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In 1963 Betty Friedan told American women they were childlike weaklings
who should grow up and stand on their own feet like men. They "never
feel that they are really exerting sufficient effort." The American
housewife "feels 'lazy, neglectful, haunted by guilt feelings' because
she doesn't have enough work to do." "At one of the major women's
magazines," she recalls,
a woman editor,
sensing that American housewives might be desperately in need of
something to enlarge their world, tried for some months to convince her
male colleagues to introduce a few ideas outside the home into the
magazine. "We decided against it," the man who makes the final
decisions said. "Women are so completely divorced from the world of
ideas in their lives now, they couldn't take it." Perhaps it is
irrelevant to ask, who divorced them? Perhaps these Frankensteins no
longer have the power to stop the feminine monster they have created.
I helped create this image. I have watched American women for fifteen
years try to conform to it. But I can no longer deny my own knowledge
of its terrible implications. It is not a harmless image. There may be
no psychological terms for the harm it is doing. But what happens when
women try to live according to an image that makes them deny their
minds?
By giving an absolute meaning and a sanctimonious value to the generic
term "woman's role," functionalism put American women into a kind of
deep freeze--like Sleeping Beauties, waiting for a Prince Charming to
waken them, while all around the magic circle the world moved on.
"Where will it
end?" Ms. Friedan asks:
I think it will
not end, as long as the feminine mystique masks the emptiness of the
housewife role, encouraging girls to evade their own growth by
vicarious living, by non- commitment. We have gone on too long blaming
or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of
progressive dehumanization, because they have never grown to full
humanity themselves. If the mother is at fault, why isn't it time to
break the pattern by urging all these Sleeping Beauties to grow up and
live their own lives? There never will be enough Prince Charmings, or
enough therapists to break that pattern now. It is society's job, and
finally that of each woman alone. For it is not the strength of the
mothers that is at fault but their weakness, their passive childlike
dependency and immaturity that is mistaken for "femininity." Our
society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains
of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren't girls
forced to grow up--to achieve somehow the core of self that will end
the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and
humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?
Here is how Ms.
Friedan told the women of 1963 to see themselves:
For the women I
interviewed, the problem seemed to be not that too much was asked of
them but too little.
Society asks so little of women.
You'd find them drinking, or sitting around talking to other women and
watching children play because they can't bear to be alone or watching
TV or reading a book.
I have suggested that the real cause both of feminism and of women's
frustration was the emptiness of the housewife's role.
"Occupation: housewife" is not an adequate substitute for truly
challenging work, important enough to society to be paid for in its
coin....
Most of the energy expended in housework is superfluous.
Ms. Friedan's
Sleeping Beauty feminism was an unwelcome derogation to American women
because it came close to the truth, still more unwelcome because it
threatened the free ride they had no intention of giving up. Many
perceived that Ms. Friedan was making the same point to women that
Playboy made in the same year to men with its mock ad:
TIRED OF THE RAT
RACE?
FED UP WITH JOB ROUTINE?
Well, then...how would you like to make $8,000, $20,000--as much as
$50,000 and More--working at Home in Your Spare Time? No selling! No
commuting! No time clocks to punch!
BE YOUR OWN BOSS!!!!
Yes, an Assured Lifetime Income can be yours now, in an easy,
low-pressure, part-time job that will permit you to spend most of each
and every day as you please!--relaxing, watching TV, playing cards,
socializing with friends!...
Incredible though it may seem, the above offer is completely
legitimate. More than 40,000,000 Americans are already so employed.
These 40,000,000 Americans were the housewives referred to by Ms.
Friedan when she said "Society asks so little of women."
Small wonder
that the Playboy/Feminine Mystique/Sleeping Beauty pitch was discarded
by feminists as an unsuitable basis for a popular movement and that it
is today as extinct as the trilobite. The idle sex-toy doll-housewife
pampered by an overworked husband is unmentioned in the literature of
post-1960s feminism. The Sleeping Beauty has been replaced by the
Slaughtered Saint, tyrannized over, oppressed, brainwashed, beaten,
enslaved, exploited, crucified, impaled, racked and harrowed, flayed,
trampled and hung in chains by remorseless, inhuman, fierce, sadistic,
exploitive, brutal alcoholic male despots, beasts, marital rapists and
so forth.
