that the latter would apparently have liked it: ‘There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really than domestic animals. He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Tennyson wrote that. It’s true. Was true. You will want to have children though.’ That was how much she knew me. ‘But I hope you will—use your brains. Use your brains. Don’t be distracted. Once you ever make that mistake, of being—distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden, a woman always does.’ […] ‘It is self-respect I am really speaking of. Self-respect.’ I did not quite get the point of this, or if I did get the point I was set up to resist it. I would have had to resist anything she told me with such earnestness, such stubborn hopefulness. Her concern about my life, which I needed and took for granted, I could not bear to have expressed. Also I felt that it was not so different from all the other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed being a female made you damageable, that a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection were called for, whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences

1

Alice Munro. Lives of Girls and Women. 1982 edition.

57

and shuck off what they didn’t want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I had decided to do the same. (173)

With such recommendations any girl would probably be frightened, feeling a real challenge waiting for her with the possibilities of pioneering a new way of living as a women and this girl is quite shocked by her own decision to “act like a man”. So once a girl is aware of the possibility of creating her own destiny, she is faced to the choice of taking up the challenge or simply to follow the traditional and well-known way of life. At this point, we can understand that some women choose the traditional feminine role of being a wife and mother, but is this choice due to true fear of not succeeding or to simple laziness in making the efforts? Anyhow, a key word has been given in this extract: that of self-respect, and it might constitute a clue to an answer on how to manage to escape from the Feminine Mystique.

58

Proposals for Solutions: As we have just seen it, far from all women are aware of the questions they ought to ask themselves and for those who are, they still have to find the answers once they open their eyes enough to search for them or as writes Betty Friedan: To face the problem is not to solve it. But once a woman faces it, as women are doing today all over America without much help from the experts, once she asks herself ‘What do I want to do?’ she begins to find her own answers. (338)

The key to women’s happiness obviously lies in this question, or rather in the answers to it and we must insist on the fact that only women themselves can be able to know what they want and that they have to make the effort to find out if they want to have a chance of happiness. In Interviews with Betty Friedan, Janann Sherman writes about Friedan “Women in her estimation were frivolous, evaded using their intellect, and generally took the easy way out by marrying young. They were guilty, she implied, of colluding in their own oppression.” (x) The clear-sighted girl from Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, whom we have seen getting the advice from her mother not to be distracted by love, later receives another advice from her now bitter mother who, deceived by her daughter’s failure, decides to tell the latter the truth about her condition and obligations if she wants to avoid the same destiny as her mother: My mother was already in bed. When I had failed to win the scholarship, something she had never questioned—her hopes of the future, through her children—had collapsed. ‘You will have to do what you want,’ she said bitterly. But was that so easy to know? […] I was free and I was not free. I was relieved, and I was desolate. Suppose, then, I had never wakened up? Suppose I had let myself lie down…(237)

Again, she is conscious of the importance of facing the choice she is offered and of the danger of neglecting it. The question raised by the mother is identical to the one pointed out by Friedan: women must ask themselves what they want to do. More scientifically, the eminent Sigmund Freud himself admits his inability to resolve the question: There is little doubt that Freud found the psychology of women more enigmatic than that of men. He said once to Marie Bonaparte: 'The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is, what does a woman want?'1 (113)

1

Ernest Jones. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. New York. 1953.

59

Yet some tried and partly managed to resolve the question and give some answers helping to propose a solution as for example Maslow quoted by Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, who brings forward the core of the problem, and writes: ‘Capacities clamor to be used, and cease their clamor only when they are well used. That is, capacities are also needs. Not only is it fun to use our capacities, but it is also necessary. The unused capacity or organ can become a disease center or else atrophy, thus diminishing the person.’ 1 (318)

Maslow’s Pyramid During the same period (around 1943), Abraham Maslow originated his psychological theory leading to his famous “Pyramid of Needs” illustrated by the following scheme and which clearly dresses a hierarchy of human needs:

According to this theory the most basic need is related to physiological survival - air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat and sex to procreate. Next in order of precedence comes a set of needs for such things as safety and security. Once an individual has taken care of his or her basic physiological needs and feels safe and secure some degree of need for love and belonging may well rise to the forefront of their concerns. Need for the respect of our fellow's, and for self-respect, are seen as being next in order of precedence. Maslow referred to the four levels of need already mentioned as deficit needs, or D-needs. If you don’t have enough of something -- i.e. you have a deficit -- you feel the need. Maslow saw all these needs as essentially survival needs. Even love and esteem are needed for the maintenance of health. The last level of the pyramid is a bit different. Maslow used a variety of terms to refer to this level:- growth motivation (in contrast to deficit motivation), being needs (or B-needs, in contrast to Dneeds), and self-actualisation.2

