The Feminine Mystique

Friedan observes a “frightening passivity” and “boredom” in American children who perform all the activities they are supposed to perform, but without interest. Students in college were especially “apathetic.” They were disinterested in their courses, which they took merely to find certain jobs, and were incapable of planning activities. A curriculum geared toward the students’ interests was no longer suitable, for they had no strong interests.

The new passivity was evident, according to Friedan, in the apparition of the “bearded, undisciplined beatnik,” as well as in the rising rates of juvenile delinquency, school dropouts, contractions of venereal disease, and illegitimate pregnancies.

Those who studied the passive behavior did not blame it on boredom, but on a deterioration of character that was also visible among American GIs who were prisoners of war in Korea. The new GIs became inert in the camps—they did not acquire food or firewood or bother to keep themselves clean.

Friedan attributes the passivity in boys and girls to mothers who live within the feminine mystique, which dictates that they should live through their children and suffer their children’s distresses and failures as though they were their own. Pop psychology had encouraged this fusion of mothers and children through the promotion of the “symbiosis” concept, which insisted that a mother’s constant loving care was necessary for a child’s emotional growth and should be available “for an indeterminate number of years.”

The “symbiosis” resulted in disturbed children who were “acting out” the wishes and fantasies of their parents. Parents trying to realize their dreams through their children is nothing new, but the difference in the 1950s was that the mothers were “infantile” and sought gratification through their children because they did not know how to gratify themselves.

According to the psychiatrist Andras Angyal, there are two ways of evading growth: noncommitment and vicarious living. An uncommitted person goes through life “playing a role,” taking on jobs and marriages without being committed to any of them. Vicarious living denies one’s own personality in favor of another, perhaps the one that is most popular at the time.

To Friedan, noncommitment and vicarious living were the methods by which women who were trapped in the feminine mystique lived their lives. Playing roles had left them confused about who they really were; in a few cases, it led to suicide.

In the 1950s, “the housewife’s syndrome” included mild symptoms, such as “bleeding blisters” and “nervousness,” as well as more severe conditions, such as heart attacks, bleeding ulcers, hypertension, and psychotic breakdowns.

The greater rate of breakdowns existed among “housewife-mothers” who shared certain characteristics in common. They had quit high school or college and came from backgrounds that had traditionally encouraged dependency among women. They had never done anything on their own, so they had never learned how to handle the stress of hard work. They had no ambitions other than to marry an ambitious man.

Sometimes, in their drive to be very good wives and mothers, “housewife-mothers” ended up playing a very “masculine,” dominant role. The housewife-mother dominated her children’s lives, nagged her husband to perform household tasks, managed the finances, and supervised education and recreation.

An investigation into an affluent Westchester community with a “world famous” school system discovered graduates with excellent grades who performed poorly in college. Investigators discovered that the students’ mothers had been doing their homework, even writing their term papers.

Children who never achieve selfhood usually have emotionally immature mothers. The mother’s constant care of her children is not a natural response, but the result of her idea of what good mothering ought to look like.

Young women whose overly involved mothers had pushed them into early sexuality became housewives who continued to evade emotional growth. In some communities, such as Bergen County, New Jersey, the rate of marital separation, which precedes divorce, was 100% during the 1950s. This was the result of early sexualization. Millions of young people in the 1960s married before the age of twenty. Girls married because they did not want to work anymore and young men married to get regular sex and “a motherly woman in the house.”

As women became more passive, men became more hostile. If a woman felt hostile toward her husband, she did not “dare” take it out on him but exercised her hostility on their child. The University of Colorado Hospital reported 302 cases of child battery within a single year. Experts predicted that child abuse would become a more frequent cause of death than diseases, such as “leukemia, cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy.”

Immaturity in human relationships had resulted in youth worship, a “sick love affair” with one’s own children, sex that was “divorced from a human framework,” and a series of stories that portrayed love affairs between humans and animals. This would continue as long as the feminine mystique encouraged women to avoid their own growth in favor of a “passive childlike dependency.”

Friedan insists that being a housewife often resulted in “a sense of emptiness” and “non-existence” similar to that experienced by prisoners in Nazi camps who “surrendered their human identity.” Friedan turns to reports on the observations of the psychoanalyst and educational psychologist Bruno Bettelheim who noted that when prisoners entered the Nazi camps, they were cut off from their adult interests. The only world that mattered was that of the concentration camp. As they became more preoccupied with their basic animal needs, such as their waning sexualities, they lost their human identities.

It brought the prisoners some comfort to know that everyone was in the same circumstance. However, no camaraderie grew out of this knowledge. They instead became filled with rage. Yet, they did not turn this rage against the officers who imprisoned them; instead, they took their anger out on each other. They had been manipulated to trap themselves in the prison and to feel empowered only when they could dominate someone weaker than they. Those who survived the concentration camps did so because they retained some memory and attachment to the world beyond the camp.

Of course, American women were not “being readied for mass extermination,” but they had suffered “a slow death of mind and spirit.” If educated women were unable to “adjust” to their role as housewives, then, according to Friedan, they must have outgrown the role.

By forcing themselves to adjust to the role, women were walking into a concentration camp where they became less than human, vulnerable to outside pressures, and fearful of losing their sexual potency. To escape the “camp,” Friedan insists that women needed to “recapture their sense of self” and “begin to grow.”