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Love and children and home are good, but they are not the whole world, even if most of the words now written for women pretend they are.
This is the real mystery: why did so many American women, with the ability and education to discover and create, go back home again, to look for “something more” in housework and rearing children?
These girls, it seemed at first, were merely following the typical curve of feminine adjustment. Earlier interested in geology or poetry, they now were interested only in being popular; to get boys to like them, they had concluded, it was better to be like all the other girls.
go to the local hangout after school and sit there for hours talking about clothes and hairdos and the twist, and I’m not that interested, so it’s an effort. But I found out I could make them like me—just do what they do, dress like them, talk like them, not do things that are different. I guess I even started to make myself not different inside.
I used to write poetry. The guidance office says I have this creative ability and I should be at the top of the class and have a great future. But things like that aren’t what you need to be popular. The important thing for a girl is to be popular.
It’s as if I wouldn’t have any personality myself. My mother’s like a rock that’s been smoothed by the waves, like a void. She’s put so much into her family that there’s nothing left, and she resents us because she doesn’t get enough in return. But sometimes it seems like there’s nothing there. My mother doesn’t serve any purpose except cleaning the house.
Maybe education is a liability. Even the brightest boys at home want just a sweet, pretty girl.
world. I never knew a woman, when I was growing up, who used her mind, played her own part in the world, and also loved, and had children.
And there is increasing evidence that woman’s failure to grow to complete identity has hampered rather than enriched her sexual fulfillment, virtually doomed her to be castrative to her husband and sons, and caused neuroses, or problems as yet unnamed as neuroses, equal to those caused by sexual repression.
The problem of identity was new for women then, truly new. The feminists were pioneering on the front edge of woman’s evolution. They had to prove that women were human. They had to shatter, violently if necessary, the decorative Dresden figurine that represented the ideal woman of the last century.
Woman was being left behind. Anatomy was her destiny; she might die giving birth to one baby, or live to be thirty-five, giving birth to twelve, while man controlled his destiny with that part of his anatomy which no other animal had: his mind.
Did women want these freedoms because they wanted to be men? Or did they want them because they also were human?
Most of my fellow-fighters were wives and mothers. And strange things happened to their domestic life. Husbands came home at night with a new eagerness. . . . As for children, their attitude changed rapidly from one of affectionate toleration for poor, darling mother to one of wide-eyed wonder.
The first women in business and the professions were thought to be freaks. Insecure in their new freedom, some perhaps feared to be soft or gentle, love, have children, lest they lose their prized independence, lest they be trapped again as their mothers were. They reinforced the myth.
The whole superstructure of Freudian theory rests on the strict determinism that characterized the scientific thinking of the Victorian era.
With his wife, as with his mother and sisters, his needs, his desires, his wishes, were the sun around which the household revolved.
It was woman’s nature to be ruled by man, and her sickness to envy him.
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.
There is little doubt that Freud found the psychology of women more enigmatic than that of men. He said once to Marie Bonaparte: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is, what does a woman want?”
The motive force of woman’s personality, in Freud’s theory, was her envy of the penis, which causes her to feel as much depreciated in her own eyes “as in the eyes of the boy, and later perhaps of the man,” and leads, in normal femininity, to the wish for the penis of her husband, a wish that is never really fulfilled until she possesses a penis through giving birth to a son.
“The feminine situation is, however, only established when the wish for the penis is replaced by the wish for a child—the child taking the place of the penis.”
She would, of
course, have to learn to keep her envy, her anger, hidden: to play the child, the doll, the toy, for her destiny depended on charming man.
The psychosocial 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. The greater the disordered sexuality in a given group of women, the fewer children do they have. . . . Fate has granted them the boon importuned by Lady Macbeth; they have been
unsexed,
