The Feminine Mystique (41 page)

But women in America are not encouraged, or expected, to use their full capacities. In the name of femininity, they are encouraged to evade human growth.

Growth has not only rewards and pleasure, but also many intrinsic pains and always will have. Each step forward is a step into the unfamiliar and is thought of as possibly dangerous. It also frequently means giving up something familiar and good and satisfying. It frequently means a parting and a separation with consequent nostalgia, loneliness and mourning. It also often means giving up a simpler and easier and less effortful life in exchange for a more demanding, more difficult life. Growth forward is in spite of these losses and therefore requires courage, strength in the individual, as well as protection, permission and encouragement from the environment, especially for the child.
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What happens if the environment frowns on that courage and strength—sometimes virtually forbids, and seldom actually encourages that growth in the child who is a girl? What happens if human growth is considered antagonistic to femininity, to fulfillment as a woman, to woman's sexuality? The feminine mystique implies a choice between “being a woman” or risking the pains of human growth. Thousands of women, reduced to biological living by their environment, lulled into a false sense of anonymous security in their comfortable concentration camps, have made a wrong choice. The irony of their mistaken choice is this: the mystique holds out “feminine fulfillment” as the prize for being only a wife and mother. But it is no accident that thousands of suburban housewives have not found that prize. The simple truth would seem to be that women will never know sexual fulfillment and the peak experience of human love until they are allowed and encouraged to grow to their full strength as human beings. For according to the new psychological theorists, self-realization, far from preventing the highest sexual fulfillment, is inextricably linked to it. And there is more than theoretical reason to believe that this is as true for women as for men.

In the late thirties, Professor Maslow began to study the relationship between sexuality and what he called “dominance feeling” or “self-esteem” or “ego level” in women—130 women, of college education or of comparable intelligence, between twenty and twenty-eight, most of whom were married, of Protestant middle-class city background.
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He found, contrary to what one might expect from the psychoanalytical theories and the conventional images of femininity, that the more “dominant” the woman, the greater her enjoyment of sexuality—and the greater her ability to “submit” in a psychological sense, to give herself freely in love, to have orgasm. It was not that these women higher in “dominance” were more “highly sexed,” but they were, above all, more completely themselves, more free to be themselves—and this seemed inextricably linked with a greater freedom to give themselves in love. These women were not, in the usual sense, “feminine,” but they enjoyed sexual fulfillment to a much higher degree than the conventionally feminine women in the same study.

I have never seen the implications of this research discussed in popular psychological literature about femininity or women's sexuality. It was, perhaps, not noticed at the time, even by the theorists, as a major landmark. But its findings are thought-provoking for American women today, who lead their lives according to the dictates of the feminine mystique. Remember that this study was done in the late 1930's, before the mystique became all-powerful. For these strong, spirited, educated women, evidently there was no conflict between the driving force to be themselves and to love. Here is the way Professor Maslow contrasted these women with their more “feminine” sisters—in terms of themselves, and in terms of their sexuality:

High dominance feeling involves good self-confidence, self-assurance, high evaluation of the self, feelings of general capability or superiority, and lack of shyness, timidity, self-consciousness or embarrassment. Low dominance feeling involves lack of self-confidence, self-assurance and self-esteem; instead there are extensive feelings of general and specific inferiority, shyness, timidity, fearfulness, self-consciousness. . . . The person who describes herself as completely lacking in what she may call “self-confidence in general” will describe herself as self confident in her home, cooking, sewing or being a mother . . . but almost always underestimates to a greater or lesser degree her specific abilities and endowments; the high dominance person usually gauges her abilities accurately and realistically.
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These high-dominance women were not “feminine” in the conventional sense, partly because they felt free to choose rather than be bound by convention, and partly because they were stronger as individuals than most women.

Such women prefer to be treated “Like a person, not like a woman.” They prefer to be independent, stand on their own two feet, and generally do not care for concessions that imply they are inferior, weak or that they need special attention and cannot take care of themselves. This is not to imply that they cannot behave conventionally. They do when it is necessary or desirable for any reason, but they do not take the ordinary conventions seriously. A common phrase is “I can be nice and sweet and clinging-vine as anyone else, but my tongue is in my cheek.” . . . Rules per se generally mean nothing to these women. It is only when they approve of the rules and can see and approve of the purpose behind them that they will obey them. . . . They are strong, purposeful and do live by rules, but these rules are autonomous and personally arrived at. . . .

Low dominance women are very different. They . . . usually do not dare to break rules, even when they (rarely) disapprove of them. . . . Their morality and ethics are usually entirely conventional. That is, they do what they have been taught to do by their parents, their teachers, or their religion. The dictum of authority is usually not questioned openly, and they are more apt to approve of the status quo in every field of life, religious, economic, educational and political.
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Professor Maslow found that the higher the dominance, or strength of self in a woman, the less she was self-centered and the more her concern was directed outward to other people and to problems of the world. On the other hand, the main preoccupation of the more conventionally feminine low-dominance women was themselves and their own inferiorities. From a psychological point of view, a high-dominance woman was more like a high-dominance man than she was like a low-dominance woman. Thus Professor Maslow suggested that either you have to describe as “masculine” both high-dominance men and women or drop the terms “masculine” and “feminine” altogether because they are so “misleading.”