It is useful, though, to remember that the initial thrust of feminism
was that "The problem seemed to be not that too much was asked of
[women] but too little." In 1963 the subsidization of ex- wives by
ex-husbands was said to be contemptible; today the feminist party line
is a demand for "support rules that aim at equalizing the standards of
living of the two parties after divorce" and that divorced women "have
earned the right to share their husbands' income for the rest of their
lives and to maintain a standard of living that is equal to theirs"
--so that even though the man is no longer a husband, and even though
Betty Friedan had told wives to be ashamed of themselves for expecting
to be subsidized for the trifling services they perform, the man
deprived of these services should continue to subsidize the woman who
withdraws them.
In Sleeping Beauty agitprop, contempt for women who accepted alimony
was conspicuous. In Slaughtered Saints feminism, contempt for alimony
is replaced by contempt for the word alimony: "Alimony?" wrote Betty
Friedan in 1974, "Forget it--it's a sexist concept, and doesn't belong
in a women's movement for equality." But on the preceding page she
wrote this:
At that time, we
were so concerned with principle--that equality of right and
opportunity had to mean equality of responsibility, and therefore
alimony was out--that we did not realize the trap we were falling into.
It is a trap for thousands, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of
women, when they face a no-fault divorce law--in which a separation
begun before the law was even envisaged becomes de facto divorce--with
no provision for economic support [read: no alimony] or division of
property....She should be insured in her own right for Social Security
in old age and severance pay in divorce [read: alimony]...Maintenance,
rehabilitation, severance pay--whatever you want to call it [read:
alimony]--is a necessity for many divorced women, as is child support.
Under Sleeping
Beauty feminism it was common for feminists like Gloria Steinem to
sneer at marriage as "prostitution." Slaughtered Saints feminist Flo
Kennedy disagreed:
Prostitutes
don't sell their bodies, they rent their bodies. Housewives sell their
bodies when they get married--they cannot take them back--and most
courts do not regard the taking of a woman's body by her husband
against her will as rape.
Now they can
take their bodies back--and still get a free ride. Taking someone's
money in exchange for nothing used to be called robbery, but
Slaughtered Saints feminists regard it as a means of restoring women's
dignity. As long as the money flows from the male to the female, as
long as Steinem's "prostitution" is retroactive and requires no
services, they are willing--they insist--that it be called something
other than alimony and will affect to despise those women who take
men's money and call what they do by its proper name. Like exophagic
cannibals denouncing the barbarousness of endophagic cannibalism, like
the Mayor of Gomorrah condemning the moral depravity of Sodom and San
Francisco, like two-dollar hookers sneering at twenty-five cent hookers
who are lowering the dignity of the profession, they have risen above
that sort of thing.
"Society asks so little of women." That was Sleeping Beauty feminism,
shaming women, telling them to stop filing their fingernails and get
out and work like men. A decade later Slaughtered Saints feminists,
seeking self-actualization and true humanity, claimed victimhood for
themselves and affected to be the wretched of the earth--adorning
themselves with crucifixes bearing a naked woman, telling men how
oppressive it was for them not to do half of the "little" housework at
which Ms. Friedan sneered. Bwana fimbo!--bad white man! By then the
admired, achieving male of 1963, hobbled with his parasitic female, had
become a gynocidal maniac, a wild beast:
Wife abuse is
deeply rooted in our culture.
[T]he Old Testament patriarchs quite intentionally set themselves
against the lunar psyche in women (and in men, who are half-female), in
their desire to destroy the Goddess religion, and the Goddess within us
all. Because of this, the menstruating womb became the Devil of
patriarchy--"the only good woman is a pregnant woman," etc.--and the
three-hundred- plus years of European Christian witch-hunting has been
accurately called "9 million menstrual murders." Women were burned for
practicing our natural moon-crafts of midwifery, hypnotism, healing,
dowsing, herbal and drug use, dream study, and sexual pleasure.
Perhaps what is most galling is that while the housewife's duties
resemble those of a servant, the financial arrangements she has with
her husband somewhat resemble those of someone even lower down on the
status ladder--namely, the slave.
