While women’s lives are obviously different in basic respects from those of men, I was surprised by the extent and power of the differences revealed by this study. It became essential to develop a theoretical perspective on the meanings of gender and the shaping influence of gender in the lives of women as well as men. My perspective on gender is grounded in the findings of the present research. It draws as well upon many sources: work on the history, anthropology, sociology, and psychology of gender; feminist studies; fiction by women; biographies of women; and the analysis of these from the vantage point of gender.
My central concept is gender splitting. This term refers not simply to gender differences but to a splitting asunder—the creation of a rigid division between male and female, masculine and feminine, in human life. Gender splitting has been pervasive in virtually every society we know about in the history of the human species, although there are wide variations in its patterning. What is regarded as “feminine” in contrast to “masculine” has varied among societies, classes, and historical periods, but the splitting is universal. To a much greater degree than is usually recognized, women and men have lived in different social worlds and have differed remarkably in their social roles, identities, and psychological attributes. The splitting operates at many levels: culture, social institutions, everyday social life, the individual psyche. It creates antithetical divisions between women and men, between social worlds, between the masculine and feminine within the self. It also creates inequalities that limit the adult development of women as well as men. I will focus on four basic forms of gender splitting:
(1) The splitting of the domestic sphere and the public sphere as social domains for women and for men;
(2) The Traditional Marriage Enterprise and the split it creates between the female homemaker and the male provisioner;
(3) The splitting of “women’s work” and “men’s work”;
(4) The splitting of feminine and masculine in the individual psyche.
When gender splitting operates most strongly, women are likely to live primarily as homemakers in a Traditional Marriage Enterprise, to center their lives in the domestic sphere, to engage solely in women’s work, and to accept and value in themselves and other women only those qualities identified as “feminine.” At the same time, women are likely to be subordinated and marginal in the public world, to be limited provisioners and authorities in the family, to have difficulty engaging in “men’s” work, and to experience as alien those personal qualities identified as “masculine.”
The division between the domestic sphere and the public sphere is of fundamental importance for women’s (and men’s) development. The public sphere includes the economy, government, and other nonfamilial institutions of every society. Since occupations comprise the bulk of this domain, I shall refer to it also as the occupational sphere. Men’s lives have traditionally been centered in the public sphere, which is their territory and under their control. Women have participated in this sphere as well, but largely on marginal, subordinated, segregated terms.
The domestic sphere consists of a household and its surrounding familial-social world. In our society, its primary unit has traditionally been the nuclear family—parents and their offspring. This century has seen an increase in the number of single-parent (mother) headed households. The nuclear family may also be closely connected with its extended family (grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, others) as part of a single household or an integrated social network. In virtually all societies, for countless generations, women’s lives have been centered in the domestic sphere. It has been the key source of their identity, meaningful activity, and satisfaction, as well as dissatisfaction.
The women in the homemaker sample led predominantly traditional, family-centered lives. The beginnings of their family life were in the marriage and the kind of life the two partners envisaged as they entered the state of matrimony. We usually think that marriage is mainly a matter of the emotional relationship between the partners. In fact, marriage is never simply about being in love. It often takes place when one or both partners are not in love. It often does not take place even when two persons are in love. A marriage is, first of all, about building an enterprise in which the partners can have a good life, according to their lights. The marital relationship can best be understood within the context of this enterprise. The concept of the “marriage enterprise” is one of the major fruits of this research.
Among the homemakers, the primary aim of matrimony was to build and maintain what I call a Traditional Marriage Enterprise. Its goal is to have children, to create a certain kind of family life, and to continue (with some improvements) the basic traditions of the family of origin. There is a well-defined division of labor between the partners. The woman/wife/mother serves primarily as homemaker, caring for the young and centering her life predominantly in the nuclear (and, when possible, extended) family. The man/husband/father, in contrast, serves as provisioner, devoting himself mainly to outside work and bringing back the resources needed to sustain the family. Men generally feel responsible for their families and want to be caring fathers and husbands, but they do so by involving themselves much more strongly in the work world than in the family.
The splitting of homemaker and provisioner stems from, and helps to sustain, the pervasive gender splitting in human life generally. It is essential to bear in mind that homemaking and provisioning are not simply roles within the family. They are, more broadly, ways of living that involve family, occupation, and many other social contexts, as we shall see.