Women suffering from the Feminine Mystique mostly have difficulties to realize the fourth level of Maslow’s pyramid and do not satisfy their need for respect or even self1

A.H. Maslow, “Some Basic Proportions of Holistic-Dynamic Psychology,” an unpublished paper, Brandeis University. 2 http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/psychology/maslow_pyramid.html

60

respect. As long as the fourth level is not completed, the fifth is impossible even to approach and as pointed out above, the four first levels are essential survival needs which explains that their absence create feminine illness. Friedan even advances a theory on projects being the secret for long life in her 1993 book The Fountain of Age, which she says “showed two things crucial for vital long lives: purposes and projects that use one’s abilities, structure one’s day and keep on moving as a part of our changing society; and bonds of intimacy.”(xxxiii)

A woman who gives up all activity or personal interest is thus sure of lacking something essential leading as far as to a permanent sort of illness or disquiet regularly described by the women interviewed by Friedan as a feeling of emptiness. The results of this continual boredom and lack of use of one’s abilities or realisation of interests are for example those described in Elisabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters1: She gave up her visits to London; she gave up her sociable pleasure in the company of her fellows in education and position. […] He loved his wife all the more dearly for her sacrifices for him; but, deprived of all her strong interests, she sank into ill-health; nothing definite; only she never was well. (p.43)

In order to escape from the Feminine Mystique, a concrete answer, still relied to fulfilment through activity and more precisely work as an essential occupation, is proposed by Barbara Novak in her novel Down With Love2: ‘Women will never be happy until they are self-fulfilled. And women will never be selffulfilled until they attain equality […] and become independent as individuals by achieving equal participation in the workforce.’ ‘And how do you propose women do that, Miss Novak?’ ‘By saying ‘Down with love’!’ I proclaimed. ‘Love is a distraction.’ (13)

This should not be interpreted as extreme feminist or anti-men statements, on the contrary. Miss Novak rather encourages men’s behaviour as far as she advices women to adopt the same attitude (though of course not the discriminating and male chauvinist part of which she is one of the victims). The evidence she hopes to transmit to women is quite simply to put love aside as men do it and to privilege work, which would produce as well equality as fulfilment. Another concept is advanced as a sine qua non condition for feminine fulfilment and quoted in several of the already named authors: the one of freedom. In Le Deuxi€me Sexe II, 1 2

Elisabeth Gaskell. Wives and Daughters. 1996 edition. Barbara Novak. Down With Love. 2003 edition.

61

Simone de Beauvoir for example suggests the marvel of being able to remain free in a loverelationship as it is the case in “La Nymphe au cœur fid•le de Margaret Kennedy, […] Tessa r‰ussit le prodige de demeurer libre dans son amour, ce qui lui permet d’aimer sans hostilit‰ ni orgueil.” (133) The philosopher pursues on the subject of activity as an essential ingredient for feminine fulfilment and the importance of not to confuse it with simple occupations as do most women: La majorit€ des femmes dans leurs activit€s priv€es ou publiques visent non un r€sultat ‹ atteindre, mais une mani‰re de s’occuper : et toute occupation est vaine quand elle n’est qu’un passetemps. (474)

Simone de Beauvoir underlines the new possibilities offered to women in the middle of the twentieth century and though these are not easy to seize, their achievement would change women’s lives, leading them away from futile preoccupations and offering a way toward fulfilment, as long as she does not abandon as soon as she falls in love in order to privilege her relationship: Aujourd’hui, il lui devient possible de prendre son sort entre ses mains, au lieu de s’en remettre Š l’homme. Si elle est absorb‰e par ses ‰tudes, des sports, un apprentissage professionnel, une activit‰ sociale et politique, elle s’affranchit de l’obsession du mˆle, elle est beaucoup moins pr‰occup‰e par ses conflits sentimentaux et sexuels. Cependant, elle a beaucoup plus de difficult‰ que le jeune homme Š s’accomplir comme un individu autonome. J’ai dit que ni sa famille ni ses mœurs favorisaient son effort. En outre, mŽme si elle choisit l’ind‰pendance, elle n’en fait pas moins une place dans sa vie Š l’homme, Š l’amour. Elle aura souvent peur si elle se donne toute enti•re Š quelque entreprise de manquer son destin de femme. Ce sentiment demeure inavou‰ : mais il est lŠ, il pervertit les volont‰s concert‰es, il marque des bornes. En tout cas, la femme qui travaille veut concilier sa r‰ussite avec des succ•s purement f‰minins. (142) Un cercle vicieux se noue ici : on s’‰tonne souvent de voir avec quelle facilit‰ une femme peut abandonner musique, ‰tudes, m‰tier, d•s qu’elle a trouv‰ un mari ; c’est qu’elle avait engag‰ trop peu d’elle-mŽme dans ses projets pour trouver dans leur accomplissement un grand profit. (143)

