Said the manager of Albuquerque’s Bowl-a-Drome: “Where else can a woman compete after she gets married? They need competition just like men do…. It sure beats going home to do the dishes!”12
It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not. But it is very much to the point to say that if an able American woman does not use her human energy and ability in some meaningful pursuit (which necessarily means competition, for there is competition in every serious pursuit of our society), she will fritter away her energy in neurotic symptoms, or unproductive exercise, or destructive “love.”
It also is time to stop giving lip service to the idea that there are no battles left to be fought for women in America, that women’s rights have already been won. It is ridiculous to tell girls to keep quiet when they enter a new field, or an old one, so the men will not notice they are there. In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination—tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.
She must learn to compete then, not as a woman, but as a human being. Not until a great many women move out of the fringes into the mainstream will society itself provide the arrangements for their new life plan. But every girl who manages to stick it out through law school or medical school who finishes her M.A. or Ph.D. and goes on to use it, helps others move on. Every woman who fights the remaining barriers to full equality which are masked by the feminine mystique makes it easier for the next woman. The very existence of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, under Eleanor Roosevelt’s leadership, creates a climate where it is possible to recognize and do something about discrimination against women, in terms not only of pay but of the subtle barriers to opportunity. Even in politics, women must make their contribution not as “housewives” but as citizens. It is, perhaps, a step in the right direction when a woman protests nuclear testing under the banner of “Women Strike for Peace.” But why does the professional illustrator who heads the movement say she is “just a housewife,” and her followers insist that once the testing stops, they will stay happily at home with their children? Even in the city strongholds of the big political party machines, women can—and are beginning to—change the insidious unwritten rules which let them do the political housework while the men make the decisions.13
When enough women make life plans geared to their real abilities, and speak out for maternity leaves or even maternity sabbaticals, professionally run nurseries, and the other changes in the rules that may be necessary, they will not have to sacrifice the right to honorable competition and contribution anymore than they will have to sacrifice marriage and motherhood. It is wrong to keep spelling out unnecessary choices that make women unconsciously resist either commitment or motherhood14—and that hold back recognition of the needed social changes. It is not a question of women having their cake and eating it, too. A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man’s advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all. But with the vision to make a new life plan of her own, she can fulfill a commitment to profession and politics, and to marriage and motherhood with equal seriousness.
Women who have done this, in spite of the dire warnings of the feminine mystique, are in a sense “mutations,” the image of what the American woman can be. When they did not or could not work full time for a living, they spent part-time hours on work which truly interested them. Because time was of the essence, they often skipped the time-wasting, self-serving details of both housewifery and professional busywork.
Whether they knew it or not, they were following a life plan. They had their babies before or after internship, between fellowships. If good full-time help was not available in the children’s early years, they gave up their jobs and took a part-time post that may not have paid handsomely, but kept them moving ahead in their profession. The teachers innovated in PTA, and substituted; the doctors took clinical or research jobs close to home; the editors and writers started free-lancing. Even if the money they made was not needed for groceries or household help (and usually it was), they earned tangible proof of their ability to contribute. They did not consider themselves “lucky” to be housewives; they competed in society. They knew that marriage and motherhood are an essential part of life, but not the whole of it.
These “mutations” suffered—and surmounted—the “cultural discontinuity in role conditioning,” the “role crisis” and the identity crisis. They had problems, of course, tough ones—juggling their pregnancies, finding nurses and housekeepers, having to give up good assignments when their husbands were transferred. They also had to take a lot of hostility from other women—and many had to live with the active resentment of their husbands. And, because of the mystique, many suffered unnecessary pains of guilt. It took, and still takes, extraordinary strength of purpose for women to pursue their own life plans when society does not expect it of them. However, unlike the trapped housewives whose problems multiply with the years, these women solved their problems and moved on. They resisted the mass persuasions and manipulations, and did not give up their own, often painful, values for the comforts of conformity. They did not retreat into privatism, but met the challenges of the real world. And they know quite surely now who they are.
They were doing, perhaps without seeing it clearly, what every man and woman must do now to keep up with the increasingly explosive pace of history, and find or keep individual identity in our mass society. The identity crisis in men and women cannot be solved by one generation for the next; in our rapidly changing society, it must be faced continually, solved only to be faced again in the span of a single lifetime. A life plan must be open to change, as new possibilities open, in society and in oneself. No woman in America today who starts her search for identity can be sure where it will take her. No woman starts that search today without struggle, conflict, and taking her courage in her hands. But the women I met, who were moving on that unknown road, did not regret the pains, the efforts, the risks.