Along with the division of labor goes a division of authority. In the Traditional Marriage Enterprise, the man is “head of the household” and ultimate source of authority within the family. He delegates responsibility for most domestic work to his wife, but she has little authority in her own right and little sense of inner authority, especially in relation to males. Likewise, men occupy the dominant positions and exercise primary authority in the major institutions of the public sphere. Patriarchy—the rule of the father—has been a universal theme (with many variations in pattern and degree) in most human societies.
The Traditional Marriage Enterprise thus involves a certain kind of partnership between female homemaker and male provisioner. They do very different kinds of work, on unequal terms, but between them they manage what is needed to form and sustain a family. The enterprise serves to contain and integrate the gender splitting that it initially helped to produce. The woman in this enterprise leads a highly domestic life. She has primary responsibility for housekeeping, family life, the care of children and husband. She may also link family to outside world through various boundary activities such as furthering her husband’s career, working on a family farm or business, connecting the family to religious and educational institutions and to the local community. These activities take her outside the domestic sphere, where they connect her mainly to other women and children.
The basic principle of the Traditional Marriage Enterprise, and of the surrounding culture, is that women are homemakers, not provisioners—and that men are the opposite. When women enter the public work world (something they have done in all societies), this principle strongly shapes and limits their engagement in it. Girls traditionally are raised not to make a strong investment of self in a future occupation or career, and women are discouraged from full participation in the occupational system. When a woman takes a job, she generally engages in “women’s work” that is relatively separate from and subordinate to the work of men. Her public life thus tends to have the same character as her domestic life—providing services, caring for others, fostering group integration and survival. It is often still a source of tension in the workplace when a woman has a position of authority over men, and a source of tension in the marriage when she is perceived as more successful or more powerful than her husband.
What is the meaning of the domestic world for its members? What part does it play in the lives of women and men? It is, in the most fundamental sense, a home base, a center for one’s life. Outside is the public work world, with its heavy demands to meet external standards of performance, to enact more narrowly defined roles, to achieve success and avoid failure. The domestic world provides other satisfactions and stresses. It is the place that is most truly one’s own: we build it for ourselves and for those with whom we are most closely connected; and in it we can be most fully ourselves. Ideally, it is the place where we rest, play, love, receive nourishment of many kinds, enjoy privacy and leisure, have strong affectional relationships with family and friends. In everyday language, we “work” outside and “live” at home.
But the domestic world also has its bleaker, more onerous, and often painful side. We experience the burdens (not solely the pleasures) of raising children. In it we suffer our own illnesses and despairs, as well as the illness and even death of spouse, children, and other close ones. Most women are faced with endless household and child care responsibilities in addition to outside work. The meaning of domestic life—the suffering as well as the satisfaction we derive from it—comes largely from giving and receiving care.
“Taking care” is a root issue in life generally, and especially in the domestic world. When a man and woman marry, they are agreeing to take care of each other, of their children, and of their domestic enterprise.
“Taking care” has three meanings: giving care to others (being a caregiver), receiving care from others (being taken care of), and taking care of oneself. All three are of great significance for our understanding of the Traditional Marriage Enterprise. Under conditions of marked gender splitting, the three ways of taking care operate differently for men and women.
In the Traditional Marriage Enterprise, a traditional man takes care of his family primarily by being a provisioner and head of household. He is required to work hard at earning a livelihood and establishing the family’s place in the community. In order to take care of them, he must learn first of all to take care of himself: to be a hero within his domain—an independent, responsible, self-reliant adult who perseveres in his occupational struggles no matter how great the hardships. These qualities, so essential for his work life, markedly shape the kinds of care he gives and receives in his domestic life.
Within the family, a man is most likely to give care in ways that reflect the values of the work world: providing material benefits, managing money, maintaining discipline and order, being most involved with his sons in activities (such as sports, recreation, and other forms of male fellowship) that directly or indirectly prepare them for the adult occupational world. It is harder for him to give care in ways traditionally defined as feminine: being tender, showing his own grief and sharing openly in the grief of others, giving compassion rather than solving problems.
The kinds of care a traditional man can most readily receive from his wife reflect his images of the homemaker. He can appreciate her efforts to provide for his rest, nourishment, and comfort, to keep the household orderly and attractive, to share certain leisure activities and to allow him other activities that he prefers to do with men. He feels cared for when she inspires and supports his heroic occupational quest. She does this by admiring his intellectual and physical prowess, enjoying his successes, finding him a valued source of knowledge and authority, by being a supportive player but not a hero in her own right.
