Parsons, a highly respected sociologist and the leading functional theoretician, describes with insight and accuracy the sources of strain in this “segregation of sex roles.” He points out that the “domestic” aspect of the housewife role “has declined in importance to the point where it scarcely approaches a full-time occupation for a vigorous person”: that the “glamour pattern” is “inevitably associated with a rather early age level” and thus “serious strains result from the problem of adaptation to increasing age,” that the “good companion” pattern—which includes “humanistic” cultivation of the arts and community welfare—“suffers from a lack of fully institutionalized status…. It is only those with the strongest initiative and intelligence who achieve fully satisfying adaptations in this direction.” He states that “it is quite clear that in the adult feminine role there is quite sufficient strain and insecurity so that widespread manifestations are to be expected in the form of neurotic behavior.” But Parsons warns:
It is, of course, possible for the adult woman to follow the masculine pattern and seek a career in fields of occupational achievement in direct competition with men of her own class. It is, however, notable that in spite of the very great progress of the emancipation of women from the traditional domestic pattern only a very small fraction have gone very far in this direction. It is also clear that its generalization would only be possible with profound alterations in the structure of the family.
True equality between men and women would not be “functional” the status quo can be maintained only if the wife and mother is exclusively a homemaker or, at most, has a “job” rather than a “career” which might give her status equal to that of her husband. Thus Parsons finds sexual segregation “functional” in terms of keeping the social structure as it is, which seems to be the functionalist’s primary concern.
Absolute equality of opportunity is clearly incompatible with any positive solidarity of the family…. Where married women are employed outside the home, it is, for the great majority, in occupations which are not in direct competition for status with those of men of their own class. Women’s interests, and the standard of judgment applied to them, run, in our society, far more in the direction of personal adornment…. It is suggested that this difference is functionally related to maintaining family solidarity in our class structure.7
Even the eminent woman sociologist Mirra Komarovsky, whose functional analysis of how girls learn to “play the role of woman” in our society is brilliant indeed, cannot quite escape the rigid mold functionalism imposes: adjustment to the status quo. For to limit one’s field of inquiry to the function of an institution in a given social system, with no alternatives considered, provides an infinite number of rationalizations for all the inequalities and inequities of that system. It is not surprising that social scientists began to mistake their own function as one of helping the individual “adjust” to his “role,” in that system.
A social order can function only because the vast majority have somehow adjusted themselves to their place in society and perform the functions expected of them…. The differences in the upbringing of the sexes…are obviously related to their respective roles in adult life. The future homemaker trains for her role within the home, but the boy prepares for his by being given more independence outside the home, by his taking a “paper route” or a summer job. A provider will profit by independence, dominance, aggressiveness, competitiveness.8
The risk of the “traditional upbringing” of girls, as this sociologist sees it, is its possible “failure to develop in the girl the independence, inner resources, and that degree of self-assertion which life will demand of her”—in her role as wife. The functional warning follows:
Even if a parent correctly [sic] considers certain conventional attributes of the feminine role to be worthless, he creates risks for the girl in forcing her to stray too far from the accepted mores of her time…. The steps which parents must take to prepare their daughters to meet economic exigencies and familial responsibilities of modern life—these very steps may awaken aspirations and develop habits which conflict with certain features of their feminine roles, as these are defined today. The very education which is to make the college housewife a cultural leaven of her family and her community may develop in her interests which are frustrated by other phases of housewifery…. We run the risk of awakening interests and abilities which, again, run counter to the present definition of femininity.9
She goes on to cite the recent case of a girl who wanted to be a sociologist. She was engaged to a GI who didn’t want his wife to work. The girl herself hoped she wouldn’t find a good job in sociology.
An unsatisfactory job would, she felt, make it easier for her to comply eventually with her future husband’s wishes. The needs of the country for trained workers, the uncertainty of her own future, her current interests notwithstanding, she took a routine job. Only the future will tell whether her decision was prudent. If her fiance returns from the front, if the marriage takes place, if he is able to provide for the family without her assistance, if her frustrated wishes do not boomerang, then she will not regret her decision….
At the present historical moment, the best adjusted girl is probably one who is intelligent enough to do well in school but not so brilliant as to get all A’s…capable but not in areas relatively new to women; able to stand on her own two feet and to earn a living, but not so good a living as to compete with men; capable of doing some job well (in case she doesn’t marry, or otherwise has to work) but not so identified with a profession as to need it for her happiness.10
So, in the name of adjustment to the cultural definition of femininity—in which this brilliant sociologist obviously does not herself believe (that word “correctly” betrays her)—she ends up virtually endorsing the continued infantilizing of American woman, except insofar as it has the unintended consequence of making “the transition from the role of daughter to that of the spouse more difficult for her than for the son.”
