The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique

Betty Friedan

Dedication

For all the new women,

and the new men

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction by Gail Collins

Preface and Acknowledgments

1 The Problem That Has No Name

2 The Happy Housewife Heroine

3 The Crisis in Woman's Identity

4 The Passionate Journey

5 The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud

6 The Functional Freeze, the Feminine Protest, and Margaret Mead

7 The Sex-Directed Educators

8 The Mistaken Choice

9 The Sexual Sell

10 Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available

11 The Sex-Seekers

12 Progressive Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp

13 The Forfeited Self

14 A New Life Plan for Women

Epilogue

Afterword by Anna Quindlen

Thinking Back and to the Future

Metamorphosis: Two Generations Later

Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

Notes

Index

Further praise for The Feminine Mystique

Copyright

Introduction

Gail Collins

E
very writer yearns to create a book that will seize the moment—to perfectly encapsulate the problem of an era before other people even notice the problem exists. Of course, that almost never happens. Mostly, we're happy if we can just manage to explain something people already know is going on in a rather interesting way. But Betty Friedan won the gold ring. When
The Feminine Mystique
emerged in 1963, it created a reaction so intense that Friedan could later write another book about the things women said to her about the first one (
It Changed My Life
). If there's a list of the most important books of the twentieth century,
The Feminine Mystique
is on it. It also made one conservative magazine's exclusive roundup of the “ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries,” which if not flattering is at least a testimony to the wallop it packed.

We're still reading it today. In
A Strange Stirring
, her book about
The Feminine Mystique
and its impact, Stephanie Coontz writes that her students “responded viscerally” to chapters like “The Sexual Sell” that spoke to their own feelings of being under pressure to buy consumer goods and “to present themselves as objects to be consumed.” And of course, if you want to understand what has happened to American women over the last half-century, their extraordinary journey from Doris Day to
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and beyond, you have to start with this book.

Critics—and many fans—feel obliged to point out the things that
The Feminine Mystique
ignores, and they are right to be a bit flummoxed that although Friedan was writing during the civil rights movement, she barely mentions African American women. Working-class women make their appearance mainly in a few suggestions that married women who want to work might want to hire a housekeeper or a nanny. And remarkably, Friedan managed to write a whole book indicting American society for its attitudes toward women without discussing its laws. In 1963, most women weren't able to get credit without a male cosigner. In some states they couldn't sit on juries; in others, their husbands had control not only of their property but also of their earnings. Although Friedan obsesses about women getting jobs, she does not mention that newspapers were allowed to divide their Help Wanted ads into categories for men and women, or that it was perfectly legal for an employer to announce that certain jobs were for men only. Even the federal government did it.

In a strange way, all those deficits are the book's strength.
The Feminine Mystique
is a very specific cry of rage about the way intelligent, well-educated women were kept out of the mainstream of American professional life and regarded as little more than a set of reproductive organs in heels. It is supremely, specifically personal, and that's what gives it such gut-punching power. Friedan had dropped out of her postgraduate studies because, she said, her academic success was threatening to her boyfriend. She was furious about the way the female college students of the next generation had been programmed to regard getting an MRS degree as the be-all and end-all of their experience in higher education. She was enraged by the way the psychiatric profession regarded housewives' unhappiness as a symptom of an out-of-whack libido. She was angry at the way the economy appeared to see her entire sex as simple consumption machines who built national prosperity by buying new appliances for the kitchen and searching madly for the perfect laundry detergent. And don't get her started on women's magazines. Friedan wrote for women's magazines, and she piles up one astonishingly awful example of the selling of the feminine mystique after another. There's one short story about a young woman who planned to “be something,” then married, wore out six copies of Dr. Spock's child-care book, and wound up declaiming: “I'm lucky! Lucky! I'M SO GLAD TO BE A WOMAN!” You really can envision the team from the mental hospital strapping her to a gurney.