If we read the Bible as normative social literature, the absence of the
Goddess is the single most important statement about the kind of social
order that the men who over many centuries wrote and rewrote this
religious document strove to establish and uphold. For symbolically the
absence of the Goddess from the officially sanctioned Holy Scriptures
was the absence of a divine power to protect women and avenge the
wrongs inflicted upon them by men.
As we have seen, it was not coincidental that everywhere in the ancient
world the imposition of male dominance was part of the shift from a
peaceful and equalitarian way of organizing human society to a
hierarchic and violent order ruled by brutal and greedy men....At the
same time that shedding blood by killing and injuring other human
beings--in wars, in brutal punishments, and in the exercise of the
male's practically absolute authority over women and children--becomes
the norm, the act of giving life now becomes tainted and unclean....And
so, first in Mesopotamia and Canaan and later in the theocracies of
Judaea and Israel, warfare, authoritarian rule, and the subjugation of
women became integral parts of the new dominator morality and society.
What kind of society is it that calls love and affection between two
women perverse, while male brutality to women is made
profitable....What kind of society is it where the lifelong partnership
of two women has no standing in court, while a husband can batter and
rape his wife without interference?...It is a pornographic society;
America is a pornographic patriarchy.
Capitalism finds it expedient to reduce women to a state of
enslavement.
Is it any wonder then that men hate women so? Is it any wonder that
they beat us and tear us apart and stomp us to death?...I suspect that
they cannot forgive us for reminding them, by our stubborn survival,
how they have raped and beaten and cheated and deceived and maimed and
killed us for 5000 years.
One of the
accusations against the male is his refusal to believe in his own
beastliness. Hear Irene Greene, Program Director of the University of
Minnesota's Sexual Violence Program, explain why accusations made by
females against males ought always to be believed:
We respect that
a woman's reality is her truth. In a society where far too often women
are disbelieved, unsupported and blamed for their own victimization, it
is important that they have at least one safe place where they will be
believed....Because a fundamental anchor of our philosophy is to
support and thus believe in each woman's reality, we may come upon the
one-in-a-hundred situation where a story or parts of a story may be
questionable. Since the occurrence of a false report is so rare, it is
far more respectful, professional and necessary to err on the side of
belief than to risk the slim chance that a story may not be totally
accurate. It is important to support the individual and her reality
rather than to deny and disbelieve her.
Slaughtered
Saints feminism is thus epitomized by feminist Mary Daly:
...feeding on
the bodies and minds of women, sapping energy at the expense of female
deaths. Like Dracula, the he-male has lived on women's blood....The
priests of patriarchy have eaten the body and have drunk the blood of
the Sacrificial Victim in their Mass, but they have not wished to know
who has really been the Victim whose blood supported this parasitic
life.
The insatiable lust of males for female blood has resulted in a
perpetual blood transfusion throughout the millennia--a one-way
outpouring into the veins and arteries of the bloodthirsty monster, the
Male Machine that now can continue its obscene life only by genocide.
If the Machine dreams, it is of a future filled with megadeaths. The
total vampire no longer needs even to speak of blood, which is after
all visible, measurable. It drinks instead in quantities calculable
only through the highest mathematics....It is men who have sapped the
life-force of women.
This horror over
male atrocity, like feminist candlelight processions to "take back the
night," is a public relations exercise. According to Dr. Karl
Menninger, for every woman who complains to her psychiatrist about the
brutality of her man there are a dozen who complain about his weakness,
dependency and impotence--a dozen who want their men to be more
dominant, not less.
There is an intergenerational angle. According to Gelles and Straus, it
is a myth that most battered and abused children grow up to become
batterers and abusers themselves. They quote child development expert
Edward Zigler of Yale University as saying "the majority of abused
children do not become abusive parents" and "the time has come for the
intergenerational myth to be placed aside." But on the next page they
cite researchers Rosemary Hunter and Nancy Kilstrom: "If they [abused
children who grew up to be non- abusive parents] had been abused, it
was by one parent, while the other parent served as a supportive life
raft in a sea of trouble and pain." In other words, the kids who
survived abuse and became decent parents came from father-present
families--the two- parent family saved them. So while Gelles and Straus
think it's good that women should have "the economic resources they
need to terminate a violent marriage," such termination transfers
children from the patriarchal system which protects them to the
matriarchal system where a disproportionate amount of child abuse
occurs. In September, 1989 a social service officer in Milwaukee
County, by name Terrence Cooley, wrote an inter-office communication
titled "AFDC/Child Abuse Information," a copy of which found its way
into the editorial office of The Family in America, pointing out that
of the 1,050 cases of child abuse and neglect in that county an
astonishing 83 percent occurred in households receiving Aid to Families
with Dependent Children (read: female-headed households). "There has
been," say Gelles and Straus,
tremendous
growth in paid employment of married women between 1975 and 1985. Our
own research has found that paid employment of married women helps
rectify the imbalance of power between spouses, and provides women with
the economic resources they need to terminate a violent marriage.
