The Feminine Mystique Quotes
"The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States."
"Woman’s political job is to 'inspire in her home a vision of the meaning of life and freedom.'"
"The logic of the feminine mystique redefined the very nature of woman’s problem."
"The only problems now are those that might disturb her adjustment as a housewife."
"In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future."
"The ultimate, in housewife happiness, is finally achieved by the Texas housewife."
"The feminine mystique is so powerful that women grow up no longer knowing that they have the desires and capacities the mystique forbids."
"Why should women accept this picture of a half-life, instead of a share in the whole of human destiny?"
"Women are human beings, not stuffed dolls, not animals."
"The material details of life do not define a woman's world."
"What happens when women try to live according to an image that makes them deny their minds?"
"The feminine mystique, with its emphasis on freedom from a repressive morality to achieve sexual fulfillment, was part of the ideology of women’s emancipation."
"Freudian psychology helped create a new superego that paralyzes educated modern American women."
"The concept 'penis envy' was seized in America in the 1940's as the literal explanation of all that was wrong with American women."
"The feminine mystique derived its power from Freudian thought."
"The new mystique is much more difficult for the modern woman to question than the old prejudices."
"It is a Freudian idea, hardened into apparent fact, that has trapped so many American women today."
"The feminists had only one model, one image, one vision, of a full and free human being: man."
"The name of Lucy Stone today brings to mind a man-eating fury, wearing pants, brandishing an umbrella."
"The irony of that man-eating myth is that the so-called excesses of the feminists arose from their helplessness."
"The ones who fought that battle won more than empty paper rights. They cast off the shadow of contempt and self-contempt that had degraded women for centuries."
"Psychological facts, as Jones said, were 'as real and concrete to him as metals are to a metallurgist.'"
"Determinism has been replaced today by a more complex view of cause and effect."
"The 'oral' and 'anal' stages which Freud described in terms of sexual development are now seen as stages of human growth."
"Freud’s mother was the pretty, docile bride of a man twice her age."
"Freud did not see this attitude as a problem, or cause for any problem, in women."
"Freud’s letters to Martha, his future wife, written during the four years of their engagement (1882–1886) have the fond, patronizing sound of Torvald in A Doll’s House, scolding Nora for her pretenses at being human."
"Women have but little sense of justice, and this is no doubt connected with the preponderance of envy in their mental life."
"Freud was not concerned with changing society, but in helping man, and woman, adjust to it."
"Margaret Mead’s eloquent pages made a great many American women envy the serene femininity of a bare-breasted Samoan."
"No human gift is strong enough to flower fully in a person who is threatened with loss of sex membership."
"The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough."
"Fewer women in recent college graduating classes have gone on to distinguish themselves in a career or profession than those in the classes graduated before World War II, the Great Divide."
"Two out of three girls who entered college were dropping out before they even finished."
"In the 1950’s, those who stayed, even the most able, showed no signs of wanting to be anything more than suburban housewives and mothers."
"A later report elaborated: Vassar students... are further convinced that the wrongs of society will gradually right themselves with little or no direct intervention on the part of women college students."
"Strong commitment to an activity or career other than that of housewife is rare."
"Girls don’t get excited about things like that anymore. We don’t want careers."
"Suddenly you wish you’d read more, talked more, taken hard courses you skipped. So you’d know what you’re interested in."
"The phenomenon does not seem confined to any particular college; one finds it among the girls in any college, or department of a college, which still exposes students to the life of the mind."
"The mothers of men and women capable of facing life maturely are not apt to be the traditional mom type."
"The psychosexual rule that begins to take form, then, is this: the more educated the woman is, the greater chance there is of sexual disorder, more or less severe."
"But the mystique nourished by the early incorrect figures was not so easily corrected."
"How many women realize, even now, that the babies in those publicized cases, who withered away from lack of maternal affection, were not the children of educated, middle-class mothers who left them in others’ care certain hours of the day to practice a profession or write a poem, or fight a political battle—but truly abandoned children."
"The studies that show working women to be happier, better, more mature mothers do not get much publicity."
"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."
"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."
"Parenthood, and especially motherhood, under the Freudian spotlight, had to become a full-time job and career if not a religious cult."
"Should a gifted child grow up to be a housewife?"
"Never underestimate the power of a woman, says another ad. But that power was and is underestimated in America."
"If that gifted girl-child grows up to be a housewife, can even the manipulator make supermarket stamps use all of her human intelligence, her human energy, in the century she may live while that boy goes to the moon?"
"The manipulators and their clients in American business can hardly be accused of creating the feminine mystique. But they are the most powerful of its perpetuators; it is their millions which blanket the land with persuasive images, flattering the American housewife, diverting her guilt and disguising her growing sense of emptiness."
