The Essential Neruda

Source of book: I own this

 

It has been over a decade since I read my first Neruda collection - a library version translated by Ben Belitt - and nine years since my brother-in-law gifted me this City Lights edition. It is fascinating to make the comparison, since the books are very different. 

 There are several different covers for this book - I have the boring red one. 

This one is definitely the best.

This particular collection was edited by Mark Eisner (who also translates a few of the poems), but the poems themselves are translated by eight different people, each of who has a unique approach. I’ll mention the introduction as one of the best things I have ever read about the art of translation and the impossibility of ever making the “definitive” version. 

 

The other thing that is odd is just how few of the poems overlap. Gone are most of the food poems I highlighted in the previous post, and instead there are a wide variety of other poems. Even from the same original collections, the editors have selected different poems to feature. I suppose this is evidence of the way that Neruda speaks differently to each of us. 

 

The poems selected range from early ones to posthumous releases, and are in a variety of forms and styles. Eisner has done an admirable job of capturing a broad picture of Neruda’s career and art. 

 

As a person, Neruda has become somewhat controversial, largely because of a passage in his memoirs where he describes a sexual encounter with a maid that sounds at least borderline non-consensual. There is also evidence that, like too many men of his generation (and, sadly, Latino male writers in particular) who were less than admirable in their personal treatment of women. 

 

On the other side, right wingers hate him for his communist politics - he praised Stalin long after other leftists realized he was a brutal thug, although he eventually changed his mind. 

 

Even his death is controversial. It appears he was suffering from prostate cancer, and most likely died of heart issues. However, there is enough evidence to at least raise the suspicion that he was murdered by the fascist Pinochet regime - his body was exhumed years later, although the autopsy results failed to reveal a poisoning. There is no doubt that he was on his way to exile at the time, and Pinochet had every reason to want him dead. (For authoritarians of all stripes, left or right, the arts are seen mostly as an impediment to power.) 

 

The complexity of Neruda’s life and legacy is one that so many great artists share. As a musician, for example, I play the works of a number of artists who were less than stellar in their personal life. Wagner was a womanizer and an antisemite, Richard Strauss was a nazi party member, Verdi starved his peasant workers, and so on. 

 

The same goes for literature, naturally. If you want to get really picky, nearly all white males of a certain era (famous or otherwise) harbored views about women and minorities that are pretty horrifying. While being of a certain time doesn’t excuse toxic views or behaviors, people do need to be evaluated in context, or nearly everyone (including us to future generations) would be discarded for our inevitable flaws. 

 

For writers like Neruda, I try to acknowledge the issues, but evaluate the art on its own terms. Thus, his pro-communist poems have generally tended to be sidelined as less than his best, while his more universal poems have justly been deemed masterpieces. 

 

On that note, let’s start with one of his political poems which has aged well. 

 

The United Fruit Company

 

When the trumpet sounded, everything

on earth was prepared

and Jehovah distributed the world

to Coca Cola Inc., Anaconda,

Ford Motors, and other entities; 

The Fruit Company Inc.

reserved the juiciest for itself,

the central coast of my land,

the sweet waist of America.

It re-baptized the lands

“Banana Republics”

and on the sleeping dead,

on  the restless heroes

who’d conquered greatness,

liberty and flags,

it founded a comic opera:

it alienated free wills,

gave crowns of Caesar as gifts,

unsheathed jealousy, attracted

the dictatorship of the flies,

Trujillo flies, Tachos flies

Carias flies, Martinez flies,

Ubico flies, flies soppy 

with humble blood and marmalade,

drunken flies that buzz around common graves,

circus flies, learned flies

adept at tyranny. 

 

The Company disembarks

among the bloodthirsty flies,

brim-filling their boards that slide

with the coffee and fruit treasure

of our submerged lands like trays.

 

Meanwhile, along the sugared-up 

abysms of the ports,

indians fall over, buried 

in the morning mist:

a body rolls, a thing

without a name, a fallen number,

a bunch of dead fruit 

spills into the pile of rot.

