Toys and Fictions

...I would wish you no better vocation...

...At Smith Adlai Stevenson told seniors in 1955 that a woman's job was to help her husband find purpose in his work...

...and later: "You do believe, then, that women should not be mothers...

...De Beauvoir: "No, but since you're talking about choice a girl should not be conditioned to want to be a mother...

...those who stayed learned "life adjustment" and "modern marriage...

...History, alas, doesn't write books...

...It is from this viewpoint that she addresses the feminist movement's current crisis...

...In 1962 Margaret Mead wondered why women "had gone back to the cave...

...Komarovsky found a striking parallel between the sexes: "The overwhelming majority attributed strains in relationships with women to personal inadequacies, thus echoing the women in the '50s, when only a minority recognized the social root of their frustrations...

...It is time to begin work, she says, on "Stage II of the Sex-Role revolution," the restructuring of institutions to widen the choices of men as well as women...

...She has turned to this project because of the paucity of studies on the position of men, in contrast to the flood of publications on women...

...Her eloquent argument was occasionally marred, though, by terms like "the sexual sell," and "the functional freeze," plus other journalistic mannerisms...

...was one of the few nations in the world where more girls married at ages 15-19 than any other...

...That is the question Friedan asked long ago, and in calling for "wider institutional changes more vivid models of egalitarian gender relationships," Komarovsky is saying as well that the stress and disorganization she has found come most of all from the persistence of the old definitions...

...Moreover, the device of linking new introductions with old articles, speeches and documents creates an imbalance between the public and the private (similar to the one that she demonstrates exists within herself and, indeed, the whole movement...

...Attacked by some as a middle-class meliorist, by others as a dangerous radical, she considers herself a "revolutionary pragmatist" and embodies the contradictions in this combination of the visionary and the practical...

...Even if a parent correctly considers certain attributes of the feminine role worthless," Komarovsky wrote in 1953, "he creates risks for the girl in forcing her to stray too far from the accepted mores of her time...

...Friedan's efforts to record chaotic events are frequently confusing, and in trying to avoid sensationalism she sometimes clumsily falls into it...

...Friedan brought to The Feminine Mystique the force of her considerable analytical intelligence and the authenticity of her personal experience as a housewife and mother...

...There is much you can do in your humble role of housewife," he said...

...Still, the reader willing to put up with the awkward format comes to know a complex woman engaged in an historic and heroic enterprise...

...In a sober analysis of the vote last October to take the National Organization for Women " 'out of the mainstream and into the revolution,'" and of the setbacks for the Equal Rights Amendment, she calls on women to face their deep differences in ideology and tactics before it is too late...

...In the '50's two out of three women students dropped out of college...

...The book is an investigation of "male role strains" in 62 seniors at an "urban Ivy League college" in 1969-70...

...Max Lerner wrote that when Walt Whitman advised women " 'to give up toys and fictions and launch forth, as men do, amid real, independent stormy life,' he was thinking . about the wrong kind of equalitarianism...

...The only alternative the students could see to traditional roles was "simple reversal": if the husband is not dominant, the wife must be...

...The number of American women with three or more children doubled in this period, and the U.S...

...Vassar is coeducational now, and most of McCarthy's talk was not concerned with women...

...Underlying these figures, Komarovsky finds one basic problem: "Ideological support for the belief in sharp sex-role differentiation in marriage has weakened, but the belief itself has not been relinquished.' The men did not see that their "advocacy of equality in the public sphere was undermined by continued adherence to sex-role segregation within the family...

...We hear odd echoes of the talk of the Life Force in Man and Superman when Friedan proposes a minimum-wage value on housework and de Beauvoir replies, "No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children...

...But far from justifying female dependence (except when it is troubling to men), the author makes no secret of her sympathy with feminism...

...A Acknowledging in her early book the "provocative" studies of Mirra Komarovsky, Friedan nevertheless criticized her for counseling adjustment to traditional womanly roles...

...Were the conflicts honest ideological differences or, as the author asks, "something more sinister...

...Friedan: "There is such a tradition of individual freedom in my country that I would never say a woman must put her child in a day-care center...

...For Friedan, "this brilliant sociologist," who did not herself believe in the cultural definition of femininity, was "virtually endorsing the continued infantilizing of American women.' Friedan also observed wryly that "as a nation we only noticed that something was wrong with women when we saw its effects on our sons...

...A taped dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir gives us a dramatic confrontation of mainstream and revolution personified...

...Not the individual woman, she believed, but the climate of opinion was responsible for the "retreat into fecundity"—a retreat, Friedan noted, that Mead herself had encouraged with warnings against enlisting the gifts of females "if bringing them into fields defined as male frightens the men and unsexes the women...

...But 1 was struck by that small aside because I have been rereading Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) as background for her new book, It Changed My Life (Random House, 388 pp., $10.00) and questions of free choice in the '50s are on my mind...

...for men, Komarovsky says, "the very reforms which might alleviate strains entail yielding some power and few possessors of power can be expected to yield it easily...

...The reader longs for a trained reporter to clarify some of the political accounts that are included in the work: What actually happened at the Women's Political Caucus in 1972...

...Women should not have that choice precisely because if there is such a choice too many women will make that one...

...Now, in Dilemmas of Masculinity, Komarovsky studies those sons...

...The author says her new book has been written by history—she didn't have time for the task...

...Yet, the author asks, "are such antithetical qualities as courage and warmth achievement and compassion [the old Talcott Parsons instrumental (male)/expressive (female) traits] to be neatly allocated to each sex...

...Such awareness, Friedan has shown, meant the loss of a woman's sense of powerlessness...

...Friedan is scarred and disillusioned by the new feminine mystique of female supremacy and separatism, astonished and dismayed by the forces arrayed against what she sees as a great human rights program...

...Every country experienced a return to marriage and family—an understandable trend after the loneliness of World War II—but only in the United States was there a second baby boom...

...It Changed My Life is no less authentic, but in a sense it is not journalistic enough...

...De Beauvoir puts the radical case so chillingly and Friedan returns to the cause of individual freedom so doggedly that the scene takes on a Shavian quality...

...Friedan: "How would you suggest that we perpetuate the human race...

...De Beauvoir: "There are enough people on earth...

...Writers & Writing TOYS AND FICTIONS BY RUTH MATHEWSON In her commencement speech at Vassar this June Mary McCarthy—whose literary stock in trade has often been the comedy of women's hospitality to received ideas—recalled that during the period of the feminine mystique (1945-1960) alumnae often complained that college had given them "too high expectations...

...Friedan's first book provided an extraordinary perspective on the 15 years when American society reversed the progress women had made between the wars and institutionalized their arrested development...

...On the issue of working wives (keep in mind the pre-recession year of the study, when a second paycheck may not have been seen as a necessity), 24 per cent of the seniors believed women belonged at home, 16 per cent "hedged their approval with qualifications few wives could meet," 7 per cent would change their lives considerably to further a wife's career, and 48 per cent took a "modified liberal" position—approving a job, withdrawal for child-rearing, and eventual return to work...

...Their grievances, she said, were "really against their own lives, which were, after all freely chosen...