Source of book: I own this
For the last several years, I have read a feminist book (usually a classic) for Women’s History Month in March. This year’s choice was The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, the founder of the National Organization for Women. You can find the rest of my selections here.
Before getting into the details, I wanted to give a bit of a summary and my opinion as to what works in this book and what doesn’t.
The term she uses in the title is essentially a version of the Cult of Domesticity from the Victorian Era - the belief that [white middle and upper class] women belong in the home, doing domestic duties, and birthing lots of [white] babies.
Friedan was part of the generation born in the 1920s, the first where women obtained college degrees in numbers never seen before. But then things went sideways, as she details in the book. With the soldiers returning from World War Two and needing jobs, women were systematically removed from the workforce and encouraged to be housewives and mothers and live the suburban [white] lifestyle that we associate with the 1950s.
This was driven not just by government policy, but by a massive cultural push and advertising campaign that painted this domesticity as the good life, the fulfilling life, the thing that all who could afford to should aspire to. After all, someone needed to buy those suburban houses and all the household crap that they could hold - capitalism depended upon it!
This all sounds far too familiar to me, because my parents’ generation, the Baby Boomers, were born during this time, and created a nostalgic return to this domesticity for my own childhood - although by that time, it was no longer a universal American cultural thing, but instead had religious baggage - and religious consumerism - driving it.
This idea in the book works very well, is well researched, and resonates today. Friedan’s diagnosis that women (like all humans) need a purpose in life beyond parenting and the drudgery of housework is not just true but amply supported by evidence. To see the horseshit we were fed in our childhoods by the Christian Patriarchy Industrial Complex spelled out as this combination of racial anxiety and consumerism is eye-opening.
That said, there are some issues with the book as well. Friedan has rightly been criticized for the book’s focus on white, middle-class women. This is more of a blind spot than an outright problem with her views - intersectionality hadn’t caught on back in the 1960s, and the book isn’t overtly racist. (Which is more than I could say about those who led the backlash against the book - from Phyllis Schlafly to James Dobson - who were pretty open about their racism then and now.)
The problem is thus more of a myopic and incomplete understanding of the various ways that patriarchy and misogyny affect different kinds of women - and the burdens imposed on minority women that serve to support the suburban lifestyle she criticizes. What I would say is to read this book with its blind spots in mind, and add additional reading from a less white and middle-class perspective as well.
More problematic for me is Friedan’s very dated views of a few issues. First, her understanding of human sexuality is rooted in 1930s psychology, which viewed homosexuality as a mental illness. While she is not as homophobic as most writers of her era, she still has the baggage of seeing lesbian relationships as “less than” and undesirable.
Likewise, she predates the understanding of male homosexuality as an inborn trait, not something caused by a smothering mother. (Even Exodus International - the notorious proponent of “conversion therapy” later backtracked and apologized for blaming parents, given the utter lack of evidence of a connection.) She also claims an increase in homosexuality that she attributes not to decriminalization but to the feminine mystique. Again, this claim hasn’t held up over time.
There are also some really bizarre things about mental illness from the era - a conflation of autism and schizophrenia, depression and schizophrenia, and some other head-scratchers. I didn’t go back and research how much of this was mainstream, but I suspect it probably was. So definitely assume that when Friedan talks about actual mental conditions, she is likely not accurate by modern standards. She is much better when talking about the mental health consequences women suffer from being denied intellectual outlets and participation in all areas of society - she gets that part right for sure.
Finally, there is a tendency in this book to use lazy generalizations when it comes to younger people. This is nothing new, and it is likely so ingrained in human nature that it will always be the case. There were definitely times I wanted to say “Okay, Silent Generation” to her.
As far as my other impressions of the book, I will say that there were times I found her writing style to be irritating, although I can’t really put my finger on why. It’s just something stylistic that many books from the 1960s have - it’s not just her - that grates on me somehow. This, combined with the length of the book, and the heavy ideas it contains, combined to cause me to take two months to read it - I’m usually faster at getting through books.
