The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
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?
-Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
It sounds, in retrospect, a little whiny, but at the time it was an earthshaking query
-Gail Collins, “Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition.”
It is neither fair nor accurate to suggest that Friedan’s seminal work has not aged well. But to read The Feminine Mystique in 2020 is to look at truths we now take as beyond self-evident when they are first being thought through. Her view of role women should be encouraged to play in society is as true as air now – we simply breathe it and take it for granted. While feminism has not achieved the goal of an equal society, the pre-feminist culture Friedan is arguing against seems ridiculous and foreign. The shock of non-recognition comes through on virtually every page – for instance, when she lists some of the stories in a woman’s magazine she reads - “Femininity Begins at Home,” “It’s a Man’s World Maybe,” “Have Babies While You’re Young,” “How to Snare a Male,” “Should I Stop Work When We Marry?” “Are You Training Your Daughter to Be a Wife?” “Careers at Home,” and “Do Women Have to Talk So Much?” One doesn’t need to think that Self or Cosmo or Vogue are somehow edifying to understand that this list of stories would never get consideration today.
As Gail Collins points out in her enthusiastic introduction, when reading a book that has provided such an accepted truth at this distance, it is almost easier to find its faults – its strengths simply point out what has become self-evident. There were times when I was reading this that I thought it was over-wrought, claimed too much for its thesis and ignored too many aspects of the problem.
The structure of the book is to tear at the notion that the highest goal of femininity was the role of mother and suburban housewife by examining it from a variety of angles. There is the stunning chapter on the role of women’s magazines. Friedan began to work on The Feminine Mystique after becoming disillusioned with the opportunities to write complex, interesting work for these magazines. My mother was an editor at Woman’s Day for most of my life and this portrait rang largely true with what I remember of her stories. My mother simply didn’t think it was the job of a magazine to supply anyone’s identity that fully. The notion of chasing some perceived least-common-denominator was more of a game for her. Friedan quits and begins the research that will lead to one of the most important books of the 20th Century.
There are sections on a variety of topics: consumerism – bemoaning the way women are taught that their sense of self is to come from their dish detergent or their appliances; education – noting the prevalence of women who go to college only to search for husbands; housework – a scathing attack on its boring, trivial quality; sexuality – containing lengthy arguments claiming that career women have more and better orgasms than housewives.
I know that Friedan has come under a good deal of criticism for the limitations of the book. Some of them seem obvious – she claims at one point that the emergence of a more public gay community in the early sixties is an outgrowth of too many boys being raised by insecure women, and there is no discussion regarding how female consumerism fits into what was (and is) a society-wide phenomenon. One can sense the outrage of Phyllis Schlafly and her followers begin to boil over as Friedan belittles housework and anyone who claims it is important. At the same time, it is stunning how little discussion of men there is – her proposed solution to the problem of maintaining a family home and having a fulfilling career does not include getting your spouse to do more of the work: she suggests that it can simply be done in an hour and a half before and after work.
The most serious criticism I have heard is that her work focuses too narrowly on the plight of upper-class, educated women. The criticism of the class limitations of the book is totally accurate, but perhaps unfair. Friedan makes no claim to be discussing anything but the plight of those well-to-do educated women who should have had the most opportunities in 1963. It is as if she wants to eliminate any complexity that might give those who wanted to argue against her a chance to muddy the waters. She freely admits that the seed of the project was a questionnaire she sent to her sister members of the Smith College class of 1942 – hardly a representative sample of American women. She refers throughout to “suburban housewives,” and makes regular references to “an eastern suburb,” to Westchester, Rockland, Bergen and Nassau Counties and occasional references to Connecticut suburbs. The women she discusses have tried therapy, painting classes, beach clubs, volunteer work and a variety of other activities closely tied to class. It is difficult to read her discussion of how few married women work outside of the home, knowing that even in 1963 tens of thousands of women worked because their income was necessary – Friedan is exclusively interested in career as a form of self-actualization, not as a road out of poverty. She is talking about women who seem to have a choice and feel trapped by that illusion.
The same blind spot exists for race and ethnicity, and it is similarly purposeful. I only noticed one case when Friedan thought that a woman’s status as trapped was related to her religion – she seems to have been in an orthodox Jewish community. Friedan does not specifically exclude race as a factor, she simply never takes it up.
In the end, if one reads this as a contemporary discussion of feminist ideas, disappointment is inevitable. But it was never meant to summarize or even advance a movement. From Friedan’s perspective, there was no women’s movement to speak of in 1963 – she is trying to start one. She consistently refers to “feminism” as a thing of the past – referring to the suffrage movement that was forty years past reaching its goal. Collins points out that it was not only legal to discriminate in hiring, it was ordinary practice: most newspapers had separate job listings for men and women. In most states a woman could not apply for a credit card without a male co-signer and in many states, if a married women did have a job, her husband had legal control over her income. Friedan is not trying to describe the movement: she is trying to start it.
About a year after the book was published, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed sex discrimination. However, that aspect of the law was not immediately taken seriously. Many commentators believe that including sex with race, religion and national background was meant to scuttle the bill – so many believed that gender discrimination in the workplace was right and proper. Friedan and other women went to Washington to push for a more serious enforcement. After a day of frustrated meetings with male legislators and aides, they met for breakfast in Friedan’s hotel room and started the National Organization of Women.
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