The Feminine Mystique Read online

  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. Behind the new mystique were concepts and theories deceptive in their sophistication and their assumption of accepted truth. These theories were supposedly so complex that they were inaccessible to all but a few initiates, and therefore irrefutable. It will be necessary to break through this wall of mystery and look more closely at these complex concepts, these accepted truths, to understand fully what has happened to American women.

  The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity. It says that the great mistake of Western culture, through most of its history, has been the undervaluation of this femininity. It says this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that man-made science may never be able to understand it. But however special and different, it is in no way inferior to the nature of man; it may even in certain respects be superior. The mistake, says the mystique, the root of women’s troubles in the past is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.

  But the new image this mystique gives to American women is the old image: “Occupation: housewife.” The new mystique makes the housewife-mothers, who never had a chance to be anything else, the model for all women; it presupposes that history has reached a final and glorious end in the here and now, as far as women are concerned. Beneath the sophisticated trappings, it simply makes certain concrete, finite, domestic aspects of feminine existence—as it was lived by women whose lives were confined, by necessity, to cooking, cleaning, washing, bearing children—into a religion, a pattern by which all women must now live or deny their femininity.

  Fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949—the housewife-mother. As swiftly as in a dream, the image of the American woman as a changing, growing individual in a changing world was shattered. Her solo flight to find her own identity was forgotten in the rush for the security of togetherness. Her limitless world shrunk to the cozy walls of home.

  The transformation, reflected in the pages of the women’s magazines, was sharply visible in 1949 and progressive through the fifties. “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 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.”

  By the end of 1949, only one out of three heroines in the women’s magazines was a career woman—and she was shown in the act of renouncing her career and discovering that what she really wanted to be was a housewife. In 1958, and again in 1959, I went through issue after issue of the three major women’s magazines (the fourth, Woman’s Home Companion, had died) without finding a single heroine who had a career, a commitment to any work, art, profession, or mission in the world, other than “Occupation: housewife.” Only one in a hundred heroines had a job; even the young unmarried heroines no longer worked except at snaring a husband.2

  These new happy housewife heroines seem strangely younger than the spirited career girls of the thirties and forties. They seem to get younger all the time—in looks, and a childlike kind of dependence. They have no vision of the future, except to have a baby. The only active growing figure in their world is the child. The housewife heroines are forever young, because their own image ends in childbirth. Like Peter Pan, they must remain young while their children grow up with the world. They must keep on having babies, because the feminine mystique says there is no other way for a woman to be a heroine. Here is a typical specimen from a story called “The Sandwich Maker” (Ladies’ Home Journal, April, 1959). She took home economics in college, learned how to cook, never held a job, and still plays the child bride, though she now has three children of her own. Her problem is money. “Oh, nothing boring, like taxes or reciprocal trade agreements, or foreign aid programs. I leave all that economic jazz to my constitutionally elected representative in Washington, heaven help him.”

  The problem is her $42.10 allowance. She hates having to ask her husband for money every time she needs a pair of shoes, but he won’t trust her with a charge account. “Oh, how I yearned for a little money of my own! Not much, really. A few hundred a year would have done it. Just enough to meet a friend for lunch occasionally, to indulge in extravagantly colored stockings, a few small items, without having to appeal to Charley. But, alas, Charley was right. I had never earned a dollar in my life, and had no idea of how money was made. So all I did for a long time was brood, as I continued with my cooking, cleaning, cooking, washing, ironing, cooking.”

  At last the solution comes—she will take orders for sandwiches from other men at her husband’s plant. She earns $52.50 a week, except that she forgets to count costs, and she doesn’t remember what a gross is so she has to hide 8,640 sandwich bags behind the furnace. Charley says she’s making the sandwiches too fancy. She explains: “If it’s only ham on rye, then I’m just a sandwich maker, and I’m not interested. But the extras, the special touches—well, they make it sort of creative.” So she chops, wraps, peels, seals, spreads bread, starting at dawn and never finished, for $9.00 net, until she is disgusted by the smell of food, and finally staggers downstairs after a sleepless night to slice a salami for the eight gaping lunch boxes. “It was too much. Charley came down just then, and after one quick look at me, ran for a glass of water.” She realizes that she is going to have another baby.

  “Charley’s first coherent words were ‘I’ll cancel your lunch orders. You’re a mother. That’s your job. You don’t have to earn money, too.’ It was all so beautifully simple! ‘Yes, boss,’ I murmured obediently, frankly relieved.” That night he brings her home a checkbook; he will trust her with a joint account. So she decides just to keep quiet about the 8,640 sandwich bags. Anyhow, she’ll have used them up, making sandwiches for four children to take to school, by the time the youngest is ready for college.

  The road from Sarah and the seaplane to the sandwich maker was traveled in only ten years. In those ten years, the image of American woman seems to have suffered a schizophrenic split. And the split in the image goes much further than the savage obliteration of career from women’s dreams.