Despite this feeling about the style, I will concede that for the most part, Friedan does an excellent job of conveying her ideas clearly, and her arguments are well thought out and supported by evidence. There were a lot of times that I had a light come on about the reiteration of the Mystique in my own family and subculture - particularly the link with consumerism and the need to sell stuff people don’t need.
So, with that out of the way, let’s dive into the book itself.
My copy is a library hardback 50th Anniversary edition. The introduction is by Gail Collins, and has some interesting things to say.
To start with, something that I was well aware of, but which might not be known to those outside of the Religious Right bubble: The Feminine Mystique is consistently listed in Right Wing lists of “ten most harmful books.” This is, naturally, one of the reasons I wanted to read it.
As I have been discovering over the course of my life, pretty much everything I was taught in that subculture was horseshit on a stick - and horseshit with a nasty political agenda behind it. In this case, the book makes a well-supported argument that women do not exist merely to be mothers and wives and do housework. That this is controversial to the Right is telling. It explains their real view of women as essentially sub-human breeders. This is also why, as I have noted in previous posts, my mom chose to destroy her relationship with my wife rather than reconsider the truth of the Mystique and the Cult of Domesticity.
The introduction also notes that the Cult of Domesticity is actually a relatively recent development, and was one of the responses to industrialization and urbanization.
The difference between her era and that 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 the most time-consuming chores of the past as well.
This then combined with other factors to place women - particularly middle-aged ones - in a bad position.
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.
My mom was all of age 44 when her youngest turned 18. That’s a lot of life left.
Next up, the book itself. Friedan starts by setting out her case both for the malaise affecting middle-aged women (like herself - part of the power of the book is that it is deeply personal) and for its cause. Young girls and women were sold a bill of goods.
They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights - the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for.
And they were also taught that the only way to be happy was to surrender one’s self to motherhood. If she didn’t feel happy or fulfilled, it was her fault, not the fault of the system. Friedan mentions as well the role of religion here - women would be happy by “handing one’s self and one’s will over to God.”
As in the subculture I grew up in, the mainstream white culture (mostly dominated by men, of course) shrugged at the growing evidence of women suffering under these demands. Newsweek asked what was wrong with American women that they couldn’t just accept their role gracefully.
Friedan placed a lot of blame on magazines generally for their role in creating the problem. In one particularly depressing passage, she lists the complete contents of McCall’s for July of 1960. I don’t know what was more saddening: the dreary list of vapid articles, or the fact that this is still what you find in magazines and online today.
I applaud Friedan for making one excellent connection regarding racism. She compares the drive to push women back into the home with the goal of making lots of [white] babies to Hitler’s very similar campaign, with the slogan “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche.” (“Children, Kitchen, Church” - 100% the same thing as Christian Patriarchy - and also, as we are learning, tied to our own modern fascist movement.)
To support this idea, pseudoscience was enlisted to “prove” that women were designed for a solely domestic role. And yes, every single one of these is pushed in the Christian Patriarchy subculture.
The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity. It says the greatest mistake of Western culture, through most of its history, has been the undervaluation of this femininity. It says this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that man-made science may never be able to understand it. But however special and different, it is in no way inferior to the nature of man; it may even in certain respects be superior. The mistake, says the mystique, the root of women’s troubles in the past is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, “which can find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.”
The obvious question, of course, is why, if this is what is “natural” to women, has it been necessary to set up entire industries to convince (or force) women to embrace these roles? If women loved it so much, why do they have to be forced?
Also obvious here is who benefits: a combination of men (at least the wealthier ones), the wives of said wealthy men, and the industries that profit off of the mystique.
Friedan, who, prior to writing this book, wrote articles for magazines, many of which were rejected for being “too intellectual for women,” noted that the reason magazines tended to push the mystique was that the writers and editors were mostly men. After the war, women were pushed out, and the content changed accordingly.
I also loved Friedan’s snark that women who picture themselves as housewives (despite actually having careers) tend to overlook the housekeepers and maids who actually do the work for them. I’m certainly thinking here of Phyllis Schlafly and her nannies and housekeepers, but this applies to most of the women who push Christian Patriarchy today. And a lot of middle-class women who hire immigrant women to clean their houses.
