The Feminine Mystique (25 page)

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 responsible 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.

Other clues to the real problem of the mother-child relationship in America have been seen by social scientists without ever penetrating the mystique. A sociologist named Arnold Green almost by accident discovered another dimension to the relationship between nurturing mother love, or its lack, and neurosis.

It seems that in the Massachusetts industrial town where Green grew up an entire generation was raised under psychological conditions which should have been traumatic: conditions of irrational, vengeful, even brutal parental authority, and a complete lack of “love” between parent and child. The parents, Polish immigrants, tried to enforce rigid old-world rules which their American children did not respect. The children's ridicule, anger, contempt made the bewildered parents resort to a “vengeful, personal, irrational authority which no longer finds support in the future hopes and ambitions of the children.”

In exasperation and fear of losing all control over their Americanized youngsters, parents apply the fist and whip rather indiscriminately. The sound of blows, screams, howls, vexations, wails of torment and hatred are so commonplace along the rows of dilapidated millhouses that the passersby pay them scant attention.
¹³

Surely, here were the seeds of future neuroses, as all good post-Freudian parents in America understand them. But to Green's amazement, when he went back and checked as a sociologist on the neuroses which according to the book must surely be flourishing, he found no known case of Army rejection because of psychoneurosis in the local Polish community, and in the overt behavior of an entire generation in the village “no expression of anxiety, guilty feelings, rigidity of response, repressed hostility—the various symptoms described as characteristic of the basic neurotic character.” Green wondered. Why didn't those children become neurotic, why weren't they destroyed by that brutal, irrational parental authority?

They had none of that constant and watchful nurturing love that is urged on middle-class mothers by the child psychologizers; their mothers, like their fathers, worked all day in the factory; they had been left in the care of older sisters or brothers, had run free in fields and woods, had avoided their parents wherever possible. In these families, stress was placed upon work, rather than personal sentiment: “respect, not love is the tie that binds.” Demonstrations of affection were not altogether lacking, Green said, “but they had little in common with the definitions of parent-child love found in the middle-class women's magazines.”

It occurred to the sociologist that perhaps the very absence of this omnipresent nurturing mother love might explain why these children did not suffer the neurotic symptoms so commonly found in the sons of middle-class parents. The Polish parents' authority, however brutal and irrational, was “external to the core of the self,” as Green put it. The Polish parents did not have the technique or opportunity to “absorb the personality of the child.” Perhaps, Green suggested, “lack of love” and “irrational authority” do not in themselves cause neurosis, but only within a certain context of “personality absorption”—the physical and emotional blanketing of the child which brings about that slavish dependence upon the parents found among children of the native white American urban college-educated middle class.

Is “lack of love” the cause of neurosis, or the middle-class parental nurturing which “absorbs” the child's independent self, and creates in him an excessive need for love? Psychoanalysts had always concentrated on the seeds of neuroses; Green wanted to “find out what there is to being a modern middle-class parent that fertilizes the soil of the child's neurosis, however the individual seed is planted.”

As usual, the arrow pointed unerringly to the mother. But Green was not concerned with helping the modern American mother adjust to her role; on the contrary, he found that she lacked any real “role” as a woman in modern society.

She enters marriage and perhaps bears a child with no definite role and series of functions, as formerly. . . . She feels inferior to man because comparatively she has been and is more restricted. The extent of the actual emancipation of women has been commonly exaggerated. . . .

Through a “good” marriage the middle-class girl attains far more status than is possible through a career of her own. But the period of phantom dalliance with a career, or an embarkation upon one, leave her ill-fitted for the drudgery of housecleaning, diapers, and the preparation of meals. . . . The mother has little to do, in or out of the home; she is her single child's sole companion. Modern “scientific child care” enforces a constant supervision and diffused worrying over the child's health, eating spinach, and ego development; this is complicated by the fact that much energy is spent forcing early walking, toilet-training, talking, because in an intensively competitive milieu middle-class parents from the day of birth are constantly comparing their own child's development with that of the neighbors' children.

Perhaps, Green speculates, middle-class mothers

. . . have made “love” of supreme importance in their relation to the child, theirs for him and his for them, partly because of the love-complex of our time, which is particularly ramified within the middle class, and partly as a compensation for the many sacrifices they have made for the child. The child's need for love is experienced precisely because he has been conditioned to need it . . . conditioned to a slavish emotional dependence. . . . Not the need for parental love, but the constant threat of its withdrawal after the child has been conditioned to the need, lies at the root of the most characteristic modern neuroses; Mamma won't like you if you don't eat your spinach, or stop dribbling your milk, or get down from that davenport. To the extent that a child's personality has been absorbed, he will be thrown into a panic by this sort of treatment. . . . In such a child, a disapproving glance may produce more terror—than a twenty-minute lashing in little Stanislaus Wojcik.