Betty Friedan was born in 1921 and graduated from Smith College in the middle of World War II, so she watched with adult eyes when the postwar economy exploded, creating a mass middle class with a standard of living the planet had never before seen. By the time Friedan began writing her book, the majority of American families lived in homes they owned. They had cars and televisions, took vacations, and hoped to send their children to college. Jobs were easy to get—so much so that desperate employers were plotting ad campaigns that might convince married women that a nice part-time clerical or sales gig would be an excellent way to make “pin money” for extras for the house and kids. (During one of
The Feminine Mystique
's attempts to nag its readers into returning to the world of work, Friedan mentions a friend, a suburban housewife who had once been a journalist but was afraid she had been out of the newspaper business too long to get back in the game. “As it turned out, when she finally decided to do something about it, she found an excellent job in her old field after only two trips to the city,” Friedan writes breezily. At this point we will have to pause while all the aspiring young reporters out there who are now on their third unpaid internship beat their heads against the wall.)

It was a remarkable moment, and perhaps the first time in American history that the average person had both the means and the leisure to ask herself whether she was really happy. Friedan wasn't.

“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,” Friedan opened
The Feminine Mystique
. (Like almost all great books of the moment, it has an eternally quoted lead.) “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 sounds, in retrospect, a little whiny, but at the time it was an earthshaking query. For all of western history, average but ambitious women had dreamed of careers as full-time housewives. Working outside the home meant toiling in the fields, laboring in a factory or bar for a male employer or as a domestic for a female one. Being a stay-at-home housewife meant the chance for a woman to manage her own show. “I guess I just liked the freedom of being at home and not having someone tell me what to do,” a woman from Oklahoma once told me, explaining why she gave up her job as a bookkeeper to raise three children.

It was the promise of life as a full-time housewife that lured young Englishwomen to come to colonial America—jumping on very small boats to cross a very large ocean on the promise that they would find not just husbands but husbands who could set them up as stay-at-home wives. Often the recruitment propaganda wasn't true—most women who came to America found both husbands and lives that involved tilling the fields as well as spinning, sewing, cooking, canning, cheese making, candle making, and all the myriad manufacturing projects that were part of colonial house life. The work involved with keeping house was so enormous that even the women who were allowed to stay home full time were perpetually exhausted. The idea that they might have been able to run their own homes without hand laundering, soap making, chicken plucking, and all the other less than elevating parts of the job might have seemed like heaven itself.

And there were their great-great-great-great-granddaughters getting just that, and feeling extremely depressed.

The postwar suburbs were either heaven or hell for their inhabitants—endless stretches of brand-new houses on quarter-acre lots, occupied, during weekday hours, entirely by women and children. I grew up in one in Cincinnati, where the dads drove off to work every morning in what was then the only family car, leaving behind a land in which the only adult males were Tommy the milkman and Art, who drove an old bus that had been outfitted with shelves of groceries that he sold to the stranded housewives. The moms were busy, mainly with the several small kids, but they were not overworked. The high point of the day came at four or five, when the chores were done, dinner was in the oven, and the women could congregate in someone's kitchen or on the back porch to drink a cocktail and talk. In our house, at least, that was followed by my father's arrival home and a second cocktail hour, during which my parents discussed their day while the older children took the younger ones for endless walks in the stroller. One way in which Friedan's household did resemble the one where I grew up was in the drinking.

In
The Feminine Mystique
Friedan attempted to portray herself as the typical middle-class suburban housewife of the early '60s. But really, a Smith graduate who went to work for a series of left-wing and union newspapers in Manhattan before settling into matrimony and motherhood was no such thing. She was from a smaller cadre of women who had gone to college holding two self-images simultaneously: the future stay-at-home housewife and the serious student who cared about grades and reading lists and serious discussions, who took the same courses as the male students—or who, like Friedan, went to Smith and presumed her courses were actually harder. Then she was off to graduate school until the boy she was dating took her for a walk in the Berkeley hills and said, “Nothing can come of this, because I'll never win a fellowship like yours.” Friedan gave up her academic career, came east, and “lived in the present, working on newspapers with no particular plan. I married, had children, lived according to the feminine mystique as a suburban housewife.”