  In an earlier time, the image of woman was also split in two—the good, pure woman on the pedestal, and the whore of the desires of the flesh. The split in the new image opens a different fissure—the feminine woman, whose goodness includes the desires of the flesh, and the career woman, whose evil includes every desire of the separate self. The new feminine morality story is the exorcising of the forbidden career dream, the heroine’s victory over Mephistopheles: the devil, first in the form of a career woman, who threatens to take away the heroine’s husband or child, and finally, the devil inside the heroine herself, the dream of independence, the discontent of spirit, and even the feeling of a separate identity that must be exorcised to win or keep the love of husband and child.

  In a story in Redbook (“A Man Who Acted Like a Husband,” November, 1957) the child-bride heroine, “a little freckle-faced brunette” whose nickname is “Junior,” is visited by her old college roommate. The roommate Kay is “a man’s girl, really, with a good head for business…she wore her polished mahogany hair in a high chignon, speared with two chopstick affairs.” Kay is not only divorced, but she has also left her child with his grandmother while she works in television. This career-woman-devil tempts Junior with
the lure of a job to keep her from breast-feeding her baby. She even restrains the young mother from going to her baby when he cries at 2 A.M. But she gets her comeuppance when George, the husband, discovers the crying baby uncovered, in a freezing wind from an open window, with blood running down its cheek. Kay, reformed and repentant, plays hookey from her job to go get her own child and start life anew. And Junior, gloating at the 2 A.M. feeding—“I’m glad, glad, glad I’m just a housewife”—starts to dream about the baby, growing up to be a housewife, too.

  With the career woman out of the way, the housewife with interests in the community becomes the devil to be exorcised. Even PTA takes on a suspect connotation, not to mention interest in some international cause (see “Almost a Love Affair,” McCall’s, November, 1955). The housewife who simply has a mind of her own is the next to go. The heroine of “I Didn’t Want to Tell You” (McCall’s, January, 1958) is shown balancing the checkbook by herself and arguing with her husband about a small domestic detail. It develops that she is losing her husband to a “helpless little widow” whose main appeal is that she can’t “think straight” about an insurance policy or mortgage. The betrayed wife says: “She must have sex appeal and what weapon has a wife against that?” But her best friend tells her: “You’re making this too simple. You’re forgetting how helpless Tania can be, and how grateful to the man who helps her…”

  “I couldn’t be a clinging vine if I tried,” the wife says. “I had a better than average job after I left college and I was always a pretty independent person. I’m not a helpless little woman and I can’t pretend to be.” But she learns, that night. She hears a noise that might be a burglar; even though she knows it’s only a mouse, she calls helplessly to her husband, and wins him back. As he comforts her pretended panic, she murmurs that, of course, he was right in their argument that morning. “She lay still in the soft bed, smiling in sweet, secret satisfaction, scarcely touched with guilt.”

  The end of the road, in an almost literal sense, is the disappearance of the heroine altogether, as a separate self and the subject of her own story. The end of the road is togetherness, where the woman has no independent self to hide even in guilt; she exists only for and through her husband and children.

  Coined by the publishers of McCall’s in 1954, the concept “togetherness” was seized upon avidly as a movement of spiritual significance by advertisers, ministers, newspaper editors. For a time, it was elevated into virtually a national purpose. But very quickly there was sharp social criticism, and bitter jokes about “togetherness” as a substitute for larger human goals—for men. Women were taken to task for making their husbands do housework, instead of letting them pioneer in the nation and the world. Why, it was asked, should men with the capacities of statesmen, anthropologists, physicists, poets, have to wash dishes and diaper babies on weekday evenings or Saturday mornings when they might use those extra hours to fulfill larger commitments to their society?

  Significantly, critics resented only that men were being asked to share “woman’s world.” Few questioned the boundaries of this world for women. No one seemed to remember that women were once thought to have the capacity and vision of statesmen, poets, and physicists. Few saw the big lie of togetherness for women.

  Consider the Easter 1954 issue of McCall’s which announced the new era of togetherness, sounding the requiem for the days when women fought for and won political equality, and the women’s magazines “helped you to carve out large areas of living formerly forbidden to your sex.” The new way of life in which “men and women in ever-increasing numbers are marrying at an earlier age, having children at an earlier age, rearing larger families and gaining their deepest satisfaction” from their own homes, is one which “men, women and children are achieving together…not as women alone, or men alone, isolated from one another, but as a family, sharing a common experience.”

  The picture essay detailing that way of life is called “a man’s place is in the home.” It describes, as the new image and ideal, a New Jersey couple with three children in a gray-shingle split-level house. Ed and Carol have “centered their lives almost completely around their children and their home.” They are shown shopping at the supermarket, carpentering, dressing the children, making breakfast together. “Then Ed joins the members of his car pool and heads for the office.”

