The Feminine Mystique (53 page)

Who knows what women can 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.

W
hen
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.

Pauli Murray, an eminent black lawyer, came to that meeting, and Dorothy Haener and Caroline Davis from the UAW, and Kay Clarenbach, head of the Governor’s Commission in Wisconsin, and Katherine Conroy of the Communications Workers of America, and Aileen Hernandez, then a member of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. I asked them to come to my hotel room one night. Most didn’t think women needed a movement like the blacks, but everyone was mad at the sabotage of Title VII. The consensus was that the conference could surely take respectable action to insist that the law be enforced.

I went to bed relieved that probably a movement wouldn’t have to be organized. At six the next morning, I got a call from one of the top token women in the Johnson administration, urging me not to rock the boat. At eight the phone rang again; this time it was one of the reluctant sisters of the night before, angry now, really angry. “We’ve been told that this conference doesn’t have the power to take any action at all, or even the right to offer a resolution. So we’ve got a table for us all to eat together at lunch, and we’ll start the organization.” At the luncheon we each chipped in a dollar. I wrote the word “NOW” on a paper napkin; our group should be called the National Organization
for
Women, I said, “because men should be part of it.” Then I wrote down the first sentence of the NOW statement of purpose, committing ourselves to “take
action
to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof, in truly equal partnership with men.”

The changes necessary to bring about that equality were, and still are, very revolutionary indeed. They involve a sex-role revolution for men and women which will restructure all our institutions: child rearing, education, marriage, the family, the architecture of the home, the practice of medicine, work, politics, the economy, religion, psychological theory, human sexuality, morality, and the very evolution of the race.

I now see the women’s movement for equality as simply the necessary first stage of a much larger sex-role revolution. I never did see it in terms of class or race: women, as an oppressed class, fighting to overthrow or take power away from men as a class, the oppressors. I knew the movement had to include men as equal members, though women would have to take the lead in the first stage.

There is only one way for women to reach full human potential—by participating in the mainstream of society, by exercising their own voice in all the decisions shaping that society. For women to have full identity and freedom, they must have economic independence. Breaking through the barriers that had kept them from the jobs and professions rewarded by society was the first step, but it wasn’t sufficient. It would be necessary to change the rules of the game to restructure professions, marriage, the family, the home. The manner in which offices and hospitals are structured, along the rigid, separate, unequal, unbridgeable lines of secretary/executive, nurse/doctor, embodies and perpetuates the feminine mystique. But the economic part would never be complete unless a dollar value was somehow put on the work done by women in the home, at least in terms of social security, pensions, retirement pay. And housework and child rearing would have to be more equally shared by husband, wife, and society.

Equality and human dignity are not possible for women if they are not able to earn. When the young radical kids came into the movement, they said it was “boring” or “reformist” or “capitalist co-option” to place so much emphasis on jobs and education. But very few women can afford to ignore the elementary economic facts of life. Only economic independence can free a woman to marry for love, not for status or financial support, or to leave a loveless, intolerable, humiliating marriage, or to eat, dress, rest, and move if she plans not to marry. But the importance of work for women goes beyond economics. How else can women participate in the action and decisions of an advanced industrial society unless they have the training and opportunity and skills that come from participating in it?

Women also had to confront their sexual nature, not deny or ignore it as earlier feminist had done. Society had to be restructured so that women, who happen to be the people who give birth, could make a human, responsible choice whether or not—and when—to have children, and not be barred thereby from participating in society in their own right. This meant the right to birth control and safe abortion; the right to maternity leave and child-care centers if women did not want to retreat completely from adult society during the childbearing years; and the equivalent of a GI bill for retraining if women chose to stay home with the children. For it seemed to me that most women would still choose to have children, though not so many if child rearing was no longer their only road to status and economic support—a vicarious participation in life.