Betty Friedan, 1963
When I became a classroom teacher, I taught AP Literature, but during my previous career as a tutor, I more often taught AP U.S. History. That test expected students to be familiar with a handful of books credited with shaping the course of the nation’s history: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which dramatically increased anti-slavery sentiment in the North; Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which prompted sweeping legislation to improve food safety; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which pioneered the modern environmental movement… and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the foundational text of second-wave feminism. I needed something to read on the trains and planes I take on my commute between Portland and the Bay Area, so when I spotted this on Ellie’s bookshelf, my memory of those practice AP exams made this the clear choice.
1: The Problem That Has No Name
One mistake people commonly make in thinking about the past is assuming that it was like the present in ways that it was not. In previous articles I’ve written about Conan O’Brien interviewing a bunch of women working as historical re-enactors; he didn’t ask them what they did for a living, figuring that women of the period they were portraying would not have been employed, but when he asked them what their fathers did, he was mystified when all of them replied, “He’s a farmer.” Nowadays “What do you do?” is one of the first questions people ask one another, since in modern society there are innumerable answers to that question, but in pre-industrial societies, upwards of 75% of the population worked in food production. If you weren’t standing at the center of a large city, then, yeah, chances were good that everyone you ran into was indeed a farmer. An even more common form of this mistake is to assume that the way we see the world today is the way people have always seen it. But the categories that seem so fundamental to our understanding of the world around us are far from static. It can fairly be called ahistorical to accuse Odysseus of exercising “white privilege” three thousand years before the advent of the concept of a “white race”, or to speculate about who was “gay” or “straight” in a culture whose script called for people to engage in both homosexual and heterosexual pairings during different stages of their lives. Just as mistaken, though, is to assume that things were different in the past, but that the path from then to now has been a matter of continuous motion in a single direction. A class of eighth-graders reading Romeo and Juliet might be shocked to discover that Juliet is getting married at their age—thirteen going on fourteen—only for the teacher to tell them that, actually, back in the olden days it was common for girls to be married off right at puberty. The kids might then say, oh yeah, my great-grandparents got married really young too—not that young, but in their teens. And so they come away with the impression that the age of marriage has been steadily climbing from the dawn of human history up to the present.
This is not the case. Shakespeare’s audience would have viewed Juliet’s age at the time of her marriage as a peculiarity of Italian culture, for women in England married at an average age of 26. (Shakespeare’s own wife was 26 when he married her.) If those great-grandparents married in their teens, it is likely because they married around the time Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, a period in U.S. history when the average age of marriage was not climbing but plunging. That age has in fact been climbing sharply since the publication of Friedan’s book, making the quarter century that followed the start of World War II look like a historical anomaly. That’s important: Friedan was not writing about the problems that women have faced throughout the ages, but about alarming retrogressive trends that were quite recent. She spends the first chapter of The Feminine Mystique briefly laying these out: a sizeable drop in the percentage of women attending college, a skyrocketing birthrate, the rise of an ideology maintaining that only by defining herself first and foremost as a housewife can a woman achieve personal fulfillment, and the many manifestations of those housewives’ secret despair. Of course, when you’re living through a historical period, there’s no telling whether it will prove to be a blip or an epoch. For instance, we don’t yet know whether the Republican Party’s increasingly overt embrace of fascism will end up being viewed as the brief final spasms of a dying ideology or whether it heralds the end of American democracy. Similarly, Friedan had no way of knowing whether the trends she grappled with in The Feminine Mystique represented a brief downtick in the progress of American women or whether they would continue for generations. Without her book, perhaps those trends might not have proved so transitory.
2: The Happy Housewife Heroine
This chapter is phenomenal. I like assigning my students excerpts from books so that we can explore a wider variety of texts than we could if we only read books cover to cover, and I can easily imagine assigning this chapter in isolation. It’s a perfect example of cultural studies: by studying works of fiction that are very far from high art—in this case, stories in mass-circulation women’s magazines—Friedan identifies a clear shift in the ideology set forth by the publications. The short version is that in 1939, a typical women’s magazine story was about a young woman determined to get her start in a career, dealing with opposition from conservative parents who lament that no man will ever want to marry someone setting out upon such an unfeminine path, and instead meeting a man who is delighted to have found an equal partner. Ten years later, career women in these stories invariably gave up their jobs at the end, and ten years after that, there were no career women to be found: the stories were about high school seniors snaring the young men who would marry them after graduation, or about young wives finding heroic ways to juggle housework and toddlers’ shenanigans without their husbands ever suspecting that the domestic sphere was anything other than a well-oiled machine. What I love about this chapter is that it is so solidly grounded in evidence—there’s no hand-waving here, no claims that are unsubstantiated—and yet Friedan uses what to me is the most interesting kind of evidence: though I certainly have a soft spot for a telling statistic, I find nothing quite so fascinating as the way people grapple with the experience of living in a particular time and place through narrative.
