re do assignment

T H E P R O B L E M T H A T H A S N O N A M E

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of

dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban

wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter

sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to

ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”

For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women,

in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over

and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to

glory in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle

their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook

gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make mar-

riage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. They

were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They

learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights—the independence and the oppor-

tunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully

giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. A thousand expert voices

applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girl-

hood to finding a husband and bearing children.

* * *

By the end of the fifties, the United States birthrate was overtaking India’s. The birth-control movement, renamed

Planned Parenthood, was asked to find a method whereby women who had been advised that a third or fourth baby would

be born dead or defective might have it anyhow. Statisticians were especially astounded at the fantastic increase in the

number of babies among college women. Where once they had two children, now they had four, five, six. Women who had

once wanted careers were now making careers out of having babies. So rejoiced magazine in a 1956 paean to the

movement of American women back to the home.

In a New York hospital, a woman had a nervous breakdown when she found she could not breastfeed her baby.

In other hospitals, women dying of cancer refused a drug which research had proved might save their lives: its side effects

were said to be unfeminine. “If I have only one life, let me live it as a blonde,” a larger-than-life-sized picture of a pretty,

vacuous woman proclaimed from newspaper, magazine, and drugstore ads. And across America, three out of every ten

women dyed their hair blonde. They ate a chalk called Metrecal, instead of food, to shrink to the size of the thin young

models. Department-store buyers reported that American women, since 1939, had become three and four sizes smaller.

“Women are out to fit the clothes, instead of vice-versa,” one buyer said.

Interior decorators were designing kitchens with mosaic murals and original paintings, for kitchens were once

again the center of women’s lives. Home sewing became a million-dollar industry. Many women no longer left their

homes, except to shop, chauffeur their children, or attend a social engagement with their husbands. Girls were growing up

in America without ever having jobs outside the home. In the late fifties, a sociological phenomenon was suddenly

remarked: a third of American women now worked, but most were no longer young and very few were pursuing careers.

They were married women who held part-time jobs, selling or secretarial, to put their husbands through school, their sons

through college, or to help pay the mortgage. Or they were widows supporting families. Fewer and fewer women were

entering professional work. The shortages in the nursing, social work, and teaching professions caused crises in almost

every American city. Concerned over the Soviet Union’s lead in the space race, scientists noted that America’s greatest source of unused brainpower was women. But girls would not study physics: it was “unfeminine.” A girl refused a science

fellowship at Johns Hopkins to take a job in a real-estate office. All she wanted, she said, was what every other American

girl wanted—to get married, have four children and live in a nice house in a nice suburb.

The suburban housewife—she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of

women all over the world. The American housewife—freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the

dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her

husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected

as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she

had everything that women ever dreamed of.

In the fifteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished and self-per-

petuating core of contemporary American culture. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures

of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their sta-

tionwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They

baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children’s clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running

all day. They changed the sheets on the beds twice a week instead of once, took the rug-hooking class in adult education,

and pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career. Their only dream was to be perfect wives

and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their hus-

bands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the men to make the

major decisions. They gloried in their role as women, and wrote proudly on the census blank: “Occupation: housewife.”

* * *

If a woman had a problem in the 1950’s and 1960’s, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or

with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a women was she if she did not feel this

mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never knew how

many other women shared it. If she tried to tell her husband, he didn’t understand what she was talking about. She did not

really understand it herself. For over fifteen years women in America found it harder to talk about this problem than about sex.

Even the psychoanalysts had no name for it. When a women went to a psychiatrist for help, as many women did, she would

say, “I’m so ashamed,” or “I must be hopelessly neurotic.” “I don’t know what’s wrong with women today,” a suburban psy-

chiatrist said uneasily. “I only know something is wrong because most of my patients happen to be women. And their problem

isn’t sexual.” Most women with this problem did not go to see a psychoanalyst, however, “There’s nothing wrong really,” they

kept telling themselves. “There isn’t any problem.”

But on an April morning in 1959, I heard a mother of four, having coffee with four other mothers in a suburban

development fifteen miles from New York, say in a tone of quiet desperation, “the problem.” And the others knew, without

words, that she was not talking about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home. Suddenly they realized they

all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name. They began, hesitantly, to talk about it. Later, after they had

picked up their children at nursery school and taken them home to nap, two of the women cried, in sheer relief, just to know

they were not alone.

