Here is the “mom” whom Dr. Strecker, as consultant to the Surgeon General of the Army and Navy, found guilty in the case histories of the vast majority of the 1,825,000 men rejected for military service because of psychiatric disorders, the 600,000 discharged from the Army for neuropsychiatric reasons, and the 500,000 more who tried to evade the draft—almost 3,000,000 men, out of 15,000,000 in the service, who retreated into psychoneurosis, often only a few days after induction, because they lacked maturity, “the ability to face life, live with others, think for themselves and stand on their own two feet.”
A mom is a woman whose maternal behavior is motivated by the seeking of emotional recompense for the buffets which life has dealt her own ego. In her relationship with her children, every deed and almost every breath are designed unconsciously but exclusively to absorb her children emotionally and to bind them to her securely. In order to achieve this purpose, she must stamp a pattern of immature behavior on her children…. The mothers of men and women capable of facing life maturely are not apt to be the traditional mom type. More likely mom is sweet, doting, self-sacrificing…. takes no end of trouble and spares herself no pains in selecting clothes for her grown-up children. She supervises the curl of their hair, the selection of their friends and companions, their sports, and their social attitudes and opinions. By and large she does all their thinking for them…. [This domination] is sometimes hard and arbitrary, more often soft, persuasive and somewhat devious…. Most frequent is the method of indirection in which in some way the child is made to feel that mom’s hurt and trying ever so hard to conceal that hurt. The soft method is infinitely more successful in blocking manifestations of youthful thought and action….
The “self-sacrificing” mom when hard-pressed may admit hesitatingly that perhaps she does look “played out” and is actually a bit tired, but she chirps brightly “What of it?”…The implication is that she does not care how she looks or feels, for in her heart there is the unselfish joy of service. From dawn until late at night she finds her happiness in doing for her children. The house belongs to them. It must be “just so” the meals on the minute, hot and tempting. Food is available at all hours…. No buttons missing from garments in this orderly house. Everything is in its proper place. Mom knows where it is. Uncomplainingly, gladly, she puts things where they belong after the children have strewn them about, here, there, and everywhere.…Anything the children need or want, mom will cheerfully get for them. It is the perfect home…. Failing to find a comparable peaceful haven in the outside world, it is quite likely that one or more of the brood will remain in or return to the happy home, forever enwombed.4
The “mom” may also be “the pretty addlepate” with her cult of beauty, clothing, cosmetics, perfumes, hairdos, diet and exercise, or “the pseudo-intellectual who is forever taking courses and attending lectures, not seriously studying one subject and informing herself thoroughly about it, but one month mental hygiene, the next economics, Greek architecture, nursery schools.” These were the “moms” of the sons who could not be men at the front or at home, in bed or out, because they really wanted to be babies. All these moms had one thing in common:
…the emotional satisfaction, almost repletion, she derives from keeping her children paddling about in a kind of psychological amniotic fluid rather than letting them swim away with the bold and decisive strokes of maturity from the emotional maternal womb…. Being immature herself, she breeds immaturity in her children and, by and large, they are doomed to lives of personal and social insufficiency and unhappiness…5
I quote Dr. Strecker at length because he was, oddly enough, one of the psychiatric authorities most frequently cited in the spate of postwar articles and speeches condemning American women for their lost femininity—and bidding them rush back home again and devote their lives to their children. Actually, the moral of Strecker’s cases was just the opposite; those immature sons had mothers who devoted too much of their lives to their children, mothers who had to keep their children babies or they themselves would have no lives at all, mothers who never themselves reached or were encouraged to reach maturity: “the state or quality of being mature; ripeness, full development…independence of thought and action”—the quality of being fully human. Which is not quite the same as femininity.
Facts are swallowed by a mystique in much the same way, I guess, as the strange phenomenon by which hamburger eaten by a dog becomes dog, and hamburger eaten by a human becomes human. The facts of the GI’s neurosis became, in the 1940’s, “proof” that American women had been seduced from feminine fulfillment by an education geared to career, independence, equality with men, “self-realization at any cost”—even though most of these frustrated women were simply housewives. By some fascinating paradox, the massive evidence of psychological damage done to boys and girls by frustrated mothers who devoted all their days to filling children’s needs was twisted by the feminine mystique to a summons to the new generation of girls to go back home and devote their days to filling children’s needs.