This idea is further developed with a new warning against the illusion of realization through motherhood, which cannot possibly fulfil a woman as such and moreover even constitutes a danger for the child living with the burden of a mother living through it. Simone de Beauvoir repeats her explanations on the danger of dependence, be it to a man or a child: MŽme au cas o• l’enfant appara‹t comme une richesse au sein d’une vie heureuse ou du moins ‰quilibr‰e, il ne saurait borner l’horizon de sa m•re. Il ne l’arrache pas Š son immanence ; elle fa“onne sa chair, elle l’entretient, le soigne : elle ne peut jamais cr‰er qu’une situation de fait qu’il appartient Š la seule libert‰ de l’enfant de d‰passer ; quand elle mise sur son avenir, c’est encore par procuration qu’elle se transcende Š travers l’univers et le temps, c’est Š dire qu’une fois de plus, elle se voue Š la d‰pendance. […] comme dans le mariage ou l’amour, elle remet Š un autre le soin de justifier sa vie alors que la seule conduite authentique, c’est de librement l’assumer. (383)

She sharply insists on the importance of women’s independence in their professional life as well as their personal life and their marriage, which she defines ideally in the following

62

terms, warning against taking short cuts and not taking the time needed to become an individual person before engaging oneself –or escaping from oneself, to someone else: Il faudrait que le mariage f•t la mise en commun de deux existences autonomes, non une retraite, une annexion, une fuite, un rem‰de. C’est ce que comprend Nora (Ibsen, Maison de Poup„e) quand elle d€cide qu’avant de pouvoir Štre une €pouse et une m‰re, il lui faut d’abord devenir une personne. (320-321)

Our analysis has essentially been based on Betty Friedan’s best-seller, The Feminine Mystique, written in nineteen-sixty-three as well as on the ideas exposed by Simone de Beauvoir in Le Deuxi€me Sexe, which was written in nineteen-forty-nine. As introduced to begin our work, the interest of the taking up of ideas half a century old, lies in their validity in women’s lives today. Some of the authors quoted are nevertheless contemporary and we shall now briefly develop the analysis on the present-day state of the feminine condition and thus conclude on the real responsible for the Feminine Mystique.

63

IV. A brief statement of things today Facts today The EOC1 (Equal Opportunities Commission) of United Kingdom has published a survey about the state of things in 2004, analysing women’s professional place in the British society. It shows that 46% of people in the labour market are now women and nearly half of women (44%) and about one in ten men who work are part-time. Also interesting, of mothers of under fives, 52% are in employment, and two-thirds of those working as employees are part-time. We will use the part concerning income and part-time work in order to know the exact situation half a century after Friedan’s publishing and draw conclusions. Flexible working 2004 (Employees aged 16 –64 Great Britain) Any dependent children thousands % Women Part-time Flexitime Any flexible arrangement Men Part-time Flexitime Any flexible arrangement

Without dependent children thousands %

2,563 504 3,056

59 12 70

2,372 734 3,423

33 10 48

159 337 761

4 8 18

909 621 1,912

12 8 25

This table shows that much more women than men work part-time, and that women work part-time according to their having dependent children or not, whereas men don’t depend on this condition in their eventual choice of part-time work. So the traditional role of women as mothers still has much influence over women’s professional possibilities or at least choices. Let us now look on the average income.

1

www.eoc.org.uk (Equal Opportunities Commission) Source: ONS (2004) Labour Force Survey Spring 2004 dataset.