Also a
non-violent marriage. Also a marriage in which the wife is not battered
and oppressed but simply bored and fed up with the sexual regulation
which the patriarchal system imposes upon her in exchange for her
permitting a male to share her reproductive life and haul her out of
the matriarchal system and place her under coverture in the patriarchal
system.
Another way of saying the same thing is that it denies men the
resources and authority they need to hold a marriage together.
It "helps rectify the imbalance of power between the two spouses," say
Gelles and Straus. They naively accept the whole Slaughtered Saints
propaganda position, that women are poor violated victims in need of
society's chivalry, an idea ancient in Mary Wollenstonecraft's day. In
1854 Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon wrote a pamphlet, "Married Women and
the Law," citing the familiar complaints about the patriarchy:
A man and wife
are one person in law; the wife loses all her rights as a single woman,
and her existence is entirely absorbed in that of her husband. He is
civilly responsible for her acts; she lives under his protection or
cover, and her condition is called coverture.
A woman's body belongs to her husband, she is in his custody, and he
can enforce his right by a writ of habeas corpus.
The legal custody of children belongs to the father. During the
life-time of a sane father, the mother has no rights over her children,
except a limited power over infants, and the father may take them from
her and dispose of them as he thinks fit.
This tilting of
the law in the favor of the male has been not just abolished but
reversed, but it is still paraded in feminist literature (like the
binding of Chinese women's feet) as proving how oppressed today's
American women are. The 19th century husband was empowered to take his
wife's children from her, but he didn't. Today's wife is empowered to
take her husband's children from him and she does in millions of
marriages, and the marriages in which her right is not exercised are
de-stabilized by the knowledge that it could be exercised if the wife
chooses. Gelles and Straus know this but they still talk as though the
law tilted in favor of the husband rather than the wife. The
"imbalance" which needs to be "rectified" is the reverse of what they
suggest: what is needed is getting rid of the massive anti-male bias of
the legal system which deprives husbands of virtually all rights and
reduces ex-husbands to literal slavery.
Today's legal system has abandoned its responsibility to stabilize
families and has become the principal enemy of the family. That such a
thing could happen, and happen so rapidly and unobtrusively, suggests
that the execrated pro-male 19th century legal system had the right
idea. It sensed, if it did not explicitly understand, that women don't
like marriage and family life and would willingly do away with them if
they could do so without forfeiting their benefits. "[I]f one imagined
himself as newly arrived from Mars," writes feminist Carolyn Heilbrun,
and were to read
the descriptions of a woman's marriage in contemporary novels by women,
one might well ask how on earth anyone could be expected to live out
such a farce.
She quotes a
woman who opposed the ERA on the grounds that "I don't care to be a
person":
She understood,
while misunderstanding the ERA, that to be a person and a wife are
oddly incompatible.
Why do contemporary men fail to see this?
She scolds
Christopher Lasch because he does not
seem to
recognize that the old, good life, which he, Yeats, Trilling, and all
today's new conservatives feel such nostalgia for, rested on the
willingness of women to remain exactly where today's women, in fiction
at least, will not remain: at home. Waiting for husband-warrior to
retreat to them from the wide world is no longer enough....[T]he woman
who finds herself miserable at home when she is supposed to have
everything she has always wanted, everything all women have always
wanted--this woman, who would, decades ago, have been sent home by her
analyst in search of a vaginal orgasm-- is now seen as passing through
a stage of development recognized in men but not hitherto associated
with women: adolescence. A woman is not an adolescent at puberty in our
society, because her search for identity does not take place then:
rather it is a search for a husband in which she then engages. The
search for self, Nora's search in Ibsen's A Doll's House, occurs deep
into marriage and often with children left behind the slammed
door....The real tension between...the fleeing woman and those who
struggle to preserve the family, is the tension between order and
change, particularly evident in our society. It is most evident within
marriage, where the man desires order and the woman change. If the
women are unclear about what change should encompass, they know it
begins with their departure.