Essentially, it is assumed that to the extent that the woman remains more “infantile,” less able to make her own decisions, more dependent upon one or both parents for initiating and channeling behavior and attitudes, more closely attached to them so as to find it difficult to part from them or to face their disapproval…or shows any other indices of lack of emotional emancipation—to that extent she may find it more difficult than the man to conform to the cultural norm of primary loyalty to the family she establishes later. It is possible, of course, that the only effect of the greater sheltering is to create in women a generalized dependency which will then be transferred to the husband and which will enable her all the more readily to accept the role of wife in a family which still has many patriarchal features.11
She finds evidence in a number of studies that college girls, in fact, are more infantile, dependent and tied to parents than boys, and do not mature, as boys do, by learning to stand alone. But she can find no evidence—in twenty psychiatric texts—that there are, accordingly, more in-law problems with the wife’s parents than the husband’s. Evidently, only with such evidence could a functionalist comfortably question the deliberate infantilization of American girls!
Functionalism was an easy out for American sociologists. There can be no doubt that they were describing things “as they were,” but in so doing, they were relieved of the responsibility of building theory from facts, of probing for deeper truth. They were also relieved of the need to formulate questions and answers that would be inevitably controversial (at a time in academic circles, as in America as a whole, when controversy was not welcome). They assumed an endless present, and based their reasoning on denying the possibility of a future different from the past. Of course, their reasoning would hold up only as long as the future did not change. As C. P. Snow has pointed out, science and scientists are future-minded. Social scientists under the functional banner were so rigidly present-minded that they denied the future; their theories enforced the prejud
ices of the past, and actually prevented change.
Sociologists themselves have recently come to the conclusion that functionalism was rather “embarrassing” because it really said nothing at all. As Kingsley Davis pointed out in his presidential address on “The Myth of Functional Analysis as a Special Method in Sociology and Anthropology” at the American Sociological Association in 1959:
For more than thirty years now “functional analysis” has been debated among sociologists and anthropologists…. However strategic it may have been in the past, it has now become an impediment rather than a prop to scientific progress…. The claim that functionalism cannot handle social change because it posits an integrated static society is true by definition….12
Unfortunately, the female objects of functional analysis were profoundly affected by it. At a time of great change for women, at a time when education, science, and social science should have helped women bridge the change, functionalism transformed “what is” for women, or “what was,” to “what should be.” Those who perpetrated the feminine protest, and made more of being a woman than it can ever be, in the name of functionalism or for whatever complex of personal or intellectual reasons, closed the door of the future on women. In all the concern for adjustment, one truth was forgotten: women were being adjusted to a state inferior to their full capabilities. The functionalists did not wholly accept the Freudian argument that “anatomy is destiny,” but they accepted whole-heartedly an equally restrictive definition of woman: woman is what society says she is. And most of the functional anthropologists studied societies in which woman’s destiny was defined by anatomy.
The most powerful influence on modern women, in terms both of functionalism and the feminine protest, was Margaret Mead. Her work on culture and personality—book after book, study after study—has had a profound effect on the women in my generation, the one before it, and the generation now growing up. She was, and still is, the symbol of the woman thinker in America. She has written millions of words in the thirty-odd years between Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928 and her latest article on American women in the New York Times Magazine or Redbook. She is studied in college classrooms by girls taking courses in anthropology, sociology, psychology, education, and marriage and family life; in graduate schools by those who will one day teach girls and counsel women; in medical schools by future pediatricians and psychiatrists; even in theological schools by progressive young ministers. And she is read in the women’s magazines and the Sunday supplements, where she publishes as readily as in the learned journals, by girls and women of all ages. Margaret Mead is her own best popularizer—and her influence has been felt in almost every layer of American thought.
But her influence, for women, has been a paradox. A mystique takes what it needs from any thinker of the time. The feminine mystique might have taken from Margaret Mead her vision of the infinite variety of sexual patterns and the enormous plasticity of human nature, a vision based on the differences of sex and temperament she found in three primitive societies: the Arapesh, where both men and women were “feminine” and “maternal” in personality and passively sexual, because both were trained to be cooperative, unaggressive, responsive to the needs and demands of others; the Mundugumor, where both husband and wife were violent, aggressive, positively sexed, “masculine” and the Tchambuli, where the woman was the dominant, impersonal managing partner, and the man the less responsible and emotionally dependent person.