It is much harder for him to request and receive other kinds of care from her; for example, to talk about his experience of serious failure, disappointment, anguish, and confusion, and to ask directly for her understanding and concern. He finds it difficult to acknowledge these experiences to her—as well as to himself—because they involve a feeling on his part that he is failing in his deepest commitment as a man. Sharing such experiences is often difficult for her, too. To the extent that she participates in the homemaker-provisioner split, a wife has a tremendous stake in her husband’s occupational success. Having limited her own involvement in the outside work world, she is almost totally dependent on him to provide for her and the family.
In short, it is urgently important to both partners in this enterprise that the man be a good provisioner, according to their standards. When his adequacy is in question, or when he fails in major ways, both of them often find it hard to share the experience and to engage in mutual caring about the painful feelings involved. For the wife this difficulty is compounded by the fact that, given the domestic-public split, she generally knows little about her husband’s work world and finds it alien. The division that has served them well in many respects becomes an obstacle to empathic intimacy. Likewise, a man can take care of his wife in many specific ways, such as providing material support, helping with certain chores, participating in family events, appreciating her qualities as wife and mother. It is more difficult to involve himself in the intricacies of the domestic world and its meanings for her. The splitting of the domestic and occupational worlds thus produces a deep division in the marriage. Trying to bridge this division, and dealing with the consequences of not sufficiently bridging it, are basic tasks for every couple.
How is it, then, for women? Giving care, receiving care, and taking care of oneself are also important for them, but the forms have traditionally been different. For girls and young women, the primary emphasis is usually on giving direct care to others in the domestic world. Homemaking is, above all, about giving care: nurturing her children and husband; being chiefly responsible for the household; being a good daughter to parents and in-laws; maintaining ties with her own and her husband’s extended families; being helpful to friends and a wider social network; dealing with crises stemming from illness, death, change in family fortunes, geographical moves, aging parents—ultimately, assuring the survival of the family. A woman’s domestic caregiving usually takes the form of a service that directly meets another’s needs: preparing and serving meals, child care, shopping for provisions, cleaning the house, comforting those in distress, nursing the ill, mediating family disputes.
A mother who gives care also receives care in exchange. She may receive care in at least three ways. Mothers vary widely in the degree to which they seek and obtain these forms of care-income.
First, a mother may receive important satisfactions directly from the bonding with her infant. She may experience great pleasure in breast-feeding and cuddling the baby. The infant’s responsiveness to her may give her intense feelings that she herself is being cared for and appreciated. Her ability to meet the child’s needs may give her a sense of great well-being as an effective, competent mother.
Second, in mothering her child she has an opportunity to re-mother herself—to give herself the love and care she wanted but did not receive sufficiently from her own mother. In her subjective experience, she is both the good mother caring well for her child and, simultaneously, the good child receiving the care she needs and deserves. The basic reality is the mother-child relationship. The mother often experiences this relationship from the child’s vantage point as well as her own and imagines that the child is feeling what she feels in herself. The re-mothering possibilities are especially important for a woman who becomes a mother in adolescence or in the Early Adult Transition. Still very much involved in the relationship she had as a child with her own mother, she is likely to identify with her own infant and to feel symbolically that she is receiving care as well as giving it. However, such reliving and reworking of one’s early mothering may occur at any age.
Third, a woman may receive care from her husband. While taking care of husband and children within the domestic world, she counts on him to take care of her and the children. He provides for her through his income, his position in society, his ties to other groups and institutions. He provides in a more personal way through his relationship with her and his participation in family life.
From one point of view, we can say that the traditional system requires her to give care in order to receive care. That is, she gives care to family and household as a means of receiving care from husband. But the opposite is also true: the traditional system requires her to receive his care—to stay home and be taken care of by him—so that she will devote herself to giving care as a homemaker. The traditional system attempts to engender in her the “feminine” qualities that make it highly gratifying to give and receive care in the home and, at the same time, that make it less gratifying to get strongly involved in the outside world.