Later, Friedan takes on some of Margaret Mead’s ideas about the role of women, and points out the hypocrisy.
The role of Margaret Mead as the professional spokesman of femininity would have been less important if American women had taken the example of her own life, instead of listening to what she said in her books.
Again, fill in the name of literally every female writer within Christian Patriarchy.
This next passage is outstanding, and truly clarifies the difference between the subculture I was raised in, and my current feminist views.
Thus the logic of the feminine mystique redefined the very nature of woman’s problems. When woman was seen as a human being of limitless potential, equal to man, anything that kept her from realizing her full potential was a problem to be solved: barriers to higher education and political participation, discrimination or prejudice in law or morality. But now that woman is seen only in terms of her sexual role, the barriers to the realization of her full potential, the prejudices which deny her full participation in the world, are no longer problems. The only problems are those that might disturb her adjustment as a housewife. So career is a problem, education is a problem, political interest, even the very admission of women’s intelligence and individuality is a problem.
Yep, this was the subculture. Ironically, my parents let my sister have her choice of a normal college education, while my brother and I were forced into the only opportunity the Cult allowed. But this switch from how to change society to allow women full participation to how to make women “adjust” to their limited roles is at the core of the two worldviews. One sees women as fully human, the other as a “breeder.”
I think this was one of the epiphanies I had reading this book. It is easy to miss that the Cult of Domesticity is really all about seeing women as little more than their sexuality. Their sexual role is to reproduce humans. Their role in sex and reproduction is not merely their destiny but their reason for existence, their sole purpose in life. Oof. So much for the idea that it is secular liberals who are obsessed with sex…
Very sad as well were the passages where Friedan talks with young women - educated young women who have lost the fervor for education and a purpose in life due to the mystique.
One says, “You know they’re not going to use their education. They’ll be wives and mothers.” And another, after marriage and children, “I thought my own growth and evolution were over.”
I have heard these from young women in the subculture all too often. And also have observed how many women stop growing and evolving (particularly in a positive way) after marriage and children. It’s like that part of life is over for them, and life is now about perpetuating the mystique and controlling their adult children, rather than finding a purpose in life beyond motherhood.
Friedan notes that part of normal human development is that of growing up and choosing an identity. She quotes psychologist Erik Erkison:
“I have called the major crisis of adolescence the identity crisis; it occurs in that period of the life cycle when each youth must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity, out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood; he must detect some meaningful resemblance between what he has come to see in himself and what his sharpened awareness tells him others judge and expect him to be.”
This is, of course, expected of young men. But it hasn’t necessarily been applied to young women. Their role and identity have already been determined for them: they are to be wives and mothers, and the rest gets in the way of that.
One of my favorite chapters in the book addresses the slander that patriarchists level at feminists: that they are man-hating.
It is a strangely unquestioned perversion of history that the passion and fire of the feminist movement came from man-hating, embittered, sex-starved spinsters, from castrating, unsexed non-women who burned with such envy for the male organ that they wanted to take it away from all men, or destroy them, demanding rights only because they lacked the power to love as women.
Friedan goes on to make a long list of famous feminists who were not only married, but who dared to show passionate love to their husbands in an age when this was frowned upon in women.
I would also add not only my own marriage to a passionately feminist woman, but the examples of so many of my friends. Ironically, my feminist friends tend to be quite devoted to and nurturing of their partners, while the women who complain constantly about their husbands tend invariably to be conservative or even anti-feminist. It is enough of a pattern to show a strong correlation.
Likewise, Friedan notes that it is a myth - a slander really - that claims that women would use their new-found rights for “vengeful domination of man.” In reality, giving women the right to education, their own property, and the right to a career hasn’t led to men being mistreated. If anything, women who are happier and more fulfilled tend to be less hostile toward men. (For an extreme example, women who have their own income tend to reject partners who are violent toward them, and thus tend to have happier feelings about their partners - beating is hardly a way to earn the love of another human.)
More about this later - she talks about how much better an equal partnership makes marriage, love, and sex.
