“The Problem That Has No Name”

--Betty Friedan

Sandra E. Block

Now I understand….my mother…..in and out of those mental hospitals all my life, until she died when I was twenty-one. The problem had no name! As Betty Friedan points out in her article, women with far less trauma in their lives had “the problem with no name”. It didn’t matter if they were in “good” marriages with beautiful homes and beautiful children, and successful husbands who were good providers. It didn’t matter if they went to college and used their brains. If they became “housewives”, women felt the emptiness. So, THAT was my mother’s problem! “The Problem That Had No Name!”

In the beginning of her article, Friedan explains that women 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.” Doctors thought my mother’s problems could be fixed with tranquilizers, but I never saw them solved! And that feeling of not existing, that was my feeling; I claim that one, perhaps along with my mother!

I was one of two girls (Sandra E. and Sandra J.) born into a family of eight Block grandchildren, six of whom were boys. So, any wonder I didn’t exist. I had a mother whose “problem with no name” was so intense, she left me time and time again to find my own identity. I found my identity, defined myself, like so many housewives, in terms of the men in my family, my father and my brothers--because to define myself in terms of my mother would not be the healthiest choice. Yet her life has ruled my own.

So, Friedan goes on. “A strange feeling of desperation” was what I saw in my mother after so many confinements. She wasn’t college educated, having been born in 1918 to a Jewish family. It wasn’t the “norm” for her culture or age. But I saw the desire in her. I remember before one hospitalization, she took an apartment up the street and put a card up as an interior decorator, even though she had no training. I didn’t understand until my thirties, that she was crying out to be something more than a caretaker and housekeeper. We saw it as a sign of her “illness” taking over again. It was too late for me to tell my mother I understood.

Friedan tells us that “in 1960, the problem burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife.” In our family it burst long before the 60’s. It burst in the 40’s, when my brother was a baby, and before my father went off to the Navy during WWII. That was the first time my mother “flipped out”. Friedan coined the term “happy housewives" because the media, educators, clergy, psychologists and psychiatrists said that these women had no reason to be unhappy. As a grown woman, I, too have struggled with insensitive, uncaring members of the psychiatric community.

So, the solutions--what were the solutions to be to this problem? According to Friedan “home economists suggested more realistic preparation for housewives”, i.e., “high school workshops in home appliances”. For the more literate bunch, college educators suggested “more discussion groups on home management and the family….” “Take away the woman’s right to vote,” some misguided male humorist cracked in Harper's Bazaar. We become negated, told it's too much for us, all the responsibility of home and citizenship. Some educators, Friedan says, "suggested women should no longer be admitted to four-year colleges."

All the solutions to the “problem with no name” were solutions that defeated women’s advances, woman’s potential. “No other road to fulfillment was offered to American women in the middle of the twentieth century”. This was a woman’s lot. This was my mother’s lot, and she died, at age forty-nine, before she could experience liberation. I didn’t die, and I go on, age fifty-five on this Sunday, the 16th of September, not only in my own name, but in the name of my mother and for all the women and mothers in my family before me. I go on for my grandmother, Sally, who committed suicide when my father was seven and his brother five and sister twelve. I go on, because, at last, I have solved for myself and hopefully my daughter, this Problem That Has No Name.

Sandra E. Block is a single mother and student at SMC majoring in English and women's studies. She will be transferring to Wells College in the Fall. Sandra also writes under the name of Ellen Irving.