A woman who freely chooses to participate in the Traditional Marriage Enterprise receives many benefits, such as comfort, security, the satisfactions afforded from being a “good wife and mother,” but there are also great costs. She is an appendage to her husband, dependent on his care—be it beneficent, indifferent, or tyrannical—and subordinate to him within the home and in the larger scheme of things. She takes care of many others yet does not experience herself as a fully independent person who can take care of herself in the world. It feels dangerous to develop too strong a sense of self and too much interest in taking care of herself. If she did, she might then seek to enter the public occupational sphere and become a provisioner without a husband or on equal terms with a husband. To prevent this kind of independence, the traditional “good girl” generally lives in her father’s home until she moves into her husband’s home to embark on a domestic career. Indeed, her adaptation in this system is best served by accepting her place in it—not asking too many questions, not exploring alternative options, and not pursuing goals that would enable her to grow up as an independent woman. The homemakers studied here represent various forms of this self and mode of living.
Since the onset of the Industrial Revolution about two hundred years ago, the human species has begun a major new step in its social evolution. Modern nations have grown astronomically in size and complexity. There has been a fantastic growth of institutions governing industry, finance, politics, education, science, technology, health, the arts and humanities. Many countries have moved from “pre-industrial” to “industrial” to “post-industrial” conditions. Some have moved farther than others, but the process of modernization is widespread.
One aspect of this historical process is the gender revolution: a transformation in the meanings of gender, the place of women and men in society, and the relationships between women and men in all aspects of life. The change is not the work of a single group or movement. It is both an effect and a cause of the social evolution of the human species. At the heart of the gender revolution is a reduction in the gender splitting and a modification of the Traditional Marriage Enterprise. It is not possible to maintain fully the old division of labor between female homemaker and male provisioner. Women can no longer count on having a permanent marriage and a life of domesticity. They are being impelled, by powerful social forces as well as inner motivations, into the public occupational world. And men are, much more slowly, becoming involved in family life and accepting the entry of women into all sectors of the occupational system.
Many social changes are reducing women’s involvement in the family and increasing their involvement in outside work.
(1) Human longevity has risen sharply. In previous times very few members of any society lived beyond age 40. For the survival of the species this brief life expectancy was sufficient, perhaps optimal. Nature had provided a peak life season in early adulthood when people could meet their essential species requirements: they begot and raised enough children to produce a new generation of adults; they contributed to the society through productive work and maintenance of the community; and most of them died when their productive capacities diminished. Early adulthood was the crucial era in the life cycle. Only a small cohort of persons over 40 was needed for more specialized responsibilities requiring greater leadership and wisdom. Most adults over 40 would be impaired by illness, accident, and bodily decline; they would consume more than they produced and would thus be a drain on communal resources. Their early demise was thus a species requirement. The generation in early adulthood simply could not produce enough for itself and the children, if it had also to provide for middle-aged and older generations of any size.
We are now reaching the point where society must have a larger labor force in early and middle adulthood (roughly age 17–65) doing the productive work required to support themselves as well as the younger and older generations. We have not yet created effective, equitable arrangements for achieving this. Indeed, we have hardly begun to acknowledge the problems and to develop sound programs of social security, health care, retirement, and the like. The generation in this era bears a major responsibility for the survival and welfare of the species. The “aging” of the population increases the pressure on women in early and middle adulthood to be employed in outside work.
(2) The demand for women’s work in the family is decreasing. The increase in life expectancy produces a decrease in the need for a high birth rate and in large family size. With the availability of birth control, the great majority of American women have their last child by the late twenties to early thirties. This decreases the intensity and duration of their primary involvement in a domestic career. It also makes them more available for work outside the home.
(3) The incidence of divorce has grown. A young woman can no longer take it for granted that she will enter a permanent state of matrimony and will have a permanent male provisioner. She needs some job skills so that she can “take care of herself” if she remains single or marries badly. The increasing divorce rate has propelled many women into the labor force. Many divorced women work both out of financial need and with the hope that occupation may provide a sustaining major component in their lives.
Today, homemaking is no longer a permanent, full-time occupation for most women. The domestic career occupies fewer years than before and is less demanding. Most young women live with the awareness that they may have to become the primary provisioner for themselves and their children. Those who don’t actively want such work are often under great financial and social pressure to seek it.