Gradually I came to realize that the problem that has no name was shared by countless women in America

* * *

Just what was this problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it?

Sometimes a woman would say “I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete.” Or she would say, “I feel as if I don’t exist.”

Sometimes she blotted out the feeling with a tranquilizer. Sometimes she thought the problem was with her husband, or her

children, or that what she really needed was to redecorate her house, or move to a better neighborhood, or have an affair,

or another baby. Sometimes, she went to a doctor with symptoms she could hardly describe: “A tired feeling . . . I get so

angry with the children it scares me . . . I feel like crying without any reason.” (A Cleveland doctor called it “the house-

wife’s syndrome.”) A number of women told me about great bleeding blisters that break out on their hands and arms. “I

call it the housewife’s blight,” said a family doctor in Pennsylvania. “I see it so often lately in these young women with

four, five and six children who bury themselves in their dishpans. But it isn’t caused by detergent and it isn’t cured by cor-

tisone.”

* * *

In 1960, the problem that has no name burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife. In the

television commercials the pretty housewives still beamed over their foaming dishpans and cover story on “The Sub-

urban Wife, an American Phenomenon” protested: “Having too good a time . . . to believe that they should be unhappy.” But

the actual unhappiness of the American housewife was suddenly being reported—from the and to and CBS Television (“The Trapped Housewife”), although almost everybody who talked about it found

some superficial reason to dismiss it. It was attributed to incompetent appliance repairmen ( ), or the distances

children must be chauffeured in the suburbs ( ), or too much PTA ( ). Some said it was the old problem—educa-

tion: more and more women had education, which naturally made them unhappy in their role as housewives. “the road from

Freud to Frigidaire, from Sophocles to Spock, has turned out to be a bumpy one,” reported the (June 28,

1960). “Many young women—certainly not all—whose education plunged them into a world of ideas feel stifled in their

homes. They find their routine lives out of joint with their training. Like shut-ins, they feel left out. In the last year, the problem

of the educated housewife has provided the meat of dozens of speeches made by troubled presidents of women’s colleges who

maintain, in the face of complaints, that sixteen years of academic training is realistic preparation for wifehood and mother-

hood.”

There was much sympathy for the educated housewife. (“Like a two-headed schizophrenic . . . once she wrote a

paper on the Graveyard poets; now she writes notes to the milkman. Once she determined the boiling point of sulphuric

acid; now she determines her boiling point with the overdue repairman. . . . The housewife often is reduced to screams and

tears. . . . No one, it seems, is appreciative, least of all herself, of the kind of person she becomes in the process of turning

from poetess into shrew.”)

* * *

A bitter laugh was beginning to be heard from American women. They were admired, envied, pitied, theorized

over until they were sick of it, offered drastic solutions or silly choices that no one could take seriously. They got all

kinds of advice from the growing armies of marriage and child-guidance counselors, psychotherapists, and armchair psy-

chologists, on how to adjust to their role as housewives. No other road to fulfillment was offered to American women in

the middle of the twentieth century. Most adjusted to their role and suffered or ignored the problem that has no name. It

can be less painful, for a women, not to hear the strange, dissatisfied voice stirring within her.

It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women. This is not what

being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been

found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough. I do not accept the answer that there is no

problem because American women have luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of; part of the strange

newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness,

hunger, cold. The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill. It persists in women whose husbands

are struggling interns and law clerks, or prosperous doctors and lawyers; in wives of workers and executives who make

$5,000 a year or $50,000. It is not caused by lack of material advantages; it may not even be felt by women preoccupied with

desperate problems of hunger, poverty or illness. And women who think it will be solved by more money, a bigger house, a

second car, moving to a better suburb, often discover it gets worse.