If those temperamental attitudes which we have traditionally regarded as feminine—such as passivity, responsiveness, and a willingness to cherish children—can so easily be set up as the masculine pattern in one tribe, and in another be outlawed for the majority of women as well as for the majority of men, we no longer have any basis for regarding such aspects of behavior as sex-linked…. The material suggests that we may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex, as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of head-dress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.13
From such anthropological observations, she might have passed on to the popular culture a truly revolutionary vision of women finally free to realize their full capabilities in a society which replaced arbitrary sexual definitions with a recognition of genuine individual gifts as they occur in either sex. She had such a vision, more than once:
Where writing is accepted as a profession that may be pursued by either sex with perfect suitability, individuals who have the ability to write need not be debarred from it by their sex, nor need they, if they do write, doubt their essential masculinity or femininity…and it is here that we can find a ground-plan for building a society that would substitute real differences for arbitrary ones. We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.
Just as society now permits the practice of an art to members of either sex, so it might also permit the development of many contrasting temperamental gifts in each sex. It would abandon its various attempts to make boys fight and to make girls remain passive, or to make all children fight…. No child would be relentlessly shaped to one pattern of behavior, but instead there should be many patterns, in a world that had learned to allow to each individual the pattern which was most congenial to his gifts.14
But this is not the vision the mystique took from Margaret Mead; nor is it the vision that she continues to offer. Increasingly, in her own pages, her interpretation blurs, is subtly transformed, into a glorification of women in the female role—as defined by their sexual biological function. At times she seems to lose her own anthropological awareness of the malleability of human personality, and to look at anthropological data from the Freudian point of view—sexual biology determines all, anatomy is destiny. At times she seems to be arguing in functional terms, that while woman’s potential is as great and various as the unlimited human potential, it is better to preserve the sexual biological limitations established by a culture. At times she says both things in the same page, and even sounds a note of caution, warning of the dangers a woman faces in trying to realize a human potential which her society has defined as masculine.
The difference between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature…. Sometimes one quality has been assigned to one sex, sometimes to the other. Now it is boys who are thought of as infinitely vulnerable and in need of special cherishing care, now it is girls…. Some people think of women as too weak to work out of doors, others regard women as the appropriate bearers of heavy burdens “because their heads are stronger than men’s.”…Some religions, including our European traditional religions, have assigned women an inferior role in the religious hierarchy, others have built their whole symbolic relationship with the supernatural world upon male imitations of the natural functions of women…. Whether we deal with small matters or with large, with the frivolities of ornament and cosmetics or the sanctities of man’s place in the universe, we find this great variety of ways, often flatly contradictory one to the other, in which the roles of the two sexes have been patterned.
But we always find the patterning. We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation; that otherwise in all respects they are simply human beings with varying gifts, no one of which can be exclusively assigned to either sex.
Are we dealing with a must that we dare not flout because it is rooted so deep in our biological mammalian nature that to flout it means individual and social disease? Or with a must that, although not so deeply rooted, still is so very socially convenient and so well tried that it would be uneconomical to flout it—a must which says, for example, that it is easier to get children born and bred if we stylize the behavior
of the sexes very differently, teaching them to walk and dress and act in contrasting ways and to specialize in different kinds of work?15
We must also ask: What are the potentialities of sex differences?…If little boys have to meet and assimilate the early shock of knowing that they can never create a baby with the sureness and incontrovertibility that is a woman’s birthright, how does this make them more creatively ambitious, as well as more dependent upon achievement? If little girls have a rhythm of growth which means that their own sex appears to them as initially less sure than their brothers, and so gives them a little false flick towards compensatory achievement that almost always dies down before the certainty of maternity, this probably does mean a limitation on their sense of ambition? But what positive potentialities are there also?16
In these passages from Male and Female, a book which became the cornerstone of the feminine mystique, Margaret Mead betrays her Freudian orientation, even though she cautiously prefaces each statement of apparent scientific fact with the small word “if.” But it is a very significant “if.” For when sexual differences become the basis of your approach to culture and personality, and when you assume that sexuality is the driving force of human personality (an assumption that you took from Freud), and when, moreover, as an anthropologist, you know that there are no true-for-every-culture sexual differences except those involved in the act of procreation, you will inevitably give that one biological difference, the difference in reproductive role, increasing importance in the determination of woman’s personality.