Nothing made that hamburger more palatable than the early Kinsey figures which showed that sexual frustration in women was related to their education. Chewed and rechewed was the horrendous fact that between 50 and 85 per cent of the college women polled had never experienced sexual orgasm, while less than one-fifth of high-school educated women reported the same problem. As Modern Woman: The Lost Sex interpreted these early Kinsey returns:
Among women with a grade school education or less, complete failure to achieve orgasm diminished toward the vanishing point. Dr. Kinsey and his colleagues reported that practically 100% full orgastic reaction had been found among uneducated Negro women…. The psychosexual rule that begins to take form, then, is this: the more educated the woman is, the greater chance there is of sexual disorder, more or less severe…6
Nearly a decade went by before publication of the full Kinsey report on women, which completely contradicted those earlier findings. How many women realize, even now, that Kinsey’s 5,940 case histories of American women showed that the number of females reaching orgasm in marriage, and the number of females reaching orgasm nearly 100 per cent of the time, was related to education, but the more educated the woman, the greater chance of sexual fulfillment. The woman with only a grade-school education was more likely never to experience orgasm, while the woman who finished college, and who went on to graduate or professional school, was far more likely to achieve full orgasm nearly 100 per cent of the time. In Kinsey’s words:
We found that the number of females reaching orgasm within any five-year period was rather distinctly higher among those with upper educational backgrounds…. In every period of marriage, from the first until at least the fifteenth year, a larger number of the females in the sample who had more limited educational backgrounds had completely failed to respond to orgasm in their marital coitus, and a small number of the better educated females had so completely failed….
These data are not in accord with a preliminary, unpublished calculation which we made some years ago. On the basis of a smaller sample, and on the basis of a less adequate method of calculation, we seemed to find a larger number of the females of the lower educational levels responding to orgasm in the marital coitus. These data now need correction…7
But the mystique nourished by the early incorrect figures was not so easily corrected.
And then there were the frightening figures and case histories of children abandoned and rejected because their mothers worked. How many women realize, even now, that the babies in those publicized cases, who withered away from lack of maternal affection, were not the children of educated, middle-class mothers who left them in others’ care certain hours of the day to practice a profession or write a poem, or fight a political battle—but truly abandoned children: foundlings often deserted at birth by unwed mothers and drunken fathers, children who never had a home or tender loving care. Headlines were made by any study which implied that working mothers were respon
sible for juvenile delinquency, school difficulties or emotional disturbance in their children. Recently a psychologist, Dr. Lois Meek Stolz, of Stanford University, analyzed all the evidence from such studies. She discovered that at the present time, one can say anything—good or bad—about children of employed mothers and support the statement by some research findings. But there is no definitive evidence that children are less happy, healthy, adjusted, because their mothers work.8
The studies that show working women to be happier, better, more mature mothers do not get much publicity. Since juvenile delinquency is increasing, and more women work or “are educated for some kind of intellectual work,” there is surely a direct cause-and-effect relationship, one says. Except that evidence indicates there is not. Several years ago, much publicity was given to a study comparing matched groups of delinquent and non-delinquent boys. It was found, among other things, that there was no more delinquency, or school truancy, when the mothers worked regularly than when they were housewives. But, spectacular headlines warned, significantly more delinquents had mothers who worked irregularly. This finding brought guilt and gloom to the educated mothers who had given up full-fledged careers, but managed to keep on in their fields by working part-time, by free-lancing, or by taking temporary jobs with periods at home in between. “Here for years I’ve been purposely taking temporary jobs and part-time jobs, trying to arrange my working life in the boys’ best interests,” one such mother was quoted by the New York Times, “and now it looks as though I’ve been doing the worst possible thing!”9
Actually, this mother, a woman with professional training who lived in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood, was equating herself with mothers in that study who, it turned out, not only lived in poor socio-economic circumstances, but had in many cases been juvenile delinquents themselves. And they often had husbands who were emotionally disturbed.
The researchers who did that study suggested that the sons of these women had emotional conflicts because the mother was motivated to her sporadic work “not so much to supplement family income as to escape household and maternal responsibilities.” But another specialist, analyzing the same findings, thought the basic cause both of the mother’s sporadic employment and the son’s delinquency was the emotional instability of both parents. Whatever the reason, the situation was in no way comparable to that of most educated women who read themselves into it. In fact, as Dr. Stolz shows, many studies misinterpreted as “proof” that women cannot combine careers and motherhood actually indicate that, where other conditions are equal, the children of mothers who work because they want to are less likely to be disturbed, have problems in school, or to “lack a sense of personal worth” than housewives’ children.
The early studies of children of working mothers were done in an era when few married women worked, at day nurseries which served working mothers who were without husbands due to death, divorce or desertion. These studies were done by social workers and economists in order to press for such reforms as mothers’ pensions. The disturbances and higher death rate in such children were not found in studies done in this recent decade, when of the millions of married women working, only 1 out of 8 was not living with her husband.
In one such recent study, based on 2,000 mothers, the only significant differences were that more housewife-mothers stated “the children make me nervous” than working mothers; and the housewives seemed to have “more children.” A famous study in Chicago which had seemed to show more mothers of delinquents were working outside the home, turned out to show only that more delinquents come from broken homes. Another study of 400 seriously disturbed children (of a school population of 16,000) showed that where no broken home was involved, three times as many of the disturbed children’s mothers were housewives as working mothers.