64

Pay and income United Kingdom

Hourly earnings (— per hour) Full-time Part-time

Women

Men

Gender pay gap* %

11.21 8.19

13.73 9.36

18 40

This table clearly shows that women are less paid for equal work than men: -

Average hourly earnings for women working full-time are 18% lower than for men working full-time, and for women working part-time hourly earnings are 40% lower.

-

The gender gap between women’s and men’s mean individual incomes in 2002/03 was 46%, and the gender gap between women’s and men’s median income was 47%.

This difference between incomes mainly resides on the difference in the corresponding professional sectors: women still “choose” jobs that pay less than those held by men as show these conclusions for the EOC survey: -

More than four-fifths of skilled trades people and process, plant and machine operatives are men.

-

In administrative and secretarial occupations, as well as in personal service jobs, at least four-fifths of workers are women.

-

Women hold the majority of jobs in the education & health & social work sectors, whilst men are the majority in transport, storage & communication & construction.

The survey concludes on the importance from now on, to try to permit larger orientations for women and not only direct them towards their traditional sectors, independently on judgements by family or society which often constitute a real obstacle in women’s motivation toward these new sectors.

65

Comparison and analysis Let us try to see if all the causes of the sixties we have been worked on are still available today. We discussed the differences between men and women as well as women’s education and can continue to quote Friedan who has kept analysing American society and feminine condition through the years and in 1993 writes in her book Beyond Gender1: ‘Women began enrolling in great numbers in law schools and medical schools, and M.B.A. and Ph.D. programs. Women went from 8 percent of medical school graduates in 1970 to 34 percent in 1990.’ (6)

These statistics of course show an obvious progress in women’s care for education and their achieving it and over twenty years their graduations rose significantly with more than four times as many feminine graduations. Without even having to observe statistics, we are already commonly aware of the progress made concerning equality between women and men as much at work as on private bases and this is not to be questioned. If any proof is needed, official American statistics show women are now nearly 50 percent of the labour force2. Nevertheless, women’s obtaining of equality has not come without a certain prize and new problems rise as essentially the extreme questioning of their ability to lead double-lives as mothers and working women. Thus, if society has now admitted the ability of women in studies and work, it may still not always be ready to admit the concealing of this choice with the one of being a mother. Friedan gives some quite extreme examples of women having their children taken away from them because of their career: ‘I notice the new custody decisions, in Michigan and California, where women lose custody of a child because they have a demanding job or are getting their law degree or Ph.D. and have the child part of the day in day care.’ (12)

Though this is not a common procedure, nearly all mothers caring for their work are somehow feeling guilty under what Anna Quindlen calls the cultural fire and not being totally available for their children. But if they nevertheless manage to escape from this feeling of culpability, they will not have to bear persistent hurtful remarks made by society, which has evolved and now does accept the working mother. Friedan wrote for herself in her preface in nineteen-sixty-two: “I sense it first as a question mark in my own life, as a wife and mother of three small children, half-guilty and therefore half-heartedly, almost in spite of myself, using my abilities and education in work that took me away from home.”(9) This feeling has

1 2

Betty Friedan. Beyond Gender – The New Politics of Work and Family. 1997 edition. • Employment and Earnings, Ž Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 1996.

66

resisted years passing and women do still feel at least a little bad about leaving their children for their work and now also have new kinds of problematic situations to deal with. Friedan is aware of the ongoing battle women have to lead in modern society and at home towards family and themselves, especially with many new kinds of situation appearing and trying to get accepted: ‘The fact is, most women still live in some kind of family with men, and they will subtly suffer – economically and emotionally – if the downsizing and insecurity of the men continue. We must face the real economic threat to family values. As for women alone, single parents, lesbian couples, the politics of hate that is rising from and stirring up the rage of the threatened me will surely turn on them.’ (13)