Like Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, Friedan takes aim at Freud, who, for all of his insights, was hopeless when it came to understanding women.
Freud, it is generally agreed, was a most perceptive and accurate observer of important problems of the human personality. But in describing and interpreting these problems, he was a prisoner of his own culture. As he was creating a new framework for our culture, he could not escape the framework of his own.
This is a problem for all of us, but it is on-point for Freud, and the best explanation for how he missed things that seem obvious. I might also add that this is an ongoing mistake religious fundamentalists keep making - trying to interpret ancient writings without a full knowledge of that culture, and then imposing the cultural framework rather than the meaning.
Speaking of cultural frameworks, she challenges that of her own. Particularly the idea that maintaining existing cultural roles and hierarchies is a valid goal. If you assume that maintaining the current gender roles is of itself the goal, then you cannot even consider alternatives. But maintaining the status quo is not necessarily good - the status quo is often quite unjust, so defending it (such as defending slavery) is merely to perpetuate the injustice.
For to limit one’s field of inquiry to the function of an institution in a given social system, with no alternatives considered, provides an infinite number of rationalizations for all the inequalities and inequities of that system.
So, for women, as for the enslaved, those in power seek to find ways to make the oppressed “adjust” to their oppression. Friedan describes the consequences.
Unfortunately, the female objects of functional analysis were profoundly affected by it. At a time of great change for women, at a time when education, science, and social change should have helped women bridge the change, functionalism transformed “what is” for women, or “what was,” to “what should be.” Those who perpetrated the feminine protest, and made more of being a woman than it can ever be, in the name of functionalism of for whatever complex of personal and intellectual reasons, closed the door of the future on women. In all the concern for adjustment, one truth was forgotten: women were being adjusted to a state inferior to their full capabilities. The functionalists did not wholly accept the Freudian argument that “anatomy is destiny,” but they accepted whole-heartedly an equally restrictive definition of woman: woman is what society says she is. And most of the functional anthropologists studied societies in which woman’s destiny was defined by anatomy.
Friedan saw this as a problem which was now extending to education, where boys were encouraged to grow into full humans, while girls were sidelined into “wife and mother.” She shares an interesting quote from Nevitt Sanford on the goal of education, which I generally agree with.
Education should and can, make a person “broad in outlook, and open to new experience, independent and disciplined in his thinking, deeply committed to some productive activity, possessed of convictions based on understanding of the world and his own integration of personality.”
Later, the book addresses what Friedan sees as on factor that led to the pushing of the feminine mystique. They had undergone trauma and wished to retreat to the womb, to the comforts of mommy. So women were given the expectation of re-creating childhood this way in their own homes.
There was, just before the feminine mystique took hold in America, a war, which followed a depression and ended with the explosion of an atom bomb. After the loneliness of war and the unspeakableness of the bomb, against the frightening uncertainty, the cold immensity of the changing world, women as well as men sought the comforting reality of home and children.
Another fascinating passage is on what this meant for the children of these mothers. While every family is different, and not every symptom occurred in every family, I definitely recognize the phenomenon of a mother who, since children are expected to be her entire identity, becomes enmeshed with her children, and focuses her entire self-worth on how those children “turned out.” Which means, of course, the need to control.
In my own case, this means that even now, I am pressured to feel that I am responsible for my parents’ feelings, that I have to continue to avoid any pushback that might make them feel bad. Because they sacrificed for me, I owe them - still in my 40s - quiet obedience.
As I noted before, one of the strongest chapters in the book is the one that ties the feminine mystique of the 1950s to consumerism.
Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house.
The technique is clear: by keeping women in the home, with a lack of purpose in their lives, they are vulnerable to advertising. Maybe this gadget or this decoration will bring purpose. And believe me, she goes through the advertising slogans and campaigns thoroughly, showing how this is exactly how stuff was marketed. (And still is, although rarely as blatantly these days.) She also talks to ad executives who share their secrets.
Properly manipulated…American housewives can be given the sense of identity, purpose, creativity, the self-realization, even the sexual joy they lack - by the buying of things.