The specific factors leading any individual woman to work are varied. They may involve external circumstances, such as her husband’s low income or unemployment, being single, separated, divorced, or widowed, and emergencies of various kinds. They may also involve inner wishes and values regarding independence, ambition, personal growth, living on terms of greater equality with men, moving beyond the confines of a purely domestic life. Although individual situations and choices are extremely varied, the broad historical trend is clear: society is evolving to the stage where it cannot allow women to remain full-time homemakers. And, for the individual woman, full-time homemaking is becoming both less feasible and less attractive as a way of life: it does not offer lifelong tenure; it is less required by the dominant cultural values; and there is growing opportunity as well as demand for outside involvement. Women are increasingly impelled out of the family and into the occupational system. The character of both the family and the world is thus changing in fundamental ways.
More than 50 percent of all American women are now in the labor force—part-time or full-time, paid or volunteer, continuously or sporadically—and the figure is rising. Will women be employed? is no longer the question. The key question now is: What kinds of outside work will women do, under what conditions, with what benefits and burdens for themselves and others? It is useful to distinguish three categories of nondomestic work:
(1) Unskilled or semiskilled jobs. Most women have been employed in jobs, such as typing, clerical, sales, services, that involve little occupational training and identity and offer no long-term career path. These jobs generally demand little and give little in return. They provide limited pay, benefits, security, status, or prospects for advancement. They are explicitly or implicitly regarded as “women’s work” and given solely or primarily to women. This practice creates segregated, all-female enclaves which exist as separate castes within a work organization. Women and men rarely work together on an equal footing. A woman’s place in this system—working under a male authority, doing specific chores, providing services to those who need them—is much like her place in the traditional family. The economy needs to fill large numbers of such jobs.
This kind of work life is feasible for women who have a great personal investment in the family and a minimal investment in outside work. They can move more freely in and out of the labor force, with few problems of occupational training and long-term career management. Despite its limitations, this work increases somewhat the potential for gender equality. Women are moved toward greater independence and assertiveness when they earn money of their own, demonstrate competence in public, have public evidence of existing separately from their husbands, and participate in a nondomestic world that offers even minimal possibilities for advancement.
(2) The traditionally “female occupations” such as teaching, nursing, and social work are those in which roughly 70 percent or more of the members are women. They generally require more education and skill than the jobs above, and they provide a more clear-cut occupational identity. These occupations are predominantly in the fields of health, education, welfare, and culture, rather than in the production economy and the management of major institutions. They have to do with raising the young, caring for the sick, helping the poor, supporting the arts, teaching the young and the disadvantaged, providing services of many kinds. The kind of work they require has much in common with women’s traditional homemaking work. The female occupations ordinarily require more education and commitment than the less skilled jobs, and in these respects pull a woman more away from her domestic life. Still, they are often flexible enough in the demands they make on her time and energy that she can be employed to varying degrees while making her primary investment in family.
The entry and advancement of women in the traditionally female occupations are not a major source of social conflict and gender tension. The creation of “genderized” occupations helps to keep women segregated and subordinated. A high position in one of these occupations seldom represents a high position in the larger occupational world. Even when the female occupations become more professionalized, they tend not to be equal in authority or remuneration to the comparable occupations held by males. Women can attain prominent positions within nursing or social work, for example, but the health care system as a whole is usually headed by men. A woman can advance to a position of considerable authority in an organization where most of her subordinates are women; for example, director of nursing, principal of a school. But it is still rare for a woman to have a senior management position in which most of her immediate subordinates are men. Even in systems staffed largely by women, such as public education, the more authoritative positions of management and policy making are held largely by men.
Almost all of the women in the homemaker sample had outside jobs, regularly or sporadically. Most of the jobs were in category one above, the rest in category two. The women in the career samples, in contrast, were predominantly in, or moving toward, the third category.
(3) The higher-status occupations, such as the professions, business, and management of work organizations generally, are regarded as “men’s work” and inhabited chiefly by men. The issue of authority is crucial here. Women had virtually no access to these occupations prior to this century. In the United States, the first large-scale effort to reduce the barriers against women’s entry and advancement in them began only in the 1970s. The process of change began a little earlier in some other countries, but the extent and depth of change are still quite limited everywhere. Small numbers of women currently hold professional positions in business, government, and other work organizations. For these women, however, advancement is often limited: they are concentrated in low- or middle-management levels, in staff positions without line authority, or in more consultative, free-lance work that provides greater freedom but less security and opportunity for advancement.