So once woman has decided to work and become invested in her career and life outside her home, she has to deal with the succeeding in making the two functions cohabit. The popular image of the successful career woman appeared in the nineteen-eighties and in Interviews with Betty Friedan1 (to Denise Watson), Friedan explains “Younger women in the 1980s ‘had a whole new set of problems’ related to trying to sustain work and family. ‘What is needed,’ said Friedan, ‘is an integration of the two.”(14) The difficulty to conceal both roles is real and the danger is to have to abandon one and thus inevitably lack of something essential, as writes Barbara Novak in Down with Love: “I was successful. But I was lonely,”(76) and the novel concludes on the narrators final happiness after finding love, but remaining truly committed to her work and passion. Nevertheless, this image of the workingwoman is positive and though she might be having a hard time concealing her two roles, she is successful and much more fulfilled, has respect for herself and never experiences the feeling of emptiness the bored housewives of the sixties live with. What is more, she does not have to stand the continual indictments of society concerning her choices, making her acceptance of her self-made life much easier and rewarding. Friedan also confirms in 1997, writing “poll after poll shows women today feeling pretty good about their complex lives of job, profession, and their various choices of marriage and motherhood.”(xix) And most women in reality do prefer to end their day exhausted from their multiple activities, but without any feeling of boredom or uselessness, at least this gives their life a sense and thus fulfil them though tiring them. We cannot repeat enough how important it is for a woman to overcome her guiltiness in not being a hundred percent available for her children and having a real activity, or even better, a passion, in order to feel happy with herself. 1

Janann Sherman. Interviews with Betty Friedan. 2002 edition.

67

As for society as a factor of today’s feminine condition, education can hardly be accused to dispense sex-directed education and women teachers are as represented as men in the teaching corpse and amongst students. Media cannot be held responsible anymore as it proposes such a big range of models that it has become nearly impossible to name the most popular and if any, a trend to be followed would be the one of the working mother, perfectly concealing her professional and family lives. Advertisement may still have a role to play in it primal role, which remains to seduce and provoke consumers to buy. Nevertheless, men are today also victims of advertisers who as often address them directly as they do women (now even in washing-powder adds and slimming yoghurts), and in 1997, Friedan quotes the New York Times, which reports “a fashion crisis: Women are no longer buying high-style clothes, men are,”(xxxiv) which gives the scale of the change. Socialists, philosophers and psychoanalysts still observe society and propose various solutions to various and always more numerous and complex existential problems. John Gray did make a bestseller out of his Men come from Mars and Women come from Venus, but this nevertheless did not actually change people ways of living. Briefly, it seems society offers so many different ideas and ways of living with none being actually seen as THE way anymore and that it is now up to individual people to choose for themselves without relying on models anymore. Thus a positive evolution has occurred as far as women seem free to make the choice they want to and undergo less pressure from society etc. Nonetheless, living up to a glorified image as perfect working mother is not always easy or possible, especially with a working crisis having appeared in the nineteen-nineties and the difficulty of obtaining a job, without even speaking of an interesting job. Many women still keep part-time jobs and do not have real responsibilities at their work and thus do not find a means of fulfilment in it. What is more, the fairytale myths are still taught to small girls and women still continue to believe in love being the most important thing in life, magically making them happy. I personally grew up with parents listening to the Beatles of whom I believe I have always known the lyrics by heart and somehow believed in the hippie-spirit and the famous “All you need is Love” and “Money can’t buy me love” concepts and of course I always dreamt of meeting true love and would have sacrificed everything for The One who would make me happy. As a young woman, I did not read any of Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir’s books, but I wish I had, because I truly had no idea of the eventual need of

68

something else than love in my life. Of course, I did not intend to become a housewife and not work outside, but I never really cared about what work I would do and I never asked myself the indispensable question: What do I want? Or to quote Anna Quindlen’s “Who am I?” (x)

69

Conclusion

Whereas Friedan in 1997 optimistically writes “We may now begin to glimpse the new human responsibilities when women and men are finally free to be themselves, know each other for who they really are,”(xxxiv) around me, many girls and women keep being unhappy and suffer and too late understand they have to rethink their life. Moreover, too many women unfortunately still misunderstand their unhappiness as a consequence of an unhappy marriage that doesn’t satisfy them and ask for a divorce whereas the real solution often ought to be that they learn to make themselves happy alone without relying on men and consequently redo the same mistake over again. This is most often what happens and as soon as they manage to escape from what they believed to be responsible for their unhappiness: their husband, they rush into some new relationship, under the influence of the magical feeling one gets when falling in love, but still without having solved their true problem, which remains to know what they want themselves and who they are. These crucial questions are indispensable in ones finding ones own identity, but women much too often evade the question and pretend to be happy, hiding behind the ephemeral happiness and sense of plenitude provoked by young love. The questions are difficult to answer and it is not an easy task to define ones own identity, the matter needs profound reflections and real efforts of thought. Too many women do not make these efforts. How often have I witnessed, and even experienced myself, this feeling of incapacity to lead the wondering further and the desire to abandon and simply choose the so much easier traditional scheme of just getting married, having children and no matter what job to eventually add to the family’s financial income? This might be the hugest of all of women’s problems: society’s acceptance of their abandoning and the possibility of living without having a proper identity. Men do not face the same choice. Men have no possibility of evicting their quest for their selves. They are not offered any other possibilities than to find out what they want to do with their lives and to succeed in doing it. Defending women by functionalist theories of their nature as mothers is illegitimate as far as only society designs this sole primary role for them and that no concrete example exists to prove women’s incapacity of working just as men. Besides, men might also prefer to stay longer with their children, but this was long not