 

(translated by Jack Hirschman) 

 

In relation to this, I highly recommend Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer. The history of the United States destroying democracy abroad to benefit its corporations is depressing. 

 

Next up is a delicious and erotic love poem, translated by Eisner, who captures the rhythm of the original, even though he doesn’t preserve the rhyme. Neruda’s skill in the unexpected metaphor is on full display in this early poem. 

 

Body of a Woman

 

Body of woman, white hills, white thighs,

you look like the world in your attitude of giving.

My savage peasant body plows through you

and makes the son surge from the depths of the earth.

 

I went alone as a tunnel. Birds fled from me,

I was invaded by the power of the night. 

To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,

like an arrow in my bow, like a stone in my sling.

 

But the hour of vengeance strikes, and I love you.

Body of skin, of moss, of ardent, constant milk.

Ah the chalices of the breasts! Ah the eyes of absence!

Ah the roses of the pubis! Ah your voice slow and sad!

 

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.

My thirst, my infinite anguish, my indecisive path!

Dark riverbeds where eternal thirst follows,

And fatigue follows, and infinite sorrow. 

 

This poem is part of a collection entitled “Twenty Love Poems.” Another poem from that collection is one of my all-time favorites. This one is also translated by Eisner, although I will give props to M. S. Merwin for another gorgeous translation of this particular poem - which is how I discovered it some time ago. 

 

I can write the saddest verses

 

I can write the saddest verses tonight.

 

Write, for example, “The night is full of stars, 

            twinkling blue, in the distance.”

 

The night wind spins in the sky and sings.

 

I can write the saddest verses tonight.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

 

On nights like this I held her in my arms.

I kissed her so many times beneath the infinite sky.

 

She loved me, at times I loved her too.

How not to have loved her great still eyes. 

 

I can write the saddest verses tonight.

To think that I don’t have her. To feel that I have lost her.

 

To hear the immense night, more immense without her. 

And the verse falls onto my soul like dew onto grass.

 

What difference that my love could not keep her.

The night is full of stars, and she is not with me. 

 

That’s all. In the distance, someone sings. In the distance.

My soul is not at peace with having lost her.

 

As if to bring her closer, my gaze searches for her,

My heart searches for her, and she is not with me.

 

The same night that whitens the same trees.

We, of then, are no longer the same.

 

I no longer love her, it’s true, but how much I loved her.

My voice searched for the wind that would touch her ear.

 

Another’s. She will be another’s. As before my kisses.

Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

 

I no longer love here, it’s true, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, and forgetting is so long.

 

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,

my soul is not at peace with having lost her.

 

Though this may be the final sorrow she causes me,

and these the last verses I write for her. 

 

Such a beautiful and achingly sad poem. 

 

The next one is more or less a sonnet - even in the original (this version has both English and Spanish), the rhymes aren’t exactly correct, even if the form is otherwise that of a sonnet. The repeated “and” (“y”) are in the original as well. 

 

System of Gloom

 

From every one of these days black as old iron,

and opened up by the sun like big red oxen,

and barely kept alive by air and by dreams,

and suddenly and irremediably vanished,

nothing has taken the place of my troubled beginnings,

and the unequal measures pumping through my heart

are forged there day and night, all by themselves,

adding up to messy and miserable sums.

 

So that’s how, like a lookout gone blind and senseless,

incredulous and condemned to a painful watch,

facing the wall where each day’s tem congeals,

my different faces gather and are bound in chains

like large, heavy, faded flowers

stubbornly temporary, dead already. 

 

(translated by Stephen Kessler)

 

I also liked this one. 

 

There’s No Forgetting (Sonata)

 

Were you to ask me where I’ve been

I would have to say, “There comes a time.”

I would have to tell how dirt mottles the rocks,

how the river, running, runs out of itself:

I know only what left the birds bereaved,

the sea forsaken, or my sister weeping.

Who so many places, why does one day

cling to another? Why does a night’s blackness

Drain into the mouth? Why the dead?