Other studies showed that children of working mothers were less likely to be either extremely aggressive or extremely inhibited, less likely to do poorly in school, or to “lack a sense of personal worth” than children of housewives, and that mothers who worked were more likely to be “delighted” at becoming pregnant, and less likely to suffer conflict over the “role of mother” than housewives.
There also seemed to be a closer and more positive relationship to children among working mothers who liked their work, than among housewife-mothers or mothers who did not like their work. And a study during the thirties of college-educated mothers, who are more able to choose work they like, showed no adverse effect of their employment on their marital and emotional adjustment, or on number or seriousness of children’s problems. In general, women who work shared only two attributes; they were more likely to have higher education and to live in cities.10
In our own era, however, as droves of educated women have become suburban housewives, who among them did not worry that their child’s bedwetting, thumbsucking, overeating, refusal to eat, withdrawal, lack of friends, inability to be alone, aggressiveness, timidity, slow reading, too much reading, lack of discipline, rigidity, inhibition, exhibitionism, sexual precociousness, or sexual lack of interest was a sign of incipient neurosis. If not actual abnormality or actual delinquency, they must be at least signs of parental failure, portents of future neurosis. Sometimes they were. Parenthood, and especially motherhood, under the Freudian spotlight, had to become a full-time job and career if not a religious cult. One false step could mean disaster. Without careers, without any commitment other than their homes, mothers could devote every moment to their children; their full attention could be given to finding signs of incipient neurosis—and perhaps to producing it.
In every case history, of course, you can always find significant facts about the mother, especially if you are looking for facts, or memories, of those supposedly crucial first five years. In America, after all, the mother is always there; she is supposed to be there. Is the fact that they are always there, and there only as mothers, somehow linked to the neuroses of their children? Many cultures pass on their conflicts to children through the mothers, but in the modern cultures of the civilized world, not many educate their strongest, ablest women to make a career of their own children.
Not long ago Dr. Spock confessed, a bit uneasily, that Russian children, whose mothers usually have some purpose in their lives besides motherhood—they work in medicine, science, education, industry, government, art—seemed somehow more stable, adjusted, mature, than American children, whose full-time mothers do nothing but worry about them. Could it be that Russian women are somehow better mothers because they have a serious purpose in their own lives? At least, said the good Dr. Spock, these mothers are more sure of themselves as mothers. They are not, like American mothers, dependent on the latest word from the experts, the newest child-care fad.11 It is clearly a terrible burden on Dr. Spock to have 13,500,000 mothers so unsure of themselves that they bring up their children literally according to his book—and call piteously to him for help when the book does not work.
No headlines marked the growing concern of psychiatrists with the problem of “dependence” in American children and grownup children. The psychiatrist David Levy, in a very famous study of “maternal overprotection,” studied in exhaustive detail twenty mothers who had damaged their children to a pathological extent by “maternal infantilization, indulgence and overprotection.”12 A typical case was a twelve-year-old boy who had “infantile temper tantrums in his eleventh year when his mother refused to butter his bread for him. He still demanded her help in dressing…. He summed up his requirements in life very neatly by saying that his mother would butter his bread for him until he married, after which his wife would do so…”
All these mothers—according to physiological indexes such as menstrual flow, breast milk, and early indications of a “maternal type of behavior”—were unusually strong in their feminine or maternal instinctual base, if it can be described that way. All but two of the twenty, as Dr. Levy himself described it, were responsible, stable and aggressive: “the active or aggressive feature of the respo
nsible behavior was regarded as a distinctly maternal type of behavior; it characterized the lives of 18 of the 20 overprotecting mothers since childhood.” In none was there any tinge of unconscious rejection of the child or of motherhood.
What made these twenty strongly maternal women (evidently strength, even aggression, is not masculine when a psychiatrist considers it part of the maternal instinct) produce such pathologically infantile sons? For one thing, the “child was utilized as a means of satisfying an abnormal craving for love.” These mothers freshened up, put lipstick on when the son was due home from school, as a wife for a husband or a girl for her date, because they had no other life besides the child. Most, Levy said, had thwarted career ambitions. The “maternal overprotection” was actually caused by these mothers’ strength, by their basic feminine energy—responsible, stable, active and aggressive—producing pathology in the child when the mother was blocked from “other channels of expression.”
Most of these mothers also had dominating mothers and submissive fathers of their own, and their husbands had also been obedient sons of dominating mothers; in Freudian terms, the castrativeness all around was rather extreme. The sons and mothers were given intensive psychoanalytical therapy for years, which, it was hoped, would break the pathological cycle. But when, some years after the original study, research workers checked on these women and the children they had pathologically overprotected, the results were not quite what was expected. In most cases psychotherapy had not been effective. Yet some of the children, miraculously, did not become pathological adults; not because of therapy, but because by circumstance the mother had acquired an interest or activity in her own life and had simply stopped living the child’s life for him. In a few other cases, the child survived because, through his own ability, he had staked out an area of independence of which his mother was not a part.