"Why do
contemporary men fail to see this" indeed? Women don't like the
regulation marriage imposes upon them. The feminist/sexual revolution
is an attempt to get rid of this regulation without forfeiting the
economic and status advantages its acceptance formerly conferred.
What Dr. Heilbrun says comes close to what the Seneca Falls feminists
complained about, that women were moral minors with whom
contracts--including marriage--were worth nothing because they could
renege on them if they wished. Such irresponsibility justified the
pro-male tilt of the law. 19th century men needed the pro-male
tilt--and so do men today. "Why do contemporary men fail to see this?"
"Women will not remain at home," says Dr. Heilbrun. Not if they can
make themselves economically independent (as they are doing) or if they
can implement the feminist program of making divorce an economically
viable alternative to marriage (for women) and, after inducing males to
thrust their necks into the matrimonial guillotine, induce lawmakers to
enact child support rules "that aim at equalizing the standards of
living of the two parties after divorce."
Dr. Heilbrun speaks of women's delayed "adolescence," their final
growing up, postponed beyond its proper period by the necessity of
having a husband while they are nubile and dependent and may wish to
procreate a child or two. This delayed adolescence "begins with their
departure" (read: divorce), when they demonstrate their maturity by
repudiating the marriage contract upon which men and children must
depend but which they and Dr. Heilbrun and the legal system correctly
perceive as a mere piece of paper.
"The man desires order and the woman desires change." The man desires a
stable patriarchal family system; the woman desires a return to
matriliny and de-regulation, a return to the sexual anarchy of the
Stone Age and the ghetto and the Indian reservation. The only possible
resolution of this is to make women grow up and choose either to accept
sexual regulation as the quid pro quo for the benefits of patriarchy or
to reject the benefits along with the regulation. "The clearest memory
of my wedding day," says Susan Crain Bakos,
is what was
going on in my head as I walked down the aisle in my white satin dress
with the floor-length lace mantilla billowing around me: "No. No way is
this going to be forever, for the rest of my life. No."
I said "I do" because that's what young women wearing white dresses
have traditionally said in front of altars in churches. But in my mind,
at least, the choices were still there.
This shows her
maturity: she is passing through the adolescence that males pass
through at puberty. And the legal system agrees with her that her vows
and her marriage contract are non-binding: her choices are still there.
The difference is that the male's maturity makes his contracts
dependable and Ms. Bakos's maturity makes hers undependable. The
difference between these two kinds of maturity was the reason Victorian
society decreed that "the legal custody of children belongs to the
father"--and it is the reason our society ought to do the same.
"When I was no longer married," continues Ms. Bakos,
I found it easy
to share Kara's philosophy: Don't trust men; only sleep with them.
The experience of multiple partners led us both to the same obvious
conclusion: There would always be someone new, someone better, some
other man to make love to us, so why not leave when a relationship grew
boring or difficult or too complicated? It was what men deserved
anyway.
Why limit ourselves to one man when lots of men were available?
I got divorced so that I could join the generation of women, my
generation, who kept their options open, put their own needs first, and
considered sex a natural right. Together with the men of our
generation, we weren't very good at "working things out," but we were
certainly wonderful at "moving on." We knew how to break up. Our music
about breaking up and moving on was upbeat and positive. The civilized
divorce was surely our invention.
She quotes
"Kara":
"When men began
talking about commitment, I got out. Making a commitment meant
marriage; and for women, marriage means giving a man too much power in
your life. I just knew I wasn't going to do it; and I was glad we lived
in a time where a woman could have sex, all the sex she wanted, without
getting married.
"I thought in vague terms of having a kid someday, of being a single
mother. I didn't give up on having kids then, just marriage."
We chose sex, not marriage.
Marriage means
giving men responsibility and a meaningful reproductive role and these
gals couldn't care less about male responsibility--aside from the
responsibility of paying child support money. They want to schlepp back
into promiscuity, recreational sex, matriliny and the free ride, like
the squaws on Indian reservations and the welfare matriarchs of the
ghettos.