70

commonly proposed until the appearance of new proposals today. I believe women’s real battle has only just begun, with men today, understandably enough, envying women’s privileged position of having the choice of the roles as a parent and/or a working person. Women’s complaining about their lack of fulfilment thus appears more like a luxury problem offered to women who finally have too many possibilities to choose from and are unable to know which they prefer. Are women not finally spoiled by the various possibilities today’s society offers them? Be that as it may, with so many possibilities, the sole responsible for their unhappiness must be women themselves. And with men beginning to ask for the same choices, women’s choices might reduce and they will have to awake from their enchanted existence. As Friedan brilliantly writes: “In the end, a woman, as a man, has the power to choose, and to make her own heaven or hell.”(12) The new challenge for the twenty-first century will thus be to find a real balance in the equality of sexes, including women’s but also men’s rights. As for women’s fulfilment, they must overcome any guiltiness of living through themselves, without depending on children or men, and redefine their conception of love, which should be a part of their lives, but in no case the sole part. And more than anything, they must be committed to something more, passion or work, and not let themselves be distracted by love, which is a lot easier solution than work, but not a lasting one. Philosophers have been advising this for years, as Saint Augustin who said: “Celui qui se perd dans sa passion perd moins que celui qui perd sa passion.” Or more concretely as Voltaire who wrote in Candide ou l’optimisme: “Le travail ‰loigne de nous trois grands maux : l’ennui, le vice et le besoin.” The secret to women’s happiness would often be that “Il faut cultiver votre jardin,” and probably stop living in the dream of an utopian perfect life without reality of work and problems and too much time to think wrongly about themselves. Women would be happier if they appreciated how lucky they are to have the possibilities to freely choose for themselves and make the effort to know what they want, in order then to assume whatever choice they then make, as far as they are the sole responsible for it.

71

Appendices Sources *The books and articles preceded by an asterisk are those I have not read

Books by Betty Friedan Betty Friedan. The Feminine Mystique. Copyright by Betty Friedan 1997, 1991, 1974, 1963. Introduction by Anna Quindlen 2001. ISBN 0-393-32257-2 pbk. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. – 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110. www.wwnorton.com

*- - - - - - - - - - It Changed My Life - Writings on the Women's Movement. Published by Gollancz in 1976. ISBN 0575023120.

*- - - - - - - - - - The Second Stage. Published by Simon & Schuster October 1981. ISBN: 0671410342.

* - - - - - - - - - - The Fountain of Age. Published by Simon & Schuster September 1, 1993. ISBN: 0671880985

- - - - - - - - - - Beyond Gender – The New Politics of Work and Family. Copyright 1997 by Betty Friedan. ISBN 0-943875-84-6. Edited by Brigid O’Farrell. Published by the Woodrow Wilson Center Press – Editorial Offices – 370 L’Enfant Promenade, S.W., Suite 704, Washington D.C. 20024-2518. Distributed by The Johns Hopkins University Press – Hampden Station – Baltimore, Maryland 21211 * - - - - - - - - - - Life so Far. Published by Simon & Schuster; 1 Touchsto edition May 2, 2001. ASIN: 0743200241.