Over the past decades women have begun to enter elite occupations in more than token numbers, to have long-term careers, and to achieve positions of institutional authority. These are the kinds of work, and the conditions of work, that cause the rub. The entry of women into these occupations is much more problematic for work organizations, for the family, and for individual women and men than is their employment in semiskilled jobs or in traditionally female occupations. It violates the traditional division of labor between the genders: women are doing “men’s work,” very different from that of homemaking and caretaking. It undermines the segregation of women and men in the work world and “degenderizes” many aspects of life. It also violates the traditional division of authority between the genders: women are moving out of subordinate positions and engaging in the fuller exercise of authority—even over men who have considerable authority in their own right. Women’s growing engagement in such work contributes to, and stems from, significant change in the Traditional Marriage Enterprise. It generates for many women a personal investment in career that may equal or outweigh their investment in family, and combining the two is extremely difficult. The career sample studied here exemplifies the diverse ways in which individual lives evolve within this context.
I have identified the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure as one basic image of woman. It is reflected in the culture, the family, the occupational and other social institutions, and the psyches of individual women and men. Within the psyche this image exists as an internal figure, a self that may evolve in various ways. In the homemaker sample this figure often became the basis for the woman’s conscious, valued self—the person she strove to become. Among the career women, too, the internal image of the Traditional Homemaker Figure played an important part, but she was opposed to another, antithetical internal image that I call the Anti-Traditional Figure. Subsequent chapters will document the place of these two internal figures in the lives of our subjects. For now I want simply to introduce them in three brief examples.
The English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, a product of nineteenth-century Victorian society and of the forces that transformed it early in the twentieth century. The Victorian form of the homemaker played a powerful part in Woolf’s development as girl and woman, even as she struggled against it. She gave an eloquent account of this struggle in a lecture entitled “Professions for Women,” given in 1931 as she was turning 49. It was a time when professional careers were becoming more available to women—not in large numbers, but larger than ever before and, as it seemed, ever-growing. Woolf was at the peak of her career after years of great struggle. She wanted to tell a group of younger professional women about the “inner phantoms” she had confronted in becoming a writer. Her name for the phantom most inimical to her literary dream was “The Angel in the House,” the Victorian version of the Traditional Home-maker Figure:
I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman … I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, “The Angel in the House” … You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her … I will describe her … She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say it—she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace. In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room … She slipped behind me and whispered: “My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.” And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money—shall we say five hundred pounds a year?—so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel in the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must—to put it bluntly—tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer …
Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?
Woolf’s Angel is the Traditional Homemaker Figure as it existed in her historical period, class, and personal experience. For her, the internal figure of the Angel was locked in mortal combat with the internal figure of the Writer. Her inner Writer is a version of the Anti-Traditional Figure. Much of the drama in the following chapters derives from the struggle between these two figures: in the minds of individual women and men, in the family, in our culture and social institutions.
Virginia Woolf voiced the hope that the next generation of women would no longer be burdened by the Angel—that they would be free to have minds of their own, to know who they are as women and as persons, to participate in all domains of human life. That hope has been rekindled in every generation since hers. The Angel is, however, still alive and healthy.
For Virginia Woolf, the Angel was an internal phantom with which she had to struggle in search of a fuller life. For many other women, she is a valued ideal. Here is a contemporary homemaker who attempts to live in accord with her own version of the Angel.
Kay Ryan is a 43-year-old member of the homemaker sample. Her husband, of working-class origins, is now an executive in a medium-sized company. Despite some grievances she is generally satisfied with her 21-year marriage and life:
My parents divorced when I was 7. Life was hard for my mother and me after my father left. She had to work, and I’d be home alone, and we didn’t have any money. She had all the responsibilities and worries that go with running a whole household by yourself. I knew what she wanted most was to be married and to be home with me. I learned from her predicament that a man needs to support the family and it’s the woman’s duty to do whatever is required to make the marriage work.
I never wanted to work. I went to college and expected to be married when I graduated … I wanted to stay home and take care of the house and raise the babies, and that’s what I did. Oh, it was a lonely life. My husband traveled a lot on business and was never home, but he had to earn the living. I never wished I was out in the work world working, and he certainly didn’t want to stay home and raise the kids.
I would rank my marriage as the center of my life. I have this image of men as being stronger and more capable than women. I always looked at my husband as being able to do anything and able to take care of me and the kids no matter what. I never doubted; I knew he would take care of us and we’d be all right.
When women work and have to run a house, too, it’s very difficult. Magazine articles say that men still don’t do half of the housework when the women are working. All these liberated women and their liberated husbands, wherever they are—the women still get stuck with two jobs, work and home.