This is not to say that men aren’t vulnerable too - they definitely are. But even back in the 1950s women were considered to have control of three-quarters of all household spending. And, to capture the market, you start with the young.
It was discovered that young wives, who had only been to high school and had never worked, were more “insecure,” less independent, easier to sell. These young people could be told that, by buying the right things, they could achieve middle-class status, without work or study.
The problem with this “fulfillment” by femininity is that it is temporary. You always need the next thing. Even if you leave out the commercialism, there is still the fact that being a mommy is only temporary.
The chapter on how housework has expanded to fill the available time, despite all the labor-saving devices and smaller families, is excellent. There is too much to summarize there, but it is something I have thought about a lot.
Toying with the question, how can one hour of housework expand to fill six hours (same house, same work, same wife), I came back again to the basic paradox of the feminine mystique: that it emerged to glorify woman’s role as housewife at the very moment when the barriers to her full participation in society were lowered, at the very moment when science and education and her own ingenuity made it possible for a woman to be both wife and mother and to take an active part in the world outside the home. The glorification of “woman’s role,” then, seems to be in proportion to society’s reluctance to treat women as complete human beings; for the less real function a role has, the more it is decorated with meaningless details to conceal its emptiness.
Friedan further notes that this applies to past ages for wealthy women - the less they had to do, the less important their role, the more an elaborate system of details was created.
In reality, most housework - including the stuff that takes the most time - is not difficult work requiring intelligence. Friedan points out that most 8-year-old children can do it. (And actually, our children did, starting with some jobs before that. As did my wife and I when we were that age.) With a bit of time spent, anyone in the household - and by that I mean everyone - can get it done. It only becomes an all-consuming job when it is made to be so.
One of the other things that has filled the gap is homeschooling - and the religious (and very racial) culture wars that followed. But even there, if your identity is “mommy,” it will end. As one person Friedan interviewed put it:
“When I’m pregnant and the babies are little, I’m somebody, finally, a mother. But then, they get older. I can’t just keep on having babies.”
This hits really close to home. When I was little, my mom found a lot of fulfillment in being a parent. But as I got older and more independent, we clashed a lot more, and after puberty, I no longer served the role I was expected to - of giving her life meaning and validating her choices.
So, as I got toward adulthood, my parents tried to have another baby. Looking back, I kind of get why. It was a questionable (and unsuccessful) choice, but I see why it would be attractive.
There is also a chapter on sex, and the ways that Friedan thinks the feminine mystique has ruined it. I think she is on to something: just a perusal of all the crap put out about sex in patriarchal circles is enough evidence that for the most part, Evangelicals are having terrible sex in terrible marriages.
It also has spilled over into the broader culture. Check out any women’s magazine, and it is everywhere - the sex advice, the techniques, which indicate a lack of pleasure and excitement.
She also talks about a phenomenon that I have seen all too often: when motherhood becomes the source of identity, men often see their wives as mothers rather than lovers. And then, as the author puts it, he seeks out a “girl-child, a Lolita, as sexual object.”
In addition, because a woman must live through her husband, find her purpose in him, this puts men in an impossible burden, leading to resentment. Her analysis is mostly solid here (with the exception of her issues regarding LGBTQ people.)
Another facet of this is explored in the book: the way that women will choose sex (and often marriage) as an escape from responsibility. This choice isn’t generally available to men - you can’t marry to avoid having to get a job in most cases.
A psychiatrist consultant for Harvard-Radcliffe students recently pointed out that college girls often seek “security” in these intense sexual relationships because of their own feelings of inadequacy, when, probably for the first time in their lives, they have to work hard, face real competition, think actively instead of passively - which is “not only a strange experience, but almost akin to physical pain.”
This seems to be the case for both my mother (who married at 19) and my sister (who got engaged while in college and has never held a full-time job.) But also, in my legal practice, I experience many of these women who have never had to support themselves being shocked and furious at having to get a job after a divorce.
The book then looks at the forfeiting of self that the feminine mystique requires. Maslow, who I have come to admire more and more over the years, features prominently. This passage is particularly good.
