The Feminine Mystique: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

In the 1950s, educators were shocked to realize that more women than ever before were going to college, but they were not going to prepare themselves for careers. Two out of three young women who entered college dropped out. Those who stayed were only interested in finding a husband—a pursuit which began as early as freshman year.

Statistics showed that college presidents, scholars, and educators were leaving women’s colleges. Some women’s colleges had closed down. The president of Sarah Lawrence College, a women’s college, talked about making it co-educational. Some said that college “should no longer be wasted on women,” and the president of Vassar College, another institution for women, predicted the end of American colleges for women.

Initially, Friedan thought that the reports were exaggerations or merely the result of the deterioration of some institutions. She noticed the problem during a visit back to Smith College. One recent graduate told her that, in spite of the expectation that they go to college, a girl who was serious about her studies would be regarded as “peculiar, unfeminine.” They did not talk about serious ideas as Friedan’s generation had, but instead talked about their dates.

The female students regarded college as something to get out of the way with haste so that their “real” lives as housewives could begin. They had learned that if they wanted to have a normal, “adjusted” life they should devote themselves to getting married and having children and should not become “seriously interested” in anything else. Some had learned this lesson at home, others from their peers. However, the message was also communicated to them by professors.

Under the influence of the feminine mystique, educators and administrators had discouraged critical thinking in young women. They worried, based on the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead, that a proper education would only doom women to frustration when they inevitably became housewives.

The sex-directed educator had embraced the views of Freud and Mead, which validated the feminine mystique and encouraged “adjustment within the world of home and children.” Some really believed in the “mystique” as social scientists had “handed it to them.” Others did not find confirmation of their own prejudices within the theories, but had no reason not to accept them.

Those few women who were college educators or presidents either conformed to the feminine mystique, or their authority was questioned. They did not speak on their experiences as women. They did not usually become the presidents of women’s colleges; that role usually went to an older man. Sometimes they became the heads of departments at universities where the graduate students were usually male.

The female scholar was suspect because she did not work solely to support her household. Sometimes, in her self-defense, she wore very feminine clothing, such as frilly blouses. Friedan observed this habit among female psychoanalysts.

The sex-directed educator accepted responsibility for education being the cause of the housewife’s frustration. They encouraged a “feminized higher education” to counteract the “masculine” forces in the culture, such as “egotistic individualism” and “quantitative thinking.”

“Feminized higher education” might include disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and psychology to help women explore “the quiet and unspectacular forces of society and of the mind,” but it would also include the “minor arts”—never fine art, which was deemed “masculine”—such as, ceramics or textiles, which required more work from the hand than from the brain. The minor arts also appealed to a woman’s love of beauty, which they connected with “the processes of living.”

The sex-directed educator believed that a young woman should begin studying home economics in high school and continue in college, “with greater intensity and imagination.” Young men could receive this education, too, but it was not to interfere with “their valuable college time.”

American educators who investigated “the waste of our national resources of creative intelligence” found that too many high school students were taking “easy how-to courses” and that most of those who should have been studying math, science, and foreign languages were girls. They had the intelligence to do the work, but they viewed such subjects as “unfeminine."

The influence of sex-directed education was most pronounced in high schools where women were discouraged from pursuing a professional field of study. If they were accepted to universities to study professional fields, such as architecture, guidance counselors continued to discourage them by saying that they would not find work. Young women were, instead, encouraged to go to junior college where the work was easier and they could learn all they needed to know in preparation for marriage.

Women were dropping out of college at a faster rate than men to get married. The average age of first marriage had dropped to the youngest in American history. Meanwhile, “with the advent of science and education,” the average age of first marriage was rising in Asia and Africa. Also, the annual rate of population increase in the United States was among the highest in the world.

Education, according to Friedan, is necessary for personal growth. For the girl, her evasion of growth in college was due to having an “exclusively sexual” view of identity. College, for her, was simply the place where she could fulfill her sex role.

Educators expected boys to achieve “personal autonomy and identity” through their goals. Even if those goals were not realistic in the beginning, the expectation was that they would change in college. Educators did not expect to see that development in girls. 

Instead of inspiring a desire for autonomy in young women, sex-directed educators encouraged them to fulfill their desire for achievement through men. They gave them “a potpourri of liberal-arts courses” that would give them a veneer of sophistication and encouraged them to join programs well below their abilities.

Economists revealed a study that predicted that there would be a decline in employment “for the uneducated and the unskilled.” They predicted that women would spend twenty-five years or more working outside of the home. Still, women were unfazed and, with the encouragement of sex-directed educators, only expected to be housewives.

Educators who believed in functionalism thought it was more important to focus on the practical perceived needs of their students, such as understanding the roles they would play in marriage. At one famous women’s college, Friedan uses the example of the female president to demonstrate the guilt that some ex-feminists felt over encouraging a non-sex-directed education, for a minority of alumnae had complained that their educations had ill-prepared them for their roles as housewives.

The students who take courses in “family-life education,” such as “Marriage and Family,” learn bits and pieces of ideas from Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead, but not with the necessary backgrounds in psychology and anthropology to contextualize those ideas. The courses encouraged all manner of conformity, advocating the “wrongness” of premarital sex, the notion that successful career women were atypical, that working women usually felt guilty for leaving their children at home, and that “mixed marriages” (marriages between people of different classes or religions) were unwise.

Lessons in functionalism were very “soothing” to young women who were afraid to break away from their childhoods and who did not want to work hard in college or develop their own views. Smart, spirited young women learned that it was unwise to talk about intellectual subjects around boys out of fear of being labeled as “brains.” Psychologists believed that women's interest “in men and marriage” were defenses against intellectual development. That development, some found, was stunted in girls as young as fourteen or fifteen who showed a drop in their IQ scores due to statements from them, also reflected in their school records, that they thought it wasn’t “too smart for a girl to be smart.”

The young women of the Eisenhower era faced a choice between conformity and accepting the growing pains of becoming individuals. Using a study from Vassar College, Friedan observed that, just when many women began to feel “the conflicts” and growing pains of building an identity, they discontinued their growth by leaving school. They did not develop their own interests and, years out of college, sometimes showed signs of being on the verge of nervous breakdowns. Another group of students in the same study had pursued their own interests in college and later became professionals. Their interests in men were more genuine and did not interfere with their educations.

Sex-directed educators offered the following solutions for housewives who outlived their husbands: a course in law to help with matters, such as insurance and estates, early retirement for men so that they could spend more time with their wives, and a “brief fling” with volunteer work or the arts. They could also take a part-time job, as long as it did not take work away from men who needed the income for their families.

Sex-directed educators saw the danger in encouraging domesticity in boys but, due to the feminine mystique, no one thought it was a tragedy when a woman did only one thing with her life. Still, according to Friedan, educators did not bear full blame. Women had made the choice to go back to the home and they were responsible for their choice.