In the light of woman’s long battle for emancipation, the recent sexual counterrevolution in America has been perhaps a final crisis, a strange breath-holding interval before the larva breaks out of the shell into maturity—a moratorium during which many millions of women put themselves on ice and stopped growing. They say that one day science will be able to make the human body live longer by freezing its growth. American women lately have been living much longer than men—walking through their leftover lives like living dead women. Perhaps men may live longer in America when women carry more of the burden of the battle with the world, instead of being a burden themselves. I think their wasted energy will continue to be destructive to their husbands, to their children, and to themselves until it is used in their own battle with the world. But when women as well as men emerge from biological living to realize their human selves, those leftover halves of life may become their years of greatest fulfillment.15
Then the split in the image will be healed, and daughters will not face that jumping-off point at twenty-one or forty-one. When their mothers’ fulfillment makes girls sure they want to be women, they will not have to “beat themselves down” to be feminine; they can stretch and stretch until their own efforts will tell them who they are. They will not need the regard of boy or man to feel alive. And when women do not need to live through their husbands and children, men will not fear the love and strength of women, nor need another’s weakness to prove their own masculinity. They can finally see each other as they are. And this may be the next step in human evolution.
Who knows what women c
an be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women’s intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love? Who knows of the possibilities of love when men and women share not only children, home, and garden, not only the fulfillment of their biological roles, but the responsibilities and passions of the work that creates the human future and the full human knowledge of who they are? It has barely begun, the search of women for themselves. But the time is at hand when the voices of the feminine mystique can no longer drown out the inner voice that is driving women on to become complete.
Epilogue
When The Feminine Mystique was at the printer’s, and my last child was in school all day, I decided I would go back to school myself and get my Ph.D. Armed with my publisher’s announcement, a copy of my summa cum laude undergraduate degree and twenty-years-back graduate record, and the New World Foundation report of the educational project I had dreamed up and run in Rockland County, I went to see the head of the social psychology department at Columbia. He was very tolerant and kind, but surely, at forty-two, after all those undisciplined years as a housewife, I must understand that I wouldn’t be able to meet the rigors of full-time graduate study for a Ph.D. and the mastery of statistics that was required. “But I used statistics throughout the book,” I pointed out. He looked blank. “Well, my dear,” he said, “what do you want to bother your head getting a Ph.D. for, anyhow?”
I began to get letters from other women who now saw through the feminine mystique, who wanted to stop doing their children’s homework and start doing their own; they were also being told they really weren’t capable of doing anything else now but making homemade strawberry jam or helping their children do fourth-grade arithmetic. It wasn’t enough just to take yourself seriously as a person. Society had to change, somehow, for women to make it as people. It wasn’t possible to live any longer as “just a housewife.” But what other way was there to live?
I remember getting stuck at that point, even when I was writing The Feminine Mystique. I had to write a last chapter, giving a solution to “the problem that has no name,” suggesting new patterns, a way out of the conflicts, whereby women could use their abilities fully in society and find their own existential human identity, sharing its action, decisions, and challenges without at the same time renouncing home, children, love, their own sexuality. My mind went blank. You do have to say “no” to the old way before you can begin to find the new “yes” you need. Giving a name to the problem that had no name was the necessary first step. But it wasn’t enough.
Personally, I couldn’t operate as a suburban housewife any longer, even if I had wanted to. For one thing, I became a leper in my own suburb. As long as I only wrote occasional articles most people never read, the fact that I wrote during the hours when the children were in school was no more a stigma than, for instance, solitary morning drinking. But now that I was acting like a real writer and even being interviewed on television, the sin was too public, it could not be condoned. Women in other suburbs were writing me letters as if I were Joan of Arc, but I practically had to flee my own crabgrass-overgrown yard to keep from being burned at the stake. Although we had been fairly popular, my husband and I were suddenly no longer invited to our neighbors’ dinner parties. My kids were kicked out of the car pool for art and dancing classes. The other mothers had a fit when I now called a cab when it was my turn, instead of driving the children myself. We had to move back to the city, where the kids could do their own thing without my chauffeuring and where I could be with them at home during some of the hours I now spent commuting. I couldn’t stand being a freak alone in the suburbs any longer.
At first, that strange hostility my book—and later the movement—seemed to elicit from some women amazed and puzzled me. Even in the beginning, there wasn’t the hostility I had expected from men. Many men bought The Feminine Mystique for their wives and urged them to go back to school or to work. I realized soon enough that there were probably millions of women who had felt as I had, like a freak, absolutely alone, as a suburban housewife. But if you were afraid to face your real feelings about the husband and children you were presumably living for, then someone like me opening up the can of worms was a menace.
