The Feminine Mystique (50th Anniversary Edition) by Betty Friedan

Author:Betty Friedan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

11

The Sex-Seekers

I did not do a Kinsey study. But when I was on the trail of the problem that has no name, the suburban housewives I interviewed would often give me an explicitly sexual answer to a question that was not sexual at all. I would ask about their personal interests, ambitions, what they did, or would like to do, not necessarily as wives or mothers, but when they were not occupied with their husbands or their children or their housework. The question might even be what they were doing with their education. But some of these women simply assumed that I was asking about sex. Was the problem that has no name a sexual problem, after all? I might have thought so, except that when these women spoke of sex, there was a false note, a strange unreal quality about their words. They made mysterious allusions or broad hints; they were eager to be asked about sex; even if I did not ask, they often took pride in recounting the explicit details of some sexual adventure. They were not making them up; these adventures were real enough. But what made them sound unsexual, so unreal?

A thirty-eight-year-old mother of four told me sex was the only thing that made her “feel alive.” But something had gone wrong; her husband did not give her that feeling anymore. They went through the motions, but he was not really interested. She was beginning to feel contemptuous of him in bed. “I need sex to feel alive, but I never really feel him,” she said.

In a flat, matter-of-fact tone that added to the unreality, a thirty-year-old mother of five, calmly knitting a sweater, said she was thinking of going away, to Mexico perhaps, to live with a man with whom she was having an affair. She did not love him, but she thought if she gave herself to him “completely” she might find the feeling that she knew now was “the only important thing in life.” What about the children? Vaguely, she guessed she would take them along—he wouldn’t mind. What was the feeling she was looking for? She had found it at first with her husband, she supposed. At least she remembered that when she married him—she was eighteen—she had “felt so happy I wanted to die.” But he did not “give himself completely” to her; he gave so much of himself to his work. So she found that feeling for a while, she thought, with her children. Shortly after she weaned her fifth baby from the breast, at three, she had her first affair. She discovered “it gave me that wonderful feeling again, to give my whole self to someone else.” But that affair could not last; he had too many children, so did she. He said when they broke up, “You’ve given me such a feeling of identity.” And she wondered, “what about my own identity?” So she went off by herself for a month that summer, leaving the children with her husband.

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