  Ed, the husband, chooses the color scheme for the house and makes the major decorating decisions. The chores Ed likes are listed: putter around the house, make things, paint, select furniture, rugs and draperies, dry dishes, read to the children and put them to bed, work in the garden, feed and dress and bathe the children, attend PTA meetings, cook, buy clothes for his wife, buy groceries.

  Ed doesn’t like these chores: dusting, vacuuming, finishing jobs he’s started, hanging draperies, washing pots and pans and dishes, picking up after the children, shoveling snow or mowing the lawn, changing diapers, taking the baby-sitter home, doing the laundry, ironing. Ed, of course, does not do these chores.

  For the sake of every member of the family, the family needs a head. This means Father, not Mother…. Children of both sexes need to learn, recognize and respect the abilities and functions of each sex…. He is not just a substitute mother, even though he’s ready and willing to do his share of bathing, feeding, comforting, playing. He is a link with the outside world he works in. If in that world he is interested, courageous, tolerant, constructive, he will pass on these values to his children.

  There were many agonized editorial sessions, in those days at McCall’s. “Suddenly, everybody was looking for this spiritual significance in togetherness, expecting us to make some mysterious religious movement out of the life everyone had been leading for the last five years—crawling into the home, turning their backs on the world—but we never could find a way of showing it that wasn’t a monstrosity of dullness,” a former McCall’s editor reminisces. “It always boiled down to, goody, goody, goody, Daddy is out there in the garden barbecuing. We put men in the fashion pictures and the food pictures, and even the perfume pictures. But we were stifled by it editorially.

  “We had articles by psychiatrists that we couldn’t use because they would have blown it wide open: all those couples propping their whole weight on their kids. But what else could you do with togetherness but child care? We were pathetically grateful to find anything else where we could show father photographed with mother. Sometimes, we used to wonder what would happen to women, with men taking over the decorating, child care, cooking, all the things that used to be hers alone. But we couldn’t show women getting out of the home and having a career. The irony is, what we meant to do was to stop editing for women as women, and edit for the men and women together. We wanted to edit for people, not women.”

  But forbidden to join man in the world, can women be people? Forbidden independence, they finally are swallowed in an image of such passive dependence that they want men to make the decisions, even in the home. The frantic illusion that togetherness can impart a spiritual content to the dullness of domestic routine, the need for a religious movement to make up for the lack of identity, betrays the measure of women’s loss and the emptiness of the image. Could making men share the housework compensate women for their loss of the world? Could vacuuming the living-room floor together give the housewife some mysterious new purpose in life?

  In 1956, at the peak of togetherness, the bored editors of McCall’s ran a little article called “The Mother Who Ran Away.” To their amazement, it brought the highest readership of any article they had ever run. “It was our moment of truth,” said a former editor. “We suddenly realized that all those women at home with their three and a half children were miserably unhappy.”

  But by then the new image of American woman, “Occupation: housewife,” had hardened into a mystique, unquestioned and permitting no questions, shaping the very reality it distorted.

  By the time I started writing for women’s magazines, in the fifties, it was simply taken for granted
by editors, and accepted as an immutable fact of life by writers, that women were not interested in politics, life outside the United States, national issues, art, science, ideas, adventure, education, or even their own communities, except where they could be sold through their emotions as wives and mothers.

  Politics, for women, became Mamie’s clothes and the Nixons’ home life. Out of conscience, a sense of duty, the Ladies’ Home Journal might run a series like “Political Pilgrim’s Progress,” showing women trying to improve their children’s schools and playgrounds. But even approaching politics through mother love did not really interest women, it was thought in the trade. Everyone knew those readership percentages. An editor of Redbook ingeniously tried to bring the bomb down to the feminine level by showing the emotions of a wife whose husband sailed into a contaminated area.

  “Women can’t take an idea, an issue, pure,” men who edited the mass women’s magazines agreed. “It has to be translated in terms they can understand as women.” This was so well understood by those who wrote for women’s magazines that a natural childbirth expert submitted an article to a leading woman’s magazine called “How to Have a Baby in an Atom Bomb Shelter.” “The article was not well written,” an editor told me, “or we might have bought it.” According to the mystique, women, in their mysterious femininity, might be interested in the concrete biological details of having a baby in a bomb shelter, but never in the abstract idea of the bomb’s power to destroy the human race.

  Such a belief, of course, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 1960, a perceptive social psychologist showed me some sad statistics which seemed to prove unmistakably that American women under thirty-five are not interested in politics. “They may have the vote, but they don’t dream about running for office,” he told me. “If you write a political piece, they won’t read it. You have to translate it into issues they can understand—romance, pregnancy, nursing, home furnishings, clothes. Run an article on the economy, or the race question, civil rights, and you’d think that women had never heard of them.”