72

Books about Betty Friedan Janann Sherman. Interviews with Betty Friedan. Conversations with Public Intellectuals Series. Douglas Brinkley and David Oshinsky, General Editors. Copyright 2002 by University Press of Mississippi. Edited by Janann Sherman. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 1-57806-479-1 Milton Meltzer. Betty Friedan – A Voice For Women’s Rights – Women of our Time. Copyright Milton Meltzer 1985. ISBN 0-14-032161-6. Puffin Books. Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street, New York 10010, U.S.A. First Published by Viking Penguin Inc. 1985. Published in Puffin Books 1986. Text Printed in U.S.A. by R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia * Daniel Horowitz. Betty Friedan and the making of The Feminine Mystique. 1998. Published by University of Massachusetts Press (September 1, 2000). ISBN 1558492763. * Judith Tenessee. Betty Friedan Her life. Published by Random House. 1st ed edition (March 16, 1999). ASIN 0679432035. Other Books Margaret Mead. Male and Female. Copyright by Margaret Mead 1950. First published in the U.S.A. 1950. Published in Pelican Books 1962. Penguin Books Ltd, Hardmonthsworth, Middlesex. Made and printed in Great Britain by Nicholls & Company Ltd. Set in monotype Times Barbara Novak. Down With Love. Copyright 2003 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. ISBN 0-7434-7798-7. First Pocket Books edition October 2003. Pocket Books. An imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd – Africa House, 64-78 Kingsway, London WC2B 6AH. Simon & Schuster Australia – Sydney www.simonsays.co.uk. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire Alice Munro. Lives of Girls and Women. Copyright McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited 1971 First Published in the USA by the McGraw-Hill Book Company 1971. First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 1973. Published in Penguin Books 1982. Penguin Books Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England. Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc David Herbert Lawrence. Women In Love. Copyright 1920, 1922 by David Herbert Lawrence. Copyright 1948, 1950 by Frieda Lawrence. Published by the Penguin Grou Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England. This edition first published in Great Britain 1921. Published in Penguin Popular Classics 1996. Printed in England by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

73

Simone de Beauvoir. Le deuxi€me sexe I. Composition Interligne. Impression Brodard et Taupin ‹ La Fl‰che (Sarthe), le 4 avril 2003. D€p‘t L€gal : avril 2003. 1er d€p‘t l€gal dans la collection : mai 1986. Num€ro d’imprimeur : 18278. ISBN 2-07032351-X / Imprim€ en France. Collection FOLIO/ESSAIS – Editions Gallimard, 1949, renouvel€ en 1976 - - - - - - - - - - - Le deuxi€me sexe II. Composition Interligne. Impression Soci€t€ Nouvelle Firmin-Didot ‹ Mesnil-sur-l’Estr€e, le 7 mars 2003. D€p‘t L€gal : mars 2003. Num€ro d’imprimeur : 63163. ISBN 2-07-032352-8 / Imprim€ en France. Collection FOLIO/ESSAIS. Editions Gallimard, 1949, renouvel€ en 1976 Elizabeth Gaskell. Mary Barton. Penguin popular Classics. www.penguin.com. Published by the Penguin Grou Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England.. First published in 1848. Published in Penguin Popular Classics 1994. Printed in England by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire - - - - - - - - - - - Wives and Daughters. Introduction and notes copyright Pam Morris 1996 Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England. First published in 1866. Published in Penguin Books 1996. Typeset by Datix International Limited, Bungay, Suffolk. Pinted in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc. Carol Shields & Blanche Howard. A Celibate Season. Copyright Carol Shields and Blanche Howard 1991. First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Fourth Estate Ltd, 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU. www.4thestate.co.uk. ISBN 1-85702-812-0. Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berks Amanda Brown. Family Trust. Copyright Amanda Brown 2003. First published in Great Britain as a paperback original in 2004 by Time Warner Paperbacks. ISBN 0 7515 3483 8. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives Plc. Time Warner Paperbacks, An Imprint of Time Warner Books UK, Brettenham House, Lancaster Place, London WC2E 7EN. www.timewarnerbooks.co.uk Kathleen Demarco. Cranberry Queen. Copyright 2001 Kathleen Demarco. First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Headline Book Publishing. First published in paperback in 2002 by REVIEW, an imprint of HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING. ISBN 0 7472 6765 0. Typeset by Avon Dataset Ltd, Bidfordon-Avon, Warks. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent. HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING. A division of Hodder headline, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH. www.reviewbooks.co.uk. www.hodderheadline.com John Gray. Les hommes viennent de Mars, les femmes viennent de V„nus. ˜diteur J'ai Lu. 22 octobre 2003. Collection J'ai lu. Bien-Štre. Psychologie. Format Poche. ISBN : 2290336726. Traduction Anne Lav€drine. Helen Fielding. Bridget Jones’ Diary. Editions Folio. - - - - - - - - - - - The Edge of Reason. Editions Folio.