In our culture, the development of women has been blocked at the psychological level with, in many cases, no need recognized higher than the need for love or sexual satisfaction. Even the need for self-respect, for self-esteem and for the esteem of others - “the desire for strength, for achievement, for adequacy, for mastery and competence, for confidence in the face of the world, and for independence and freedom” - is not clearly recognized for women. But certainly the thwarting of the need for self-esteem, which produces feelings of inferiority, of weakness, and of helplessness in man, can only be based on real capacity, competence, and achievement; on deserved respect from others rather than unwarranted adulation. Despite the glorification of “Occupation: housewife,” if that occupation does not demand, or permit, realization of woman’s full abilities, it cannot provide adequate self-esteem, much less pave the way to a higher level of self-realization.
This is so very true. And the lack of earned respect often manifests itself in self-delusion - the Dunning Kruger Syndrome wherein the incompetent and ignorant consider themselves above average.
In contrast, Maslow talks about how egalitarian relationships lead to far greater happiness. I can attest to that, as my egalitarian marriage to a true equal, with her own individuality and personhood - and her own career and interests - has drawn us together and yet also strengthened us as individuals.
In our society, love has customarily been defined, at least for women, as a complete merging of egos and a loss of separateness - “togetherness,” a giving up of individuality rather than a strengthening of it. But in the love of self-actualizing people, Maslow found that the individuality is strengthened, that “the ego is in one sense merged with another, but yet in another sense remains separate and strong as always. The two tendencies, to transcend individuality and to sharpen and strengthen it, must be seen as partners and not as contradictory.”
To quote from one of my favorite songwriters, Clint Black:
We help to make each other all that we can be
Though we can find our strength and inspiration independently
The way we work together is what sets our love apart
So closely that you can't tell where I end and where you start
Yes, that was one of “our” songs when we were dating. And, unlike a lot of the beliefs we hadn’t shed yet from our fundamentalist upbringings, this one has aged really well. He gets the paradox, the way that individuality and mutuality are both necessary and related.
The final chapter is on what Friedan calls her new life plan for women. But it really is for both women and men, because for women to become fully human, they need to be released from the sole burden of unpaid domestic labor. This means men need to step up and do the drudge work too. Not all of it in most cases, but an equal share.
Friedan does believe - and I agree in most cases - that women need something outside of the family that both brings in a separate income (for financial independence as well as family security - trust me on that second one - my wife’s earnings kept us afloat during the pandemic) and gives her fulfillment.
For the women I interviewed who had suffered and solved the problem that has no name, to fulfill an ambition of their own, long buried or brand new, to work at top capacity, to have a sense of achievement, was like finding a missing piece in the puzzle of their lives. The money they earned often made life easier for the whole family, but none of them pretended this was the only reason they worked, or the main thing they got out of it. That sense of being complete and fully a part of the world - “no longer an island, part of the mainland” - had come back. They knew that it did not come from the work alone, but from the whole - their marriage, homes, children, work, their changing, growing links with the community.
For both men and women, it comes from the whole. It is unhealthy for a man (or a woman) to put his entire self-worth into his salary. And it is unhealthy for a woman (or a man) to put her entire self-worth into domesticity. Friedan notes one reason why:
When women take their education and their abilities seriously and put them to use, ultimately they have to compete with men. It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all.
Believe me, I have seen all three of these at work. I believe a significant reason why my wife and I, despite both having strong personalities, do not fight for dominance, and instead work well as a team, is that we each have our outside lives, our own challenges away from each other, and our own areas of competence.
Friedan also says something that still needs to be said:
It also is time to stop giving lip service to the idea that there are no battles left to be fought for women in America, that women’s rights have already been won. It is ridiculous to tell girls to keep quiet when they enter a new field, or an old one, so the men will not notice they are there. In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination - tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.
That last line is excellent, and applies as well to minorities of all sorts as well as women. Do not “adjust.” Fight back.
There are several additional sections at the back of the book. The Epilogue was written by the author some years after the book was published. It wasn’t clear exactly when, but in the interim, she had gone back to school for her degree, divorced her unsupportive husband, and founded NOW. She noted that one of the surprising results was that while men weren’t hostile toward her, women were, and she lost a number of friends and acquaintances as a result.