I never was a woman’s libber. I really think women have given up so much in order to gain such a little bit. I’ve always looked at men that it’s their duty to take care of us women and children. That’s their role: breadwinner. I expect a man to be the authority. I would never vote for a woman President. Luckily my husband’s not a hard taskmaster, so I don’t have a hard boss.
I asked him a few years ago if he wanted me to work. He said no, he wants me home. He likes to have me do his errands and pick up his dry cleaning. He’s not domesticated at all. He wouldn’t want to share the housework.
My husband’s the disciplinarian, even though he wasn’t around a lot while the kids were growing up. Our oldest son tells people that he really feels his mother raised him because his father was never home. I don’t feel quite that way; they always knew that if they did something wrong their father would be back, and he would punish them.
My sons never help around the house—that’s the woman’s duty. My mother said my boys are going to have a shock when they get married because their wives will be liberated and will expect them to do housework. I say that’s going to be their wives’ problem.
I think that women have lost a definite advantage by giving up the double standard. Years ago it was very simple: a girl just said no, and that was what she was supposed to do; even the boys thought she was supposed to say no. Now they don’t think that anymore; they think everybody is supposed to put out. All they want to do is go to bed. They sometimes don’t even want to buy the girl dinner first. They are missing the chance to fall in love and get married. It seems a shame. I believe in the double standard. It’s up to the girl to just say no to sex before marriage, and it’s her fault if she doesn’t. I know my boys are gonna take it if they can get it—how do those girls ever expect to get married? That old saying is true: Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
Woolf’s internal Angel, as we have seen, was the enemy of her internal Writer. For the Angel, it was unfeminine and potentially dangerous for a woman to become a serious writer—to have a mind of her own and to become a competitor and critic of men. Another aspect of the Angel theme is provided by Rachel Nash, from our faculty sample. Rachel’s Angel carried the argument much farther. She gave a terrifying account of what would happen to a woman if she chose a career. Professional success, she made clear, could be gained only at the expense of marriage and motherhood. She conjured up an “appalling image” of the Single Successful Career Woman whose career success resulted in an empty, solitary life without a home or family. This internal figure is a weapon commonly used by the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure to combat the ambitions of the internal Anti-Traditional Figure.
At 26 Rachel had a husband, a 2-year-old child, and a new Ph.D. degree. She formed an Entry Life Structure as combined homemaker and faculty member. When interviewed at 43, she was a full professor and had just initiated a marital separation. She was becoming aware that, despite her strenuous efforts and relative success in pursuing a career, she had given first priority to homemaking and had placed major limitations on her career aspirations. In trying to decide how she would live in her next “growing up,” she was engaged in a renewed struggle against the internal figure of the Single Successful Career Woman:
Recently I had a major moment where the scales fell off my eyes—a revelation. One thing came back to me that I had completely forgotten, an article on “women’s fear of success.” When I first read it I rejected the idea. I didn’t see it in my students and certainly not in myself. But in the last few weeks, in the midst of my marital crisis, psychotherapy, and self-examination, I realized that a fear of success was a big part of my reason for marrying and having kids.
What I was really afraid of was the picture that my mother—and, I guess, society—painted of a single successful woman. It was somehow so threatening to me that I couldn’t face it. I can still see it very vividly. It’s a successful woman who goes home and cries at night because she has no friends and no family, nothing, the bitter pinnacle of success. If I had remained single and pursued a career, I would have had to face that image. Even worse, my mother would have continually harped on that image—told me what a tragedy it would be and what a horrible life it would be and what I failure I would be. That picture was really what I was afraid of. I wanted to be sure I escaped that forever.
I had no image of a successful single woman who had happily made her career the center of her life. My image was that she had to be coldhearted, she had to be grasping, she had to be cruel, she had to be embittered, frustrated, wishing she had done anything just to be sitting by the fireside knitting in the evening with children. The fear of success isn’t the fear of succeeding per se but the fear of what consequences it would have. Success would bring total personal disaster. I had no way of imagining a person having a personally satisfactory life and being successful.
I never met any woman who made that choice and had a satisfactory life. The only single career woman I ever knew was an acquaintance of my parents. Once a year it was explained to us children that Poor Maggie is coming to dinner. We all felt sorry for her. We were so gracious to let her come and be a part of our happy family [laughs] for one evening a year.