The contempt for women's parasitism which Betty Friedan expressed in
1963 has now been replaced by a demand for compensation for something
Ms. Friedan never hinted at, men's parasitism. Merely equalizing
things, says Dr. Daly,
will not mean an
immediate "give and take," as if those who have been deprived of their
own life should "give on a fifty- fifty basis." Since what males have
to give has in large measure been sapped from women, "the equalizing of
concentrations" can hardly be imagined as if from equal but opposite
social positions. On the level of social interaction, what has to take
place is creative justice. It is not a simple transaction that is
demanded, but a restitution. It is absurd for men to look upon the
relinquishing of stolen privilege as benevolence. It is absurd also for
men to protest indignantly when women speak of wresting back our own
stolen power and being.
A principal
thrust of Slaughtered Saints feminism is the continuing accusation of
male domestic violence directed against "women and children"--these two
being lumped together to indicate that the perpetrators of the violence
are (who else?) husbands and fathers. The fact appears to be, however,
that Mom is responsible for more domestic violence than Dad. According
to Los Angeles policeperson Gloria Vargas, as quoted by Los Angeles
Times writer Carol McGraw, "Kids grow up seeing their father get away
with beating up mom. So what happens? They grow up and beat up their
wife or resort to other violence." "Typically," says McGraw, "the
victims, afraid of even more violence, would not turn their husbands or
relatives in, and in many cases would even join their spouse in
attacking the police who came to their rescue, Vargas said."
The suggestio falsi is that "victims" are female and "relatives" and
"spouse" male. But there are as many male victims as female ones and
the perpetrators protected by their "spouse" from police interference
are frequently female. Boys are twice as likely as girls to be victims
of assault (by Mom). Men often remain married to violent women out of
concern to protect their children, who, in the event of divorce, would
be placed in Mom's sole custody.
A mild protest against this sort of thing is registered by British
feminist Lynne Segal, who complains that contemporary feminism
"celebrates women's superior virtue and spirituality and decries 'male'
violence and technology. Such celebration of the 'female' and
denunciation of the 'male,' however, arouses fear and suspicion in
feminists who, like me, recall that we joined the women's movement to
challenge the myths of women's special nature." According to the dust
wrapper of Segal's book, "She argues against the exponents of the new
apocalyptic feminism, among whom are Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin and Dale
Spender, which says that men wield power over women through terror,
greed and violence and that only women, because of their essentially
greater humanity, can save the world from social, ecological and
nuclear disaster." Today, writes Segal,
"like any
Victorian gentleman, Robin Morgan, Adrienne Rich, Susan Griffin, Judith
Arcana, Mary Daly, Dale Spender and their many followers, take for
granted and celebrate women's greater humanism, pacifism, nurturance
and spiritual development. Robin Morgan tells us that only women can
guarantee the future of life on earth. Ronald Reagan and the New Right
in the US and anti-feminist conservatives here in Britain tell us much
the same thing. Women can save the world from the nightmares of nuclear
weaponry, which represents the untamed force of "male drives and male
sexuality," through the power of the feminine mentality and the force
of maternal concerns.
Segal's is a
minority view. As Robert Briffault truly says, "A defiant and
rebellious attitude is found in women only where they occupy a position
of considerable vantage and influence; it is not found where their
status is really one of oppression." Today's feminists occupy a
position of considerable vantage and influence and they know that that
position is secure only as long as the public accepts the "myth of the
monstrous male"--and the victimized female.
Slaughtered Saints feminists have much to say about the beastliness of
males, but nothing to say about what Ms. Friedan most emphasized in
1963: "the problem that has no name," acedia, the ennui deriving from a
lack of meaning in their existence. Acedia is a spiritual problem, but
a materialist like Ms. Friedan could conceive of it only as a problem
with an economic or occupational solution--an elitist career. She
misconceived "the problem that has no name" as not a blessing but a
curse. It was a signal that a spiritual dimension was lacking in the
lives of the educated middle-class women she wrote about. "Blessed are
those who feel their spiritual need," said Jesus, "for the Kingdom of
Heaven belongs to them." The women suffering from the problem that has
no name were in the fortunate condition of having had their other
problems solved by the patriarchal system. The acedia from which they
suffered was the problem at the very apex of the "hierarchy of needs."