3: The Crisis in Women’s Identity
This is a very short chapter asserting that a life stage faced by many throughout human history had only recently been given a name—the “identity crisis”, the need to come to grips with questions such as “Who am I? What defines me?”—and pointing out that, so far, the cultural consensus was that those questions were only important to men. Society had a pat answer to women who might be struggling with the same questions: you’re just a woman, and you’re defined by your duties as a wife and mother. The fundamental thesis of The Feminine Mystique is that the cultural mandate that women find fulfillment in embracing “femininity”, defined as dependent domesticity, leaves those women in an impossible situation, as fulfillment in life cannot be achieved without a sense of self-definition and independent purpose.
4: The Passionate Journey
This chapter looks back at first-wave feminism, the movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to secure crucial legal rights for women: the right to education, the right to attempt to enter male-dominated professions, and above all, the right to vote. The first-wave feminists were met with scathing contempt, painted as man-eating harpies, too defective as women to embrace the passive drudgery and dependence that the power structure called “femininity”. But many women found that the rights they hoped to secure were worth the opprobrium they faced for fighting for those rights—enough women that, though it took nearly a century, they were able to secure the major planks of their stated agenda. Victory? To an extent, but what Friedan explains in this chapter is that the viciousness heaped upon first-wave feminists was in fact a winning tactic in a longer game. Women who came of age after about 1920 tended to shun the feminist label: why would you make yourself a social pariah in the name of rights that had already been won and that you took for granted? If you wanted to vote, you could vote! If you wanted to go to State U., you could go! The intense focus on these tangible goals had made achieving them more likely, but also made it harder to entice the next generation to push the feminist project forward, fighting for full social equality and a woman’s ability to choose her own destiny. Joining men in sneering at first-wave feminists allowed young women to earn social approval at seemingly little cost, for the rights their forebears had secured weren’t going away any time soon. And so, Friedan contends, they eagerly bought into an image of femininity that ultimately made them miserable.
5: The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud
Again, The Feminine Mystique is about the plight of women in a particular time and place: America in the mid-20th century. And in this time and place, the broad consensus was that what Albert Einstein had done for physics, Sigmund Freud had done for psychology—or perhaps Freud had done more, essentially solving the mysteries of the human mind. The result was that when women expressed dissatisfaction with their lives, millions of Freud’s acolytes were liable to chalk up that dissatisfaction to penis envy, or to the fundamental deficiency of the female mind. And when men expressed dissatisfaction with their lives, the blame was laid at the feet of women: mothers who made up for “female lack” by living through their sons, or whose suboptimal toilet training methods had left those sons with an anal retentive personality, or what have you. (Go read the Fred Crews book for more on Freud.)
6: The Functional Freeze and Margaret Mead
Next Friedan turns to another leading shaper of mid-20th-century discourse, famed anthropologist Margaret Mead. Though decades removed from her pioneering work on selected cultures of the South Pacific, Mead had, by Friedan’s account, established herself as America’s leading female public intellectual, writing prolifically about the implications of her earlier research. And though Mead’s work was often called feminist, highlighting cultures in which women held an exalted status, Friedan contends that in fact it was quite the opposite, for those women were exalted exclusively for their role as bearers of children—the same role for which American women had been “exalted” in their mid-century relegation to the home. A rat can give birth; in a refrain she would return to repeatedly throughout the book, Friedan asks, shouldn’t a woman want to be more than an animal?
One point Friedan emphasizes in this chapter is that people would do better to take a lesson not from Mead’s writing, but from her life. Mead may have put forward the notion of woman as holy earth mother, but she herself was a scