Enter Helen (10 page)

“
The truth is that I've always been a bad-tempered bitch.”

—Betty Friedan,
Life So Far

A
few months before
Playboy
's April issue hit the stands, a young journalist from Ohio applied for one job that Helen Gurley Brown never could have landed, no matter how hard she tried: Playboy Bunny. Even with her wigs, false eyelashes, Pan-Cake, and padded bra, Helen simply didn't look the part. But Gloria Steinem did. Twenty-eight with dark brown hair, kohl eyes, and the killer legs of a Copa Girl, Steinem walked into Hugh Hefner's New York Playboy Club one brisk day in January 1963, carrying her leotard in a hatbox and a newspaper ad hyping the perks of being a Playboy Bunny: celebrity encounters, travel, and “
top money.”

Pretending to be a former waitress named Marie Catherine Ochs (a family name), Steinem told the woman who interviewed her that she had come to audition to work at the club. Indeed, she had, but her real mission was to go undercover as a Playboy Bunny and write about the seamy reality of the job for
Show
, a stylish monthly magazine covering the arts.

Steinem ended up training and working as a Bunny for about three weeks. Like the other women on her shift, she donned her cleavage-baring costume with its collar, cuffs, and tail, perfecting
her Bunny dip. Unlike the other Bunnies, she also took notes about the job's not-so-glamorous demands: grueling working conditions, a demerits system that left many girls broke, and the disturbing requirement that all Bunnies get a gynecological exam by a
Playboy
doctor.

The first installment of her witty, groundbreaking two-part series, “A Bunny's Tale,” ran in
Show
that May, followed by the second installment in June. And while the exposé was an instant sensation, it also created lasting problems for Steinem. Hours upon hours of wearing high heels and carrying heavy trays permanently enlarged her feet by half a size. Long after she turned in her costume,
Playboy
continued running her employee photograph out of spite. (In 1984,
Playboy
ran a different photo of Steinem, at age fifty, in which her breast was accidentally exposed.) In some circles, she became known as just another Playboy Bunny rather than as a serious journalist who had gone undercover for an assignment. It would be years before she felt proud of the article, realizing that, as she put it, “
all women are Bunnies.”

While Gloria's star was rising in New York, another journalist was igniting a new movement among women. Barely over five feet with salt-and-pepper hair, heavy-lidded brown eyes, and a nose that got her teased as a kid, Betty Friedan might as well have strapped a ton of dynamite under her housecoat: Her book
The Feminine Mystique
exploded onto the scene in February 1963, blasting a hole in the image of the happy housewife. Millions of women had fallen victim to an empty notion of femininity propagated by companies selling everything from washing machines to face creams, she argued. Marrying and having kids younger, they felt trapped in their homes, in their sex lives, and in their own bodies; and they grappled with an existential dread that she called The Problem That Has No Name.

“
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,” she wrote. “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?'”

It was a question that Betty Friedan, a mother of three, had asked herself.
Originally from Peoria, Illinois, Betty Goldstein (her maiden name) graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1942 and won a fellowship to the University of California, Berkeley, to study psychology. Instead of pursuing her Ph.D. in California, she moved to New York City, where she started writing for leftist publications and eventually met her husband, Carl Friedan, a summer-theater producer who later went into advertising. They married in 1947 and soon began building their family in Parkway Village, Queens. To friends they appeared to be a happy couple, but Carl was cheating on her. When Betty became pregnant with their second child—a condition that cost Friedan her job at a union newspaper—he began calling home from the office to say that he would be staying late. “
I later learned he was having an affair with a former girlfriend,” Betty Friedan wrote in her memoir,
Life So Far
. “I knew who she was. I sensed they'd been seeing each other and I felt desolate, deserted, betrayed, all those things.”

Carl was also abusive. In 1956 they moved to Rockland County, New York, for Carl's job (he eventually established his own advertising and public relations firm), settling into a beautiful but isolated old stone barn that they rented. In this rural setting with two kids and a third on the way, Betty became dependent on Carl
for adult companionship, and he depended on her to help out with expenses by taking on freelance writing assignments. “I must have gotten sharper with Carl about his deals, when we were so behind on our bills, or his not getting home for dinner,” she wrote in her memoir. “I seem to remember a sense of unspeakable horror; fear; I felt numb, until,
one night, he hit me. And he cried afterward, that first time.” (Carl later refuted her charges of physical abuse.)

It was around this difficult time that, in 1957,
Betty was asked to conduct a survey of her Smith classmates leading up to their fifteen-year reunion. Though she was hesitant at first—she felt guilty that she hadn't done more with her Smith education—Betty agreed to do the survey, largely because of a controversial book that had just come out called
Modern Women: The Lost Sex
. The authors, Freudian psychoanalyst Marynia Farnham and journalist Ferdinand Lundberg, argued that too much education was making American women unhappy at home. Fired up, Betty decided to use her Smith questionnaire findings to write a feature article for a major women's magazine—and
McCall's
wanted to run it.

Drawing on her background in both psychology and journalism, Betty threw herself into developing the questionnaire with Marion “Mario” Ingersoll Howell, the vice president of the Class of 1942, and another Smith classmate, Anne Mather Montero. After several brainstorming sessions, they came up with a list of questions that voiced many of Betty's own personal doubts and disappointments.
The final survey asked about marriage, sex, children, household chores, finances, reading habits, and religious and political beliefs, but it also featured more ambiguous categories, such as “The Other Part of Your Life” (“Did you have career ambitions?” “If your main occupation is homemaker, do you find it totally fulfilling?”) and one tellingly called “You, Personal” (“In
what ways have you changed inside as a person?” “What difficulties have you found in working out your role as a woman?”).

They eventually received two hundred responses from Betty's classmates. While they appeared to have picture-perfect lives with nice homes, husbands, and children, many of the interviewees said they felt depressed and trapped—they just didn't know why. Betty tried to publish an article about her findings, suggesting that it wasn't too much education that was making women unhappy, but rather their limited roles in society, but
McCall's
no longer wanted it. After a year of rewrites and rejections, Betty decided to write a book exposing the truth that no women's magazine dared to print. She had a much easier time finding a book publisher: Her agent sent her to Norton to meet an editor named George Brockway, who listened intently to her proposal for a book about American women's disillusionment with domestic life. As it happened, Brockway's wife, a graduate of Bryn Mawr, had just given birth to their thirteenth child. (A few years later, she went back to school and earned her Ph.D.)
After that meeting, Betty got a $3,000 book advance and began writing her book, which would take her several years to complete.

By the spring of 1963, dog-eared copies of
The Feminine Mystique
had made their way into suburban living rooms from Schenectady to Salt Lake City. Housewives recognized themselves in the book's portraits of women who didn't know the cause of their mysterious blisters or bouts of depression. “
Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets. Or she stays inside of her house and cries. Or her children tell her a joke, and she doesn't laugh because she doesn't hear it,” Friedan wrote. “I talked to women who had spent years on the analyst's couch, working out their ‘adjustment to the feminine role,' their blocks to ‘fulfillment as a wife and mother.'
But the desperate tone in these women's voices, and the look in their eyes, was the same as the tone and the look of other women, who were sure they had no problem, even though they did have a strange feeling of desperation.”

The Feminine Mystique
began with a question—“Is this all?”—and ended with a plan of action. The last chapter was titled “A New Life Plan for Women.” Women needed to stop pretending that housework was a career.
“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own,” Friedan wrote. “There is no other way.”

S
EVERAL MONTHS LATER
, Friedan's message embedded itself into Helen Gurley Brown's consciousness as she was writing and revising
Sex and the Office
. “
I'll tell you
this
,” Helen typed, addressing the legions of unhappy housewives, newly outed. “Women in offices never have to wonder who
they
are. They
know
who they are, and nobody lets them forget it!” A career girl didn't have to search for her identity, she argued: She was the secretary, the actress, or the executive. People needed her and depended on her.

But they also judged her. In 1963 the career woman was as maligned as the single girl had been two years before when Helen started writing
Sex and the Single Girl
. Helen had been looking for something to rail against, and she found it in the advice of Dr. Benjamin Spock, who suggested that working mothers were doing a disservice to their children; in the housewife who snarled over the career girl's success; in the working girl who dropped her job as soon as she found a husband; and in the blatant misogyny of writers like Philip Wylie, who authored a vicious article, “The Career Woman,” for
Playboy
's January 1963 issue. “They call her brilliant, this highly paid Circe,” Wylie wrote. “If she is, however, she is also, outside her career, more
ignorant than institutionalized Mongoloids. . . . On her throne she sits, this skirt-girt squid, the she-tycoon, caring only about herself and heedless of the damage she is doing to the national psyche.” (Two decades earlier, in his 1942 book,
Generation of Vipers
, the woman-bashing Wylie blamed society's ills on “momism,” a term he coined to describe the phenomenon of American mothers smothering and emasculating their sons.)

The realization that the career girl was the new single girl hit Helen like a rolling metal filing cabinet. The working woman was just the outcast du jour. Helen felt her plight deeply, the unfairness and the injustice of it, but she knew she had to be careful not to sound scolding, or else another Philip Wylie would come along and lump her in with the rest of the shrieking she-wolves. She had to be subtle. And witty. She had to make people laugh before they would listen. So, she wrote a little riddle.

“
We haven't been introduced though I may have been pointed out to you at parties,” she began. It's likely that she was talking to a group of men, and that the person doing the pointing was a woman, gossiping with a gaggle of other women. “I might as well stop playing ‘I've Got a Secret' and tell you who I am!” Helen wrote. “I'm one of those driven, compulsive, man-eating, penis-envying, emasculating, lacquered, female wolverines known as a career woman. Frankly . . . I've been about as much in vogue in recent years as rattan bedroom furniture. Rosalind Russell
used
to play me in movies of the Forties, but
nobody
wants to play me anymore.”

In her signature, snappy style, Helen went on to list twenty-four reasons why women should work, suggesting that instead of becoming professional housewives they consider becoming psychiatrists, nurses, schoolteachers, social workers, and medical professionals, as well as entering fields monopolized by men, like physics and engineering. The chapter “Come with Me to the Office” was
a clear invitation to women to follow her up the ladder, one rung at a time. Helen wanted it to be her first chapter, but it landed on Berney's desk with a thud. He was all for the sections on how to catch a man in the office, but for the most part he thought Helen was wasting space encouraging girls to get ahead in their careers. One day, he suggested, she could write a separate manual for the really ambitious girls.

“
Most girls—probably 90 per cent—who work in an office are
not
pyramid-climbers,” he told Helen in a letter. “You happened to belong to the 10 per cent.”

But Helen argued right back.
She was willing to tone down that chapter, not to lose it entirely. The book needed a cause beyond instructing office girls how to flirt—she wanted them to soar. The typical working girl felt sorry for herself, just as the single girl had before, she pointed out to Berney. She was all of eighteen when she took her first job at radio station KHJ in Hollywood to pay off her tuition for secretarial school. She worked because she had to, because she didn't have a choice, and at first it felt like just another punishment that poor girls had to endure. It wasn't until she landed at Foote, Cone & Belding that she found her calling and a boss who was willing to take a chance on her as a copywriter. And where would she be now if not for that chance?