Did that really happen? Did that one remark from a jealous suitor really send Friedan off to New York and marriage to an entirely different man? It doesn't actually matter. What matters is that as a housewife—even one who kept writing freelance magazine articles on the side—Friedan was bored out of her mind. The difference between her era and the past, she understood, was that the nature of housework had changed when Americans moved from the farm to the cities, and then the suburbs. The farm wife had a crucial economic role in the family, which depended on her to manufacture the clothes, the soap, the candles, and the cheese; to grow the vegetables and raise the chickens; and to participate in the informal housewife economy where she could trade the things she made for other vital family supplies. The suburban housewife had no economic point at all, and modern appliances had stripped her of most of the time-consuming chores of the past as well. A woman's sense of self, Friedan wrote, “once rested on necessary work and achievement in the home.” But that vanished in an era when housework “is no longer really necessary or really uses much ability—in a country and at a time when women can be free, finally, to move on to something more.”

Friedan's analysis of what was bothering her turned into
The Feminine Mystique
. And when it hit the stands, women who were feeling bored and trapped by their perfect homes and marriages picked up the book and mentally repositioned themselves in the world. “Some of the women were outraged that
The Feminine Mystique
placed their choices into question, and others, like myself, felt at last they had been understood,” said Madeleine Kunin, who argued about it at her book club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was the wife of a medical student. (Kunin later went on to rejoin the working world herself. Like Friedan, she overachieved and eventually became governor of Vermont.)

As far as I know, none of the moms in my neighborhood read
The Feminine Mystique
. If they ever questioned their choices it was later, when an inherent flaw became apparent in the ideal suburban lifestyle that had been celebrated in all those women's magazines that drove Friedan nuts. The feminine mystique was built around the central feminine role as mother, but the first generation of suburbanites had their babies young, and the children were grown and gone while their role-deprived moms were still in the prime of their lives. We looked back from our new homes at college dorms and understood that this was an emptiness we had to protect ourselves against. Later, when we got our late-arriving hands on
The Feminine Mystique
, it was an
aha!
moment. Friedan's obsession about having a career—the one answer she seemed to grab at for every single problem—made perfect sense.

The Feminine Mystique
became the kind of bestseller that defines an author's life. In 1966, Friedan was researching another book in Washington when she wound up at a conference of state commissions on the status of women, where attendees were angry over the fact that the federal government had made it clear it had no intention of enforcing a law against job discrimination on the basis of sex that had been included in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (This is a good time to point out that
The Feminine Mystique
did not create the women's rights movement. Those commissions on the status of women were started by the Kennedy administration before it was published, and the Civil Rights Act was being debated in Congress while American housewives were still just starting to pass Friedan's book around.)

It was in Betty Friedan's hotel room that the angry conference-goers met to discuss what they should do when the Lyndon Johnson administration showed no interest in pursuing the issue. (Friedan was universally known as a difficult personality, and at one point she locked herself in the bathroom and told everyone to go home, but no one did.) And the next day, it was Friedan's coterie that angrily passed around notes at lunch, creating, on the spot, the National Organization for Women, which Friedan would head. It would be NOW, under Friedan, which would file court suits on behalf of exactly the kind of average, unglamorous, working women that
The Feminine Mystique
is always criticized for ignoring. And in 1970, it was Friedan who called for the great march to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the women's suffrage amendment, creating a mass turnout in cities around the country that would drive home to the nation exactly how determined women were to transform their lives and their society. In New York, the marchers were denied a parade permit for Fifth Avenue and were told to keep to the sidewalks. Friedan, at the head of the pack, took the lead again. “There was no way we were about to walk down Fifth Avenue in a little thin line,” she wrote later. “I waved my arms over my head and yelled, ‘Take to the street!' What a moment that was.”