"Only recently," says Ms. Friedan,
have we come to
accept the fact that there is an evolutionary scale or hierarchy of
needs in man (and thus in woman), ranging from the needs usually called
instincts because they are shared with animals, to needs that come
later in human development. These later needs, the needs for knowledge,
for self-realization, are as instinctive, in a human sense, as the
needs shared with other animals of food, sex, survival. The clear
emergence of the later needs seems to rest upon prior satisfaction of
the physiological needs. The man who is extremely and dangerously
hungry has no other interest but food. Capacities not useful for the
satisfying of hunger are pushed into the background. "But what happens
to man's desires when there is plenty of food and his belly is
chronically filled? At once, other (and higher) needs emerge and these,
rather than the physiological hungers, dominate the organism."
In a sense, this evolving hierarchy of needs moves further and further
away from the physiological level which depends on the material
environment, and tends toward a level relatively independent of the
environment, more and more self- determined. But a man can be fixated
on a lower need level; higher needs can be confused or channeled into
the old avenues and may never emerge.
Ms. Friedan
complains that the need for "self-actualization" has been wrongly
interpreted as a "sexual need," something she calls an "explanation by
reduction." But the career-elitism which she proposes to her female
readers as the solution for the problem that has no name is equally an
explanation by reduction, equally an "evasion of growth," equally
unsatisfying, as is shown by a flood of disillusioned feminist books
like A Lesser Life, Unnecessary Choices, This Wasn't Supposed to
Happen, The Divorce Revolution, Mothers on Trial, et cetera.
After pouring her contempt on the parasitism of American housewives,
she proposes to make them grow "to their full capacities," to
mass-produce "self-actualizers," people like Shakespeare, da Vinci,
Lincoln, Einstein, Freud, Tolstoy. This will require a "massive
attempt" by educators, parents, ministers, magazine editors,
manipulators, guidance counselors, and a "GI Bill for Women":
What is needed
now is a national educational program similar to the GI bill, for women
who seriously want to continue or resume their education--and who are
willing to commit themselves to its use in a profession. The bill would
provide properly qualified women with tuition fees, plus an additional
subsidy to defray other expenses--books, travel, even, if necessary,
some household help.
A free ride for
women who want to be "professionals" and demand large fees from the
people whose taxes give them their free ride. This is how liberated
housewives will stand on their own feet. How can the "seriousness" and
"proper qualification" of these women be evaluated? Clearly on the
basis that they declare themselves to be serious and properly qualified
and choose to enter professionally oriented programs. In other words,
idle housewives whose taking of a free ride from their husbands is held
up to scorn and whose chief motivation is boredom with suburban
lotus-eating and monogamous marriage, are to crowd into colleges and
begin a subsidized existence paid for by taxpayers mostly less affluent
than themselves. The subsidization will include funds to hire household
helpers, women not serious about becoming professionals, who need wages
solely to support their families. These members of the lower orders
will live on their trickle-down benefits, far more modest than those
given to Ms. Friedan's elitists--of all classes in society the ones
least deserving of, or in need of, public assistance. Their
subsidization is said to be a matter of "desperate...emergency":
Their desperate
need for education and the desperate need of this nation for the
untapped reserves of women's intelligence in all the professions
justify these emergency measures.
After spending
most of her book talking about the immaturity of American housewives,
Ms. Friedan then compares them to male GIs, "matured by war,"
suggesting that "Women who have matured during the housewife moratorium
can be counted on for similar performance" --presumably because of the
influence of the feminine mystique, elsewhere said to cause their
infantilism. If the "housewife moratorium" (read: feminine mystique) is
a maturing influence, why should it not lead these women to stand on
their own feet "without sexual privilege or excuse" rather than to
demand the exchange of one parasitism (on husbands) for another (on
taxpayers)? The GI Bill gave ex-servicemen some compensation for their
years of service to society. Ms. Friedan wants the same compensation
for women because "society asks so little of women" and therefore (by
Ms. Friedan's logic) must pamper these Sleeping Beauties yet more,
rather than merely allowing their husbands to pamper them, which denies
them independence and dignity.