My high school science teacher had a career and family. I felt she was marvelous. I asked her how she did it. She said, “By just not doing anything very well; I’m not as good a mother as I’d like to be, I’m not as good a teacher as I’d like to be, but it works out all right.” I thought that sounded like a very good compromise. That was what I would do. I would be sort of a half-baked mother and a half-baked teacher and in a sort of cheery way I’d muddle through. That was the image I had for myself.
I knew that marriage alone wasn’t enough to guarantee that compromise. It takes children. When you have children there is no way that you are ever going to have to be up there competing, succeeding, trying to carve out this kind of life that is so threatening to me. It took me out of the running in a certain sense. When you have kids, you’ve got a career handicap. It’s a handicap that I was more than happy to have: I wanted it because I really wanted the kids and also because I really wanted a handicap. Then, any work I did was just pure extra in a certain sense. I wasn’t a threat to anybody else and I wasn’t a threat to myself.
I’m a full professor here. The kind of work I’m doing is successful at a certain level and very satisfying. But to be, say, at Harvard or Yale would involve a whole different order of demands that would be much harder to manage with a family. The choice to have children was not just a choice to have children, but also to avoid a certain career path that I found very threatening. If I had chosen to pursue a higher level of success the demands on me would have meant a real conflict in the family. To put my career first would have meant organizing my family life in a way that was foreign to me, or else not having a personal life. The image of the appalling single successful woman is so terrifying to me that I really couldn’t face that. When I close my eyes I still see that image: this lonely, bitter person, isolated, a complete failure.
The splitting of female homemaker and male provisioner no longer provides an adequate long-term basis for a marriage enterprise, but no clear alternative has yet been established. All of us are finding our own way. Both marital partners face difficult questions: What is the nature of our enterprise? What part does each of us play in it? What is its place in each of our lives? What are the sufficient reasons for maintaining it or for ending it? How can we best modify it as we move from one season of life to another? Likewise, the occupational enterprise is changing. Women are entering new parts of the work world, but the terms of their participation are still often uncertain. Women who wish to live primarily as traditional homemakers face certain dilemmas; those who seek a new path face others.
The homemakers in this study entered adulthood with the hope of forming a Traditional Marriage Enterprise. They were prepared to work outside the home if necessary; however, for most, an outside job was a burden to be avoided when the husband was a good enough breadwinner. For others, an outside job held some attractions but had a clearly lower priority than homemaking. For all, there was something foreign about entering the wider occupational world and making a major investment of self in career. In their own worst-case scenario—being divorced, widowed, or never married—they would of necessity enter the labor market but with minimal expectations of doing satisfying, meaningful work.
The career women in business and academe took a different path. Like the homemakers, they formed an internal image of the Traditional Homemaker Figure. Like Virginia Woolf, however, they also formed a strong internal image of the Anti-Traditional Figure. This figure stood in direct conflict with the Traditional Homemaker Figure and insisted: “Become more independent, seek more in life than domesticity, acquire occupational skills, defer having a family until you establish yourself as a responsible, competent adult, able to take care of yourself, especially financially.” Each career woman heard from within herself the voice of the Traditional Home-maker Figure and the voice of the Anti-Traditional Figure. She wanted greater freedom of choice yet found herself deeply rooted in the traditional pattern by virtue of her own personality development as well as the shaping influences of our social institutions. Numerous voices and social pressures from the external world pulled her in different directions but offered no clear-cut resolution of the conflict.
Every career woman asked herself: Is it possible to liberate myself from the narrow constraints of the traditional pattern? Can I participate in family life without being a traditional homemaker? Can I participate in the male work world with inner commitment and equality? How can I have a long-term occupational career without jeopardizing my femininity and my involvement in family? The homemakers had their own versions of these questions. The questions took different forms and received different answers in the successive developmental periods of early adulthood. We have as yet little accrued cultural wisdom that gives generally satisfactory answers to these questions or even guidelines to thinking about them. Women who try to build new careers, new marriage enterprises, and new life structures are pioneers in a new phase of human history. This book depicts the efforts of diverse women to deal with these questions in the course of their adult development. It does not offer answers but will, I hope, provide a deeper understanding of the issues. Chapters 4 through 9 present the lives of the homemakers as they traverse the developmental periods from ages 17 to 45. Chapters 10 through 15 give the corresponding picture for the career women. In every period I will examine women’s lives from the combined perspectives of adult development and gender.