74

Matthieu Ricard. Plaidoyer pour le Bonheur. Nil Editions. 2 octobre 2003. ISBN: 2841112446 William Morris. News from Nowhere and Other Writings. London. Penguin Classics. €d. Clive Wilmer (introduction and notes) 1998. ISBN: 0-14-043330-9. Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England. Edition first published in 1993. *Jane Change. Woman as a hero in old English literature. Paperback Janvier 1986. Publisher: Syracuse U.P. ISBN: 0815623461 Online Articles By Betty Friedan In The New York Times on the Web1: Betty Friedan. Cooking With Betty Friedan . . . Yes, Betty Friedan. January 5, 1977. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-cooking.html * - - - - - - - - - Feminism's Next Ste July 5, 1981. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-next.html * - - - - - - - - - Twenty Years After 'The Feminine Mystique'. February 27, 1983. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-20.html * - - - - - - - - - No Hype. Issues, Please. April 9, 1984. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-hype.html * - - - - - - - - - Women in the Firing Line. October 28, 1984. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-firing.html - - - - - - - - - - How to Get the Women's Movement Moving Again. November 3, 1985. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-moving.html Online Articles About Betty Friedan In The New York Times on the Web2: Fred M. Hechinger. Women 'Educated' Out of Careers. March 6, 1963. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-educated.html Enid Nemy. Back Home to Peoria -- and a Sequel to 'Feminine Mystique'. May 21, 1976. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-sequel.html *Jane Geniesse. Home Beat. June 15, 1978. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-home.html

1 2

http://www.nytimes.com/ http://www.nytimes.com/

75

Enid Nemy. NOW Convocation on 'New Leadership'. April 1, 1981. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-leadershihtml ‘Betty Friedan, a founder of the National Organization for Women, called for a coalition of interests of ''not women alone, and certainly not women against men,'' in working for the larger interests of the country, ''and doing what we did for ourselves 20 years ago.'' *Nan Robertson. Betty Friedan Ushers in a 'Second Stage'. October 19, 1981. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-stage.html *Jon Nordheimer. Betty Friedan Defies Britons, Wins Debate. April 25, 1983. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-defies.html * Judy Klemesrud. For Friedan, a Life on the Run. May 26, 1985. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-run.html *Ronnie Wacker. Friedan and Group Seeking a 'New National Strategy'. August 9, 1987. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-strategy.html * Deirdre Carmody. Trying to Dispel 'The Mystique of Age,' at 72. September 15, 1993. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-lunch.html In other publications: C. Jensen. Why Betty Friedan Can Kiss My Suburban Ass. In sex and guts magazine on line.1 No publication date. Visited January, 2004. http://www.sexandgutsmagazine.com/betty_friedan_can_kiss_my_ass.htm#top Massachusetts News Article. Why Are Some Women Negative About Marriage? In Mass News. 2 November 2002. http://www.massnews.com/2002_editions/Print_editions/11_Nov/1102_wome n_negative_marriage.shtml Janice Crouse, Ph.D. Betty Friedan: ''The Mother of Feminism.” On CWFA 3. June 24, 2003 http://www.cwfa.org/articles/4178/BLI/dotcommentary/ Other articles: Catherine Durieux Women in the Utopian work of Edward Bellamy. Paru dans Revue d'histoire du XIXe si€cle num€ro 2002-24. http://rh19.revues.org/document370.html Mathilde and Mathias Vaerting. The Dominant Sex: A Study in the Sociology of Sex Differentiation, translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul / Vaerting, Mathilde, 1884 Creation of machine readable version: Charles 1

http://www.sexandgutsmagazine.com http://www.massnews.com/index.shtml 3 http://www.cwfa.org/main.asp 2

76

Keller. Conversion to TEI.2-conformant markup: University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center. ca. 450 kilobytes. This version available from the University of Virginia Library Charlottesville, Virginia. Virtual Library of Virginia users only. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modengV.browse.html Copyright 2000, by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia Internet sources

Wright: http://www-distance.syr.edu/fwpvita.html Lasch: http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9702/reviews/glendon.html Margaret Mead: http://www.mead2001.org/Biography.htm Franz Boas: http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/boas_franz.html

77

Friedan - Quote1

‘The Feminine Mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.’ ‘It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.’ ‘A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she adjust to prejudice and discrimination.’ ‘The problem that has no name — which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities — is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.’ ‘Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — "Is this all?"‘ ‘Men weren't really the enemy –they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.’ ‘If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.’

1

http://womenshistory.about.com/library/qu/blqufrie.htm

78