Sleeping Beauty feminism was poorly adapted to becoming a mass movement
despite Ms. Friedan's program for making it one. It was aimed at the
minority of elitists whose non-spiritual problems had been solved and
who were summoned to confront the spiritual crisis signaled by "the
problem that has no name." The failure to recognize this crisis as a
spiritual one has led not to its solution but to its burial, its
replacement by problems at lower levels in the "hierarchy of needs,"
things like paying the rent and the utilities and coping with roleless
men--problems which have made today's Slaughtered Saints feminism what
the Sleeping Beauty feminism of a generation ago could never have been,
a mass movement.
The best thing for the women's movement now would be (if it were
possible) to restore the patriarchal family and hope that it could once
again solve women's lower-level needs and bring them back to where is
could be said, "Blessed are those who feel their spiritual need." Let
the Scriptures be fulfilled. The patriarchy which brought them this far
couldn't carry them all the way to moksha experience but it was the
best friend women ever had.
Slaughtered Saints feminists now affect to interpret the free ride as
itself an affliction, as what feminist Jessie Bernard calls "the
woman's extra load of economic dependency." She thinks this burden "has
to be lightened" because
A union between
a man and a woman in which, when it breaks down, one loses not only the
mate but also the very means of subsistence is not a fair relationship.
It is not a
relationship at all when it breaks down; and it breaks down chiefly
because (thanks to the feminist/sexual revolution's insistence on a
woman's right to control her own reproduction) marriage has become a
non-binding contract. Women do not suffer from an "extra load of
economic dependency"; they want to hang on to the dependency or get it
back again--without having to fulfill the marital obligations which
justify it. The patriarchal system benefits women by marriage. The
feminist program of wrecking the patriarchy aims to make it provide the
same benefits outside marriage, thereby destroying marriage, the
family, the male role and the whole patriarchal system--and restoring
matriliny. The only way for men to restore the patriarchy is to insist
that there shall be no free ride outside of marriage and the acceptance
of sexual regulation--no alimony, no child support payments, no
affirmative action and comparable worth programs, no quotas, no
goals-and-timetables. To be independent means not to be dependent.
The suffering of single mothers--largely self-inflicted--is now deemed
sufficient justification for the free ride:
The welfare
system...should be replaced with a system under which single parents
would be earners, but would have government guarantees of child support
payments out of the earnings of the other parent, health care, and high
quality child care.
Wages Due Lesbians [is] an independent group of lesbian women who
organize within Wages for Housework, particularly in regard to custody.
Wages for Housework is an international organization fighting for money
for all women so that they can lead independent lives.
Benefits for divorced, separated, and never-married mothers and their
children could be made more similar to benefits to widows either by
increasing benefit levels or by making benefits available to single
mothers regardless of income.
For women as a group, the future holds terrifying insecurity: We are
increasingly dependent on our own resources, but in a society and an
economy that never intended to admit us as independent persons, much
less as breadwinners for others.
The fact that women are overwhelmingly the caretakers of children is a
key determinant of their secondary economic status. Whether within the
two-parent family unit or in a single-parent family, women, for the
most part, provide the nurturing, the day-to-day care, the hands-on
childrearing.
The feminist
demand to be made independent by being made dependent appears
paradoxical until its underlying idea is understood, which is this:
What women want is not independence but de-regulation. They yearn to
return to the "kind of role they had on the grasslands of Africa
millions of years ago." De-regulation is the key idea which explains
the feminist/sexual revolution. They like to talk about independence
because it sounds self-approbatively heroic--and the talk is sincere in
the sense that when they write agitprop or get together at conventions
and take one another seriously they believe their own flim-flam. But
when any tangible, especially economic, benefit enters the picture they
opt for dependence. The more dependence--the more alimony, the more
child support, the more legislative/bureaucratic/judicial chivalry, the
more affirmative action, the more comparable worth, the more quotas,
the more goals-and-timetables, the more anti-male discrimination, the
more freebies--the better. If it's free they want it. What they don't
want is the regulation of their sexuality which gives males a secure
role within stable families.
The currently fashionable program for attaining this de- regulation is
the subject of the following chapter, the program of casting themselves
into poverty and squalor and dragging "their" children with them--and
exhibiting the resulting predicament as proving their need to be
rescued.
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Annex to chapter I
Additional note
References
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