 

Were you to ask where I come from, I would have to talk 

            with shattered things,

with all too bitter tools,

with massive festering beasts, now and then,

and with my grief-bitten heart.

 

Unremembered are those who crossed over

and the pale dove asleep in oblivion,

only teary faces,

fingers at the throat,

and whatever falls from the leaves:

the darkness of a burnt-out day,

a day flavored with our curdled blood.

 

Here I have violets, swallows,

we want anything and it appears

in that long train of impressions

that marks the passing of kindness and time.

 

But let’s go no further than the teeth,

we won’t chew on husks heaped up by silence,

because I don’t know how to answer:

there are so many dead,

and so many levees the red sun has cloven

and so many heads that knock against hulls,

and so many hands that shut up kisses,

and so many things I want to forget.

 

(translated by Forrest Gander)

 

This next one is another erotic poem, one from his middle period. It is fascinating to see the difference. 

 

The Potter

 

Your whole body holds

a goblet of gentle sweetness destined for me.

 

When I let my hand climb,

in each place I find a dove

that was looking for me, as if

my love, they had made you out of clay

for my very own potter’s hands.

 

Your knees, your breasts,

your waist

are missing in me, like in the hollow

of a thirsting earth

where they relinquished

a form,

and together

we are complete like one single river,

like one single grain of sand.

 

(translation by Mark Eisner) 

 

As in the previous post on Neruda, I found myself particularly drawn to selections from Odas elementales. This is one of those collections that had little if any overlap in the two books. I may have to track down just this one, if I can, so I can read them all. 

 

This collection only has four of the odes, and I selected this one as my favorite. (Be sure to read my other Neruda post for more - his odes to vegetables are wonderful.) 

 

Ode to a Chestnut on the Ground

 

Out of the bristling foliage

you fell

complete: 

polished wood,

glistening mahogany,

perfect 

as a violin that has just

been born in the treetops

and falls

offering the gifts locked inside it,

its hidden sweetness,

finished in secret among

birds and leaves,

school of form,

lineage of firewood and flour,

oval instrument

that holds its structure

unblemished delight and edible rose.

Up there, you abandoned

the bristling husk

that half-opened its barbs

in the light of the chestnut tree,

through that opening

you saw the world,

birds 

filled with syllables

starry 

dew, 

and down below

the heads of boys

and girls,

grasses that fluttered restlessly,

smoke that rises and rises.

You made up your mind,

chestnut, 

and you leapt down to earth,

burnished and prepared,

firm and smooth

as a small breast

in the islands of America.

You fell

hitting 

the ground

but 

nothing happened,

the grass

went on fluttering, the old

chestnut tree whispered like the mouths 

of a hundred treas,

one leaf fell from red autumn,

steadily the hours kept on working

upon the earth.

Because you are 

just 

a seed:

chestnut tree, autumn, earth,

water, heights, silence

prepared the embryo,

the floury thickness,

the maternal eyelids,

which, buried, will open again

toward the heights

the simple magnificence

of foliage,

the dark, damp network

of new roots,

the ancient and new dimensions

of another chestnut tree in the earth.

 

(translated by Stephen Mitchell)

 

I also enjoyed the selections from One Hundred Love Sonnets. Alas, only a handful are in this collection, because I love sonnets in general. I picked two to feature here. Both were translated by Mark Eisner. 

 

XII

 

Full woman, carnal aple, hot moon,

thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,

what obscure clarity opens between your columns?

What ancient night does man touch with his senses?

 

Ah, loving is a voyage with water and with stars,

with suffocating air and brusque storms of flour: 

loving is a battle of lightning bolts,

and two bodies, overcome by one honey.

 

Kiss by kiss I travel across your small infinity,

your images, your rivers, your diminutive villages,

and the genital fire transformed into delight

 

runs through the narrow trails of the blood

until it plunges itself, like a nocturnal carnation,

until it is and is nothing more but a ray in the shadows. 

 

While that one is clearly erotic, the next is more along the lines of the grand intellectual passion of Shakespeare or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I was familiar with this one before reading this collection, as it is one I have shared with my beloved. 