"Sexual love and motherhood had to become all of life, had to use up, to dispose of women’s creative energies."
"Each labor-saving appliance brought a labor-demanding elaboration of housework."
"The modern American housewife spends far more time washing, drying, and ironing than her mother."
"With all their appliances, the suburban and city housewives spend more time on housework than the busy farmer’s wife."
"Women who worked many hours a week outside the home did the housekeeping in half the time."
"The very nature of family responsibility had to expand to take the place of responsibility to society."
"Despite the smaller, easier-to-care-for homes, American housewives were spending almost as many, or even more, hours a day on housekeeping as women thirty years earlier."
"The choices the housewife makes to fill that emptiness trap her further in trivial domestic routine."
"The suburban community as they found it; they were perfectly willing to fill their days with the trivia of housewifery."
"The true emptiness beneath the American housewife’s routine has been revealed in many ways."
"Scores of irate housewives dared him to prove it."
"The sexual hunger of American women has been documented ad nauseam."
"Housework is not an adequate substitute for truly challenging work, important enough to society to be paid for in its coin."
"The glorification of women’s role was a poor substitute for free participation in the world as an individual."
"The home freezer, simply by existing, takes up time: beans, raised in the garden, must be prepared for freezing."
"The physical passivity of the younger generation showed itself in a muscular deterioration, finally alarming the White House."
"A movie called 'I Was a Teenage Frankenstein' may not have seemed funny to parents in Westchester and Connecticut who were visited by the vice squad in 1960 because their kids were taking drugs at parties in each others’ pine-paneled playrooms."
"Behind the senseless vandalism, the riots in Florida at spring vacation, the promiscuity, the rise in teenage venereal disease and illegitimate pregnancies, the alarming dropouts from high school and college, was this new passivity."
"The Korean prisoners, in this sense, were models of a new kind of American, evidently nurtured in ways 'inimical to clarity and growth' at the hands of individuals themselves 'insufficiently characterized' to develop 'the kind of character and mind that conceives itself too clearly to consent to its own betrayal.'"
"Aren’t the chief characteristics of femininity... passivity; a weak ego or sense of self; a weak superego or human conscience; renunciation of active aims, ambitions, interests of one’s own to live through others; incapacity for abstract thought; retreat from activity directed outward to the world, in favor of activity directed inward or phantasy?"
"The 'absorption' of the child’s personality by the middle-class mother... has inevitably increased during these years."
"The greater her own infantilism, and the weaker her core of self, the earlier the girl will seek 'fulfillment' as a wife and mother and the more exclusively will she live through her husband and children."
"The signs of this pathological retreat will be more apparent in boys, since even in childhood boys are expected to commit themselves to tests of reality which the feminine mystique permits the girls to evade in sexual phantasy."
"The housewives who suffer the terror of the problem that has no name are victims of this same deadly 'dailyness.'"
"The housewives who... live according to the dictates of the feminine mystique, ultimately she must 'castrate' the husband and sons who can never give her enough satisfaction to make up for lack of a self."
"Perhaps something about the supposedly 'unfeminine' strength, or self-realization achieved by women educated for professional careers enabled them to enjoy greater sexual fulfillment in their marriages than other women."
"The increase in sexual fulfillment and decrease in frigidity which Kinsey found during the decades after women’s emancipation may not have been felt by the 'average' American housewife as much as by this minority of women who directly experienced emancipation through education and participation in the professions."
"It was hardly an accident that this increase in woman’s sexual fulfillment accompanied her progress to equal participation in the rights, education, work, and decisions of American society."
"Repeated reports, before and after Kinsey, showed college-educated women to have a much lower than average divorce rate."
"The feminine mystique itself—with its acknowledgement of woman as subject and not just object of the sexual act, and its assumption that her active, willing participation was essential to man’s pleasure—could not have come without the emancipation of women to human equality."
"American women are suffering, quite simply, a massive sickness of sex without self."
"The identity crisis of American women began a century ago, as more and more of the work important to the world, more and more of the work that used their human abilities and through which they were able to find self-realization, was taken from them."
"Women, as well as men, can only find their identity in work that uses their full capacities."
"A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide."
"The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way."
"The key to the trap is, of course, education."
"The problem that has no name—which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities—is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease."
"The more they are encouraged to make that new life plan—integrating a serious, lifelong commitment to society with marriage and motherhood—the less conflicts and unnecessary frustrations they will feel as wives and mothers."
"The concept of 'continuing education' is already a reality for men in many fields. Why not for women? Not education for careers instead of motherhood, not education for temporary careers before motherhood, not education to make them 'better wives and mothers,' but an education they will use as full members of society."