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> "I am efficient in many areas. I never stand when I can sit, I never sit when I can lie down."
> "I'm sure there are many gifted women who could write, but don't have the discipline. You have to make yourself do things that are cruelly difficult. The only difference between a man and a woman is that a woman puts her family first, but the actual discipline is a cruel thing."
A Sickness? It was scarcely surprising that The Feminine Mystique, which attacked the whole structure of Phyllis McGinley's convictions, provoked the contented housewife of Grindstone Hill into a spirited response. Betty Friedan's book classified the housewife state as nothing short of "dangerous." "It is not an exaggeration to call the stagnating state of millions of American housewives a sickness," she wrote. "The problem—which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities—is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease."
There is nothing really new about the Friedan argument except its language. Her book, in fact, is merely one more pronunciamento of the 20th century feminist movement. It owes a consider able debt to that formidable French non-housekeeper, Simone de Beauvoir, who in The Second Sex insisted that any woman who submits to housework betrays "a kind of madness bordering on perversion."
Old or new, the Friedan challenge was irresistible to Phyllis McGinley. "I rise to defend the quite possible She," she had written many years ago—meaning by that the woman with absolute freedom of choice to find her destiny, not just by the rigid and somewhat outmoded rules of the feminists but in the world of today.
That world, to her, has always included the home. Phyllis McGinley sings its praises as the best and possibly the richest part of the feminine equation, but by no means all of it. Her arguments, unlike those of the opposition, are undeniably modern. She is no disciple of the Teutonic school of Kinder, Küche, Kirche. And although she believes strongly in her religion, she does not place the domestic role on the pedestal of religious duty.
Phyllis McGinley's message to the housewife is that despite emancipation, despite the vote, despite jet travel and contraceptives and sleeping pills and a steadily rising census of college-educated women, there are still ample rewards and nourishment to be found in woman's noblest and most venerable role as keeper of the home.
"A liberal arts education," she writes in Sixpence, "is a true and precious stone which can glow just as wholesomely on a kitchen table as when it is put on exhibition in a jeweler's window or bartered for bread and butter. To what barbarian plane are we descending when we demand that it serve only the economy?" The educated housewife "will be able to judge a newspaper item more sensibly, understand a politician's speech more sagely, talk over her husband's business problems more helpfully, and entertain her children more amusingly if her brain is tuned and humming with knowledge.
"Of course, women have