It is no longer possible today to blame the problem on loss of femininity: to say that education and independence

and equality with men have made American women unfeminine. I have heard so many women try to deny this dissatisfied

voice within themselves because it does not fit the pretty picture of femininity the experts have given them. I think, in fact,

that this is the first clue to the mystery: the problem cannot be understood in the generally accepted terms by which sci-

entists have studied women, doctors have treated them, counselors have advised them, and writers have written about

them. Women who suffer this problem, in whom this voice is stirring, have lived their whole lives in the pursuit of femi-

nine fulfillment. They are not career women (although career women may have other problems); they are women whose

greatest ambition has been marriage and children. For the oldest of these women, these daughters of the American middle

class, no other dream was possible. The ones in their forties and fifties who once had other dreams gave them up and threw

themselves joyously into life as housewives. For the youngest, the new wives and mothers, this was the only dream. They

are the ones who quit high school and college to marry, or marked time in some job in which they had no real interest until

they married. These women are very “feminine” in the usual sense, and yet they still suffer the problem.

* * *

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 women a sex creature,” said a psychiatrist at the Mar-

garet 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 plentitude 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 followers did not predict, with physical symptoms, anxieties, and defense mechanisms equal to those caused

by sexual repression. And strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers

were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework—an inability to endure pain or discipline or

pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life. Educators are increasingly uneasy about the

dependence, the lack of self-reliance, of the boys and girls who are entering college today. “We fight a continual battle to

make our students assume manhood,” said a Columbia dean.

* * *

Can the problem that has no name be somehow related to the domestic routine of the housewife? When a woman

tries to put the problem into words, she often merely describes the daily life she leads. What is there in this recital of com-

fortable domestic detail that could possibly cause such a feeling of desperation? Is she trapped simply by the enormous

demands of her role as modern housewife: wife, mistress, mother, nurse, consumer, cook, chauffeur; expert on interior dec-

oration, child care, appliance repair, furniture refinishing, nutrition, and education? Her day is fragmented as she rushes

from dishwasher to washing machine to telephone to dryer to station wagon to supermarket, and delivers Johnny to the

Little League field, takes Janey to dancing class, gets the lawnmower fixed and meets the 6:45. She can never spend more

than 15 minutes on any one thing; she has no time to read books, only magazines; even if she had time, she has lost the

power to concentrate. At the end of the day, she is so terribly tired that sometimes her husband has to take over and put

the children to bed.

This terrible tiredness took so many women to doctors in the 1950’s that one decided to investigate it. He found,

surprisingly, that his patients suffering from “housewife’s fatigue” slept more than an adult needed to sleep—as much as

ten hours a day—and that the actual energy they expended on housework did not tax their capacity. The real problem

must be something else, he decided—perhaps boredom. Some doctors told their women patients they must get out of the

house for a day, treat themselves to a movie in town. Others prescribed tranquilizers. Many suburban housewives were

taking tranquilizers like cough drops. “You wake up in the morning, and you feel as if there’s no point in going on another

day like this. So you take a tranquilizer because it makes you not care so much that it’s pointless.”

It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban housewife, the continual demands on her time. But the

chains that bind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit. They are chains made up of mistaken ideas and mis-

interpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices. They are not easily seen and not easily shaken off.

How can any women see the whole truth within the bounds of her own life? How can she believe that voice

inside herself, when it denies the conventional, accepted truths by which she has been living? And yet the women I have

talked to, who are finally listening to that inner voice, seem in some incredible way to be groping through to a truth that

has defied the experts.

* * *

I began to see in a strange new light the American return to early marriage and the large families that are causing

the population explosion; the recent movement to natural childbirth and breastfeeding; suburban conformity, and the new

neuroses, character pathologies and sexual problems being reported by the doctors. I began to see new dimensions to old

problems that have long been taken for granted among women: menstrual difficulties, sexual frigidity, promiscuity, pregnancy

fears, childbirth depression, the high incidence of emotional breakdown and suicide among women in their twenties and thir-

ties, the menopause crises, the so-called passivity and immaturity of American men, the discrepancy between women’s

tested intellectual abilities in childhood and their adult achievement, the changing incidence of adult sexual orgasm in Amer-

ican women, and persistent problems in psychotherapy and in women’s education.

If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a matter

of loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone recognizes.

It is the key to these other new and old problems which have been torturing women and their husbands and children, and puz-

zling their doctors and educators for years. It may well be the key to our future as a nation and a culture. We can no longer

ignore that voice within women that says: “I want something more than my husband and children and my home.”