Free The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

do the dishes. After I get the children to bed, I set my hair and then I go to bed.
     
    The problem is always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife and never being myself.
     
    A film made of any typical morning in my house would look like an old Marx Brothers’ comedy. I wash the dishes, rush the older children off to school, dash out in the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in to make a phone call about a committee meeting, help the youngest child build a blockhouse, spend fifteen minutes skimming the newspapers so I can be well-informed, then scamper down to the washing machines where my thrice-weekly laundry includes enough clothes to keep a primitive village going for an entire year. By noon I’m ready for a padded cell. Very little of what I’ve done has been really necessary or important. Outside pressures lash me through the day. Yet I look upon myself as one of the more relaxed housewives in the neighborhood. Many of my friends are even more frantic. In the past sixty years we have come full circle and the American housewife is once again trapped in a squirrel cage. If the cage is now a modern plate-glass-and-broadloom ranch house or a convenient modern apartment, the situation is no less painful than when her grandmother sat over an embroidery hoop in her gilt-and-plush parlor and muttered angrily about women’s rights.
     
    The first two women never went to college. They live in developments in Levittown, New Jersey, and Tacoma, Washington, and were interviewed by a team of sociologists studying workingmen’s wives. 2 The third, a minister’s wife, wrote on the fifteenth reunion questionnaire of her college that she never had any career ambitions, but wishes now she had. 3 The fourth, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology, is today a Nebraska housewife with three children. 4 Their words seem to indicate that housewives of all educational levels suffer the same feeling of desperation.
    The fact is that no one today is muttering angrily about “women’s rights,” even though more and more women have gone to college. In a recent study of all the classes that have graduated from Barnard College, 5 a significant minority of earlier graduates blamed their education for making them want “rights,” later classes blamed their education for giving them career dreams, but recent graduates blamed the college for making them feel it was not enough simply to be a housewife and mother; they did not want to feel guilty if they did not read books or take part in community activities. But if education is not the cause of the problem, the fact that education somehow festers in these women may be a clue.
    If the secret of feminine fulfillment is having children, never have so many women, with the freedom to choose, had so many children, in so few years, so willingly. If the answer is love, never have women searched for love with such determination. And yet there is a growing suspicion that the problem may not be sexual, though it must somehow be related to sex. I have heard from many doctors evidence of new sexual problems between man and wife—sexual hunger in wives so great their husbands cannot satisfy it. “We have made woman a sex creature,” said a psychiatrist at the Margaret Sanger marriage counseling clinic. “She has no identity except as a wife and mother. She does not know who she is herself. She waits all day for her husband to come home at night to make her feel alive. And now it is the husband who is not interested. It is terrible for the women, to lie there, night after night, waiting for her husband to make her feel alive.” Why is there such a market for books and articles offering sexual advice? The kind of sexual orgasm which Kinsey found in statistical plenitude in the recent generations of American women does not seem to make this problem go away.
    On the contrary, new neuroses are being seen among women—and problems as yet unnamed as neuroses—which Freud and his