This tracks a bit with my own experience. The women in my life have been far more hostile toward my wife’s career than the men. This is not to say that all or even most of the people I know are hostile - quite the contrary: I tend to hang around people who are mainstream these days, rather than Fundies. But nearly all of the the hostility (and nastiness) has come from women. Friedan has a theory.
At first, that strange hostility my book - and lather the movement - seemed to elicit from some women amazed and puzzled me. Even in the beginning, there wasn’t the hostility I had expected from men. Many men bought The Feminine Mystique for their wives and urged them to go back to school or to work. I realized soon enough that there were probably millions of women who had felt as I had, like a freak, absolutely alone, as a suburban housewife. But if you were afraid to face your real feelings about the husband and children you were presumably living for, then someone like me opening up the can of worms was a menace.
I think this is plausible. I think a lot of mothers resent their children, but can’t bear to admit it. I mean, it makes any parent feel like a bad person to admit that, right? That they don’t absolutely love their children all the time and in every way? I have wondered how much of the hostility my mom showed to my wife has that as a factor. I was a difficult child - a sickly infant, an attention-demanding child, a teen with a mouth - and I do think she resented me more than she would ever admit.
I think too there is a fear of change and risk - going back to school or work after twenty years away is intimidating. I certainly have seen this fear in action in my divorce cases - but I also have noticed that when women take the plunge, and get back in the workforce, they actually tend to thrive and are happier than they were before.
She also returns to Margaret Mead in her passage about the recommendations made in 1965 to the President’s Commission on the Status of Women as to how to best work toward equality for women. Mead opposed the recommendations, pulling a Schlafly in worrying about who would care for the children (all while she was working and farming out the childcare.) Again, Friedan’s diagnosis is perceptive:
Perhaps women who have made it as “exceptional” women don’t really identify with other women. For them, there are three classes of people: men, other women, and themselves; their very status as exceptional women depends on keeping other women quiet, and not rocking the boat.
I also wholeheartedly agree with her prescription for what needs to change in society for women to be equal. It isn’t enough for women to have access to education and careers. The expectation that they do the unpaid drudge labor of our society needs to change as well. All of us should bear that responsibility.
There is only one way for women to reach full human potential - by participating in the mainstream of society, by exercising their own voice in all the decisions shaping that society. For women to have full identity and freedom, they must have economic independence. Breaking through the barriers that had kept them from the jobs and professions rewarded by society was the first step, but it wasn’t sufficient. It would be necessary to restructure professions, marriage, the family, the home. The manner in which offices and hospitals are structured, along the rigid, separate, unequal, unbridgeable lines of secretary/executive, nurse/doctor, embodies and perpetuates the feminine mystique. But the economic part would never be complete unless a dollar value was somehow put on the work done by women in the home, at least in terms of social security, pensions, retirement pay. And housework and child rearing would have to be more equally shared by husband, wife, and society.
This is something my wife and I have tried to live out as best we can - I have always shared in the child care and housework, and she has always shared in the breadwinning. How we have split things has changed over time, and we have adjusted to changes in circumstances, including the pandemic and its disruptions.
I want to briefly mention the two additional appendages. Anna Quindlen wrote an Afterword for this edition, and I liked her note that the consumerism that Friedan describes exists in large part to reinforce existing social strata in America. To perpetuate the divide between rich and poor, white and black.
Finally, in her 1997 musing on the book, Friedan makes a bold prediction that has very much come true. She saw the economic devastation of the middle class caused by the Reagan policies as the single biggest threat to women’s rights. By removing the economic power and security from men, corporate greed and power would encourage men to blame women (and immigrants and minorities) for their loss of status, and seek to “put women back in their place.” And lo and behold, MAGA came on the scene with just that message.
So, while I think the book has some flaws, the core ideas hold up very well, and Friedan saw through a lot of the bullshit to see the ways that gender roles serve consumerism, reinforce class inequality, and ultimately harm all of us.