 

XVII

 

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:

I love you as one loves certain obscure things,

secretly, between the shadow and the soul. 

 

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries

the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,

and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose

from the earth lives dimly in my body.

 

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,

I love you directly without problems or pride:

I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,

except in this form in which I am not nor are you,

so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,

so close that your eyes close with my dreams. 

 

I am reminded a bit of one of my favorite poems by Yeats with that last line. 

 

This next poem captures a bit of why I write, and why I make music. 

 

Poet’s Obligation

 

To whomever is not listening to the sea

this Friday morning, to whomever is cooped up

in house or office, factory or woman

or street or mine or harsh prison cell:

to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,

I arrive and open the door of his prison,

and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,

a great fragment of thunder sets in motion

the rumble of the planet and the foam,

the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,

the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,

and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

 

So, drawn on by my destiny,

I endlessly must listen to and keep

the sea’s lamenting in my awareness,

I must feel the crash of the hard water

and gather it up in a perpetual cup

so that, wherever those in prison may be,

wherever they suffer the autumn’s castigation,

I may be there with an errant wave,

I may move, passing through windows,

and hearing me, eyes will glance upward

saying: how can I reach the sea?

And I shall broadcast, saying nothing.,

the starry echoes of the wave, 

a breaking up of foam and of quicksand,

a rustling of salt withdrawing,

the grey cry of sea-birds on the coast.

So, through me, freedom and the sea

will make their answer to the shuttered heart.

 

(translated by Alastair Reid) 

 

Speaking of the sea, this short poem is a gem. The alliteration and wordplay can’t be entirely duplicated in translation, although Eisner does a remarkable job. 

 

The Sea

 

One single being, but there’s no blood.

One single caress, death or rose.

The sea comes and reunites our lives

and attacks and divides and sings alone

in night and day and man and creature.

The essence : fire and cold : movement. 

 

In the original, it is “fuego y frio ; movimiento” which is delicious. But it’s good in English too. 

 

And, speaking as well of poetry, this poem resonated. It could also be about my experience of finding music as a child. 

 

Poetry

 

And it was at that age . . . poetry arrived

in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where

it came from, from winter or a river

I don’t know how or when,

no, they weren’t voices, they were not

words, nor silence,

but from a street it called me,

from the branches of the night,

abruptly from the others

among raging fires

or returning alone,

there it was, without a face,

and it touched me.

 

I didn’t know what to say, my mouth

had no way 

with names,

my eyes were blind,

something kicked in my soul,

fever or forgotten wings,

and I made my own way,

deciphering 

that fire,

and I wrote the first, faint line,

nonsense, 

pure wisdom

of one who knows nothing, 

and suddenly I saw

the heavens

unfastened

and open,

planets,

palpitating plantations,

the darkness perforated,

riddled

with arrows, fire and flowers,

the overpowering night, the universe.

 

And I, tiny being,

drunk with the great starry

void,

likeness, image of 

mystery

felt myself a pure part

of the abyss,

I wheeled with the stars.

My heart broke loose with the wind. 

 

And, on that note of being one with the universe, I’ll end with this one. 

 

The Future is Space

 

The future is space,

earth-colored space,

cloud-colored,

color of water, air,

black space with room for many dreams,

white space with room for all snow,

for all music.

 

Behind lies despairing love

with no room for a kiss.

There’s a place for everyone in forests,

in streets, in houses;

there’s an underground space, a submarine space,

but what joy to find in the end,

                                                rising,

an empty planet,

great stars clear as vodka,

so uninhabited and so transparent

and arrive there with the first telephone

so that many men can later discuss

all their infirmities. 

 

The important thing is to be so scarcely aware of oneself,

to scream from a rough mountain range

and see on another peak

the feet of a woman newly arrived.

 

Come on, let’s leave

this suffocating river

in which we swim with other fish

from dawn to shifting night

and now in this discovered space

let’s fly to a pure solitude.

 

I very much enjoyed this collection, but it does make me want to find the full volumes it is drawn from. 

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

 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.