The Feminine Mystique

Women who forfeited their existences to live according to the feminine mystique suffered from the problem that has no name. They adjusted to an image and, in doing so, also “evaded” the freedom that frightened them. Throughout the world, “normal feminine adjustment” entails not realizing the full possibilities of one’s existence. The housewife lacked a personal purpose which extended into the future, a purpose that would help her achieve self-realization.

If the fundamental need is neither that of pleasure or the service of a biological function, but instead the development of one’s human nature, then a woman’s existence is in danger, despite having lived according to the tenets of femininity which encouraged her to find fulfillment in being a wife and a mother.

In American culture, the development of women had been stunted at “the physiological level,” with no needs met other than those for love and sexual pleasure. Their needs for strength, self-esteem, achievement, and confidence in their abilities were not met. Being a housewife did not grant women self-esteem because the “occupation” did not allow for the full expression of women’s abilities.

Women can never know sexual fulfillment or human love until they achieve their full strength as human beings. The feminine mystique, which granted women the choice between “being a woman” and engaging in human development, limited the range of possibilities.

Psychologist A.H. Maslow studied the relationship between sexuality and “dominance feeling,” or “self-esteem,” among women in the 1930s. He found that the more “dominant,” or self-confident, women tended to enjoy their sexualities more. They were not oversexed, but more comfortable with themselves.

Maslow found that high-dominance women were not conventionally “feminine” because they felt free to choose how to express themselves. On the other hand, low-dominance women did not break rules. High-dominance women were also less “self-centered’ and tended to direct their concerns toward others and “to problems of the world.” The low-dominance woman was “other-directed”—that is, she behaved according to others’ expectations and, therefore, did not feel as comfortable as the high-dominance woman with getting angry.

For Maslow, there was a link between “strength of self and sexuality.” The problem, though, was that women lived in a society that hardly made self-actualization possible for women, which reduced their likelihood to experience pleasure from love and sex.

In American society, love is usually defined as the fusion of egos—"a giving up of individuality rather than a strengthening of it.” However, in self-actualizing people, love strengthens individuality. These people are also more likely to be honest and experience intimacy. The feminine mystique had promised women fulfillment through an abdication of selfhood. However, their problems were largely due to the suppression of their beings.

A study by Alfred Kinsey showed that increased freedom for women coincided with an increased ability to reach orgasm. The study also showed that women who had educations beyond college had orgasms “all or almost all” of the times they had sex, while those who had married before the age of twenty were least likely to have orgasms.

Women’s rights coincided with greater sexual fulfillment for men and women, for they had validated women’s subjectivity. The feminine mystique had rendered women as passive objects of a man’s sexual pleasure.

Other studies, particularly that by Ernest W. Burgess and Leonard S. Cottrell, showed that women’s chances of marital happiness increased when “their career preparation increased.” The sociologists found that, the higher a woman’s income was at the time of her marriage, the likelier she was to be sexually satisfied.

Helene Deutsch, an eminent psychoanalyst, suggested, at a psychoanalytic conference, that maybe “too much emphasis had been put on the orgasm for women” and that, perhaps only “a more diffuse fulfillment” than orgasm was more realistic for women.

In contexts not concerned with women, analysts believed that passive people who feel empty psychologically and who have not developed “adequate egos” cannot experience orgasms due to fears of “their own non-existence” which are triggered by the loss of control.

If sex had a “depressive” quality for some Americans, particularly for the female “sex-seekers,” it was because people were using sex as a means to search for a sense of identity. Friedan argues that people are most likely to achieve self-actualization through work and by being in the service “of a human purpose larger than themselves.” Work could be seen as “the key to the problem that has no name.”

Traditionally, American women had worked, as pioneers on the frontier, and “beside their husbands in sweatshops and laundries.” To European travelers, American women seemed “less feminine” and “childlike” compared to European women due to their willingness to share in work, as well as their participation in education.

The South African writer Olive Schreiner warned, at the turn of the century, that the “quality and quantity” of women’s social functions were decreasing “as fast as civilization was advancing.” If women did not share equally in work, their minds would weaken, their offspring would weaken, and, eventually, all of civilization would “deteriorate.”

To break out of the housewife trap, or the “comfortable concentration camp,” women could not find their identities through others, but had to find it in work that made use of their capacities. Only that personal commitment could help them fulfill their “unique possibilities” as distinct individuals.