In 1963, Betty Friedan had a suprising grasp of many issues we still face today:
You can order the book on Amazon. (Thanks, Kate!)
The Strange, terrifying jumping off point that American women reach-18-21-25-41-has been noticed for many years by sociologists, psychologists, analysts, educators. But I think it has not been understood for what it is. It has been called a "discontinuity" in cultural conditioning, it has been called woman's "role crisis". It has been blamed on the education which made American girls grow up feeling free and equal to boys-playing baseball, riding bicycles, conquering geometry and college boards, going away to college going out in the world to get a job, living alone in an apartment in NY or chicago or san franscisco, testing and discovering their own powers in the world. All this gave girls the feeling they could be and do whatever they wanted to do, with the same freedom as boys, the critic said. It did not prepare them for their role as women. The crisis comes when they are forced to adjust this role. Today;s high rate of emotional distress and breakdown among women in their twenties and thirties is usually attributed to "role crisis".
But I think they have only seen half the truth!
What if the terror a girl faces at twenty one is the terror of freedom to decide her own life, with no one to order which path she will take? What if those who choose the path of "feminine adjustment"-evading this terror by marrying at 18, losing themselves in having babies and the details of housekeeping-are simply refusing to grow up, to face the question of their own identity?
Mine was the first college generation to run head-on into the new mystique of feminine fulfillment. Before then while most women did indeed end up as housewives and mothers, the point of education was to discover the life of the mind, to pursue truth, and to take a place in the world. There was a sense, already dulling when i went to college, that we would be the New Women. Our world would be much larger than home. Forty per cent of my college at Smith had career plans. But I remember how, even then, some of the seniors, suffering the pangs of that bleak fear of the future, envied the few who escaped it by getting married right away.
The ones we envied then are now suffering that terror at 40.
You can order the book on Amazon. (Thanks, Kate!)