I didn’t blame women for being scared. I was pretty scared myself. It isn’t really possible to make a new pattern of life all by yourself. I’ve always dreaded being alone more than anything else. The anger I had not dared to face in myself during all the years I tried to play the helpless little housewife with my husband—and feeling more helpless the longer I played it—was beginning to erupt now, more and more violently. For fear of being alone, I almost lost my own self-respect trying to hold on to a marriage that was based no longer on love but on dependent hate. It was easier for me to start the women’s movement which was needed to change society than to change my own personal life.
It seemed time to start writing that second book, but I couldn’t find any new patterns in society beyond the feminine mystique. I could find a few individual women, knocking themselves out to meet Good Housekeeping standards, trying to raise Spockian children while working at a full-time job and feeling guilty about it. And conferences were being held about the availability of continuing education for women, because all those aging full-time housewife-mothers, whose babies were now in college, were beginning to be trouble—drinking, taking too many pills, committing suicide. Whole learned journals were devoted to the discussion of “women and their options”—the “stages” of women’s lives. Women, we were told, could go to school, work a bit, get married, stay with the children fifteen to twenty years, and then go back to school and work—no problem; no need for role conflicts.
The women who were advancing this theory were among the exceptional few to reach top jobs because they somehow had not dropped out for fifteen or twenty years. And these same women were advising the women flocking back to their continuing-education programs that they couldn’t really expect to get real jobs or professional training after fifteen years at home; ceramics, or professional volunteer work—that was the realistic adjustment.
Talk, that’s all it was, talk. In 1965, the long awaited report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women detailed the discriminatory wages women were earning (half the average for men), and the declining ratio of women in professional and executive jobs. The Commission recommended that women be counseled to use their abilities in society, and suggested that child-care centers and other services be provided to enable women to combine motherhood and work. But Margaret Mead, in her introduction to the report, said, in effect, If women are all going to want to make big decisions and discoveries, who is going to stay home and bandage the child’s knee or listen to the husband’s troubles? (No matter that, with her husbands’ help and even before her child’s knees were in school all day, she herself was making big anthropological discoveries and decisions. Perhaps women who have made it as “exceptional” women don’t really identify with other women. For them, there are three classes of people: men, other women, and themselves; their very status as exceptional women depends on keeping other women quiet, and not rocking the boat.)
The President’s Commission report was duly buried in bureaucratic file drawers. That summer of 1965, I got a third of the way through the book I wanted to write about going beyond the feminine mystique; by then I knew that there weren’t any new patterns, only new problems that women weren’t going to be able to solve unless society changed. And all the talk, and the reports, and the Commission, and the continuing-education programs were only examples of tokenism—maybe even an attempt to block a real movement on the part of women themselves to change society.
It seemed to me that something more than talk had to happen. “The only thing that’s changed so far is our own consciousness,” I wrote, closing that second book, which I never finished, because the next sentence read, “What we need is a political movement, a social movement like that of the blacks.” I had to take action. On
the plane to Washington, pondering what to do, I saw a student reading a book, The First Step to Revolution Is Consciousness, and it was like an omen.
I went to Washington because a law had been passed, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning sex discrimination in employment along with race discrimination. The sex discrimination part had been tacked on as a joke and a delaying maneuver by a Southern congressman, Howard Smith of Virginia. At the first press conferences after the law went into effect, the administrator in charge of enforcing it joked about the ban on sex discrimination. “It will give men equal opportunity to be Playboy bunnies,” he said.
In Washington I found a seething underground of women in the government, the press, and the labor unions who felt powerless to stop the sabotage of this law that was supposed to break through the sex discrimination that pervaded every industry and profession, every factory, school, and office. Some of these women felt that I, as a now known writer, could get the public’s ear.
One day, a cool young woman lawyer, who worked for the agency that was not enforcing the law against sex discrimination, carefully closed the door of her office and said to me with tears in her eyes, “I never meant to be so concerned about women. I like men. But I’m getting an ulcer, the way women are being betrayed. We may never have another chance like this law again. Betty, you have to start an NAACP for women. You are the only one free enough to do it.”
I wasn’t an organization woman. I never even belonged to the League of Women Voters. However, there was a meeting of state commissioners on the status of women in Washington in June. I thought that, among the women there from the various states, we would get the nucleus of an organization that could at least call a press conference and raise the alarm among women throughout the country.