Our high dominance women feel more akin to men than to women in tastes, attitudes, prejudices, aptitudes, philosophy, and inner personality in general. . . . Many of the qualities that are considered in our culture to be “manly” are seen in them in high degree, e.g., leadership, strength of character, strong social purpose, emancipation from trivialities, lack of fear, shyness, etc. They do not ordinarily care to be housewives or cooks alone, but wish to combine marriage with a career. . . . Their salary may come to no more than the salary of a housekeeper, but they feel other work to be more important than sewing, cooking, etc.
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Above all, the high-dominance woman was more psychologically free—more autonomous. The low-dominance woman was not free to be herself, she was other-directed. The more her self-depreciation, self-distrust, the more likely she was to feel another's opinion more valid than her own, and to wish she were more like someone else. Such women “usually admire and respect others more than they do themselves'; and along with this “tremendous respect for authority,” with idolization and imitation of others, with the complete “voluntary subordination to others” and the great respect for others, went “hatred, and resentment, envy, jealousy, suspicion, distrust.”

Where the high-dominance women were freely angry, the low-dominance women did not “have ‘nerve' enough to say what they think and courage enough to show anger when it is necessary.” Thus, their “feminine” quietness was a concomitant of “shyness, inferiority feelings, and a general feeling that anything they could say would be stupid and would be laughed at.” Such a woman “does not want to be a leader except in her fantasies, for she is afraid of being in the forefront, she is afraid of responsibility, and she feels that she would be incompetent.”

And again Professor Maslow found an evident link between strength of self and sexuality, the freedom to be oneself and the freedom to “submit.” He found that the women who were “timid, shy, modest, neat, tactful, quiet, introverted, retiring, more feminine, more conventional,” were not capable of enjoying the kind of sexual fulfillment which was freely enjoyed by women high in dominance and self-esteem.

It would seem as if every sexual impulse or desire that has ever been spoken of may emerge freely and without inhibition in these women. . . . Generally the sexual act is apt to be taken not as a serious rite with fearful aspects, and differing in fundamental quality from all other acts, but as a game, as fun, as a highly pleasurable animal act.
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Moreover, Maslow found that, even in dreams and fantasies, women of above-average dominance enjoyed sexuality, while in low-dominance women the sexual dreams are always “of the romantic sort, or else are anxious, distorted, symbolized and concealed.”

Did the makers of the mystique overlook such strong and sexually joyous women when they defined passivity and renunciation of personal achievement and activity in the world as the price of feminine sexual fulfillment? Perhaps Freud and his followers did not see such women in their clinics when they created that image of passive femininity. Perhaps the strength of self which Maslow found in the cases he studied was a new phenomenon in women.

The mystique kept even the behavioral scientists from exploring the relationship between sex and self in women in the ensuing era. But, quite aside from questions of women, in recent years behavioral scientists have become increasingly uneasy about basing their image of human nature on a study of its diseased or stunted specimens—patients in the clinic. In this context, Professor Maslow later set about to study people, dead and alive, who showed no evidence of neurosis, psychosis, or psychopathic personality; people who, in his view, showed positive evidence of self-realization, or “self-actualization,” which he defined as “the full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities. Such people seem to be fulfilling themselves and to be doing the best that they are capable of doing. . . . They are people who have developed or are developing to the full stature of which they are capable.”
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There are many things that emerged from this study which bear directly on the problem of women in America today. For one thing, among the public figures included in his study, Professor Maslow was able to find only two women who had actually fulfilled themselves—Eleanor Roosevelt and Jane Addams. (The men included Lincoln, Jefferson, Einstein, Freud, G. W. Carver, Debs, Schweitzer, Kreisler, Goethe, Thoreau, William James, Spinoza, Whitman, Franklin Roosevelt, Beethoven.) Apart from public and historical figures, he studied at close range a small number of unnamed subjects who met his criteria—all in their 50's and 60's—and he screened 3,000 college students, finding only twenty who seemed to be developing in the direction of self-actualization; here also, there were very few women. As a matter of fact, his findings implied that self-actualization, or the full realization of human potential, was hardly possible at all for women in our society.

Professor Maslow found in his study that self-actualizing people invariably have a commitment, a sense of mission in life that makes them live in a very large human world, a frame of reference beyond privatism and preoccupation with the petty details of daily life.

These individuals customarily have some mission in life, some task to fulfill, some problem outside themselves which enlists much of their energies. . . . In general, these tasks are nonpersonal or unselfish, concerned rather with the good of mankind in general, or of a nation in general. . . . Ordinarily concerned with basic issues and eternal questions, such people live customarily in the widest possible frame of reference. . . . They work within a framework of values that are broad and not petty, universal and not local, and in terms of a century rather than a moment. . . .
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Further, Professor Maslow saw that self-actualizing people, who live in a larger world, somehow thereby never stale in their enjoyment of the day-to-day living, the trivialities which can become unbearably chafing to those for whom they are the only world. They “. . . have the wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may have become to others.”
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He also reported “the very strong impression that the sexual pleasures are found in their most intense and ecstatic perfection in self-actualizing people.” It seemed as if fulfillment of personal capacity in this larger world opened new vistas of sexual ecstasy. And yet sex, or even love, was not the driving purpose in their lives.

In self-actualizing people, the orgasm is simultaneously more important and less important than in average people. It is often a profound and almost mystical experience, and yet the absence of sexuality is more easily tolerated by these people. . . . Loving at a higher need level makes the lower needs and their frustrations and satisfactions less important, less central, more easily neglected. But it also makes them more wholeheartedly enjoyed when gratified. . . . Food is simultaneously enjoyed and yet regarded as relatively unimportant in the total scheme of life. . . . Sex can be wholeheartedly enjoyed, enjoyed far beyond the possibility of the average person, even at the same time that it does not play a central role in the philosophy of life. It is something to be enjoyed, something to be taken for granted, something to build upon, something that is very basically important like water or food, and that can be enjoyed as much as these; but gratification should be taken for granted.
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