Mamma in Search of Herself
RAVITCH, DIANE
Mama in Search of Herself THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE By Betty Friedan Norton. 410 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by DIANE RAVITCH The full-time mother, according to the folklore of popular...
...Implicit in the popular conception of feminity is a bias against both careers and higher education for women: To want a good education and the freedom to make use of it is unfeminine and therefore "unnatural...
...In her broadside against the Freudian-Meadian concept of femininity, Mrs...
...Friedan "hostile," just as few consider Vance Packard angry...
...If she is right, then the desire to curtail women's education is motivated by the shaky male ego, seeking to avert the creation of "castrating" women...
...Like men, women gain identity through meaningful work...
...Friedan's style, which is continually undermining her serious intentions...
...She too is more concerned with publicizing the subject than with the subject itself...
...The Feminine Mystique is an angry and often shrill blast at the ideas of womanhood which have been derived from Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead...
...timid husbands...
...middle-class children who commit crimes for kicks...
...Like Packard, she is a journalist of the social sciences running down a story on a Big Idea...
...The result, Mrs...
...But housework is stultifying routine and full-time devotion to one's children constitutes, in effect, an unreasonable demand by asking the children to provide meaningfulness to a person who, outside of them, has none...
...She accuses the sales-minded mass media, and especially the ladies' magazines, of making a cult of spurious femininity...
...Reviewed by DIANE RAVITCH The full-time mother, according to the folklore of popular psychology, is the ideal mother...
...teenage prostitutes...
...the emotional unhealthiness of suburbia...
...But, ironically, it is most often the "happy housewife" who turns out to be a castrating woman, Mrs...
...Now we have a whole book devoted to criticizing not the housewives themselves, but the ideal of femininity which keeps so many of them from venturing beyond their own front doors...
...Mrs...
...schizophrenic children...
...Yet, for all her deference to authority, Mrs...
...Attempts at serious reflection are always buttressed by authoritative citations, as though the writer doubts whether her ideas can stand alone...
...And this paragon's deepest concerns are her eternal youth, her incessant acquisitions and her strivings for a whiter wash—all of which, translated into dollars, serve to enrich her creators...
...Not surprisingly, excerpts from The Feminine Mystique have appeared recently in both McCall's and the Ladies' Home Journal...
...The basic problem of the American housewife, Mrs...
...A few months ago, for example, the New York Times reported that "role conflict" is suffered more often by full-time housewives than by working mothers, and that the children of working mothers have noticeably fewer "behavior problems" than those of mothers who spend all their time at home...
...Even more disturbing is Mrs...
...And, in the manner of those very women's magazines she is ostensibly attacking, the author's phrase-making is so earnest, so persistent, and yet so coy that the effect is unnerving...
...Friedan's book represents little more than a rehashing and watering-down of many of the French writer's ideas...
...Mrs...
...In this and other respects...
...Mrs...
...and she goes on to spell out her point in a few pithy paragraphs...
...But recently the American housewife has come under attack from several quarters...
...During the past 15 years, according to Betty Friedan, the popularization of these ideas has effected a veritable counter-revolution against female emancipation...
...Friedan's solidly documented analysis of the frustrated American housewife is marred, however, by a pervasive glibness of thought...
...This and similar studies which document the dangers of all-absorbing mother-love comprise the book's most provocative chapter and are the strongest evidence for the author's indictment of the housewife as mother...
...Unfortunately, though, The Feminine Mystique has little of The Second Sex's assurance and incisiveness...
...Though she draws on a wealth of research material, and has done a good deal of her own field work, the book is filled with unidentified quotes—many of them accidentally overheard or reported from an unspecified interview...
...Friedan, on the other hand, requires an entire chapter (entitled "Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available"), studded with quotes and statistics, to demonstrate what is essentially the same point...
...She finds its source in Freud's theory of penis envy which, she maintains, is really a neurosis peculiar to the Victorian Age, with little validity today...
...Friedan particularly attacks the idea that "anatomy is destiny," that is, that woman must limit herself to womanly functions...
...She properly condemns the woman who lives vicariously through her family, projecting her own needs on her children...
...She can name herself only in terms of others: She is her husband's wife or her child's mother...
...Friedan quotes at length from a study of the nearly three million American men who were found unfit to serve in World War II for psychoneurotic reasons...
...Friedan also has a wide variety of contemporary targets...
...A child cannot have too much love," we are told, and a woman can find true fulfillment only in her role as wife and mother...
...It may be that Betty Friedan plays down her debt to Simone de Beauvoir with reason...
...These magazines and day-time TV project an idealized image of the housewife as a model for the good life, she writes...
...Friedan believes, is her lack of a sense of self...
...Friedan conspicuously fails to give sufficient credit to her major source of ideas: Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, published in 1949...
...Many American women are suspicious of the French writer...
...In a majority of cases, the responsibility for their condition (described in part as an inability "to face life, live with others, think for themselves and stand on their own feet") was traced to an old-fashioned, stay-at-home, over-protective mom...
...Comparing the current generation with its predecessor, she finds that women today marry younger, have more children and seek less education...
...Friedan tells us, has become the basic rationale for discouraging women from serious professional commitments...
...For instance, Mlle, de Beauvoir says, "Middle-class women who employ help . . . pay for their leisure with ennui . . . they often multiply and complicate their domestic duties to excess, just to have something to do...
...if the husband and child die or leave, she has no way to certify her existence...
...Yet this psychological anachronism, Mrs...
...To borrow a much overworked phrase, the American housewife undergoes a lifelong identity crisis...
...Femininity, it follows, ought to be the ultimate goal of every female...
...Friedan's major thesis is that the modern housewife is unhappy because the "feminine mystique" requires her to adopt a highly routinized, unvarying life pattern which bears no relation to her own stunted individuality...
...they consider her "hostile" to her own sex...
...the failure of American prisoners-of-war in Korea to attempt escape—in short, the deterioration of the American moral fiber...
...Friedan says, has been an "infantilization" of women...
...But she then blames the housewife for almost every conceivable blemish on the American character: passive children...
...Mile, de Beauvoir made substantially the same point 14 years ago...
...Few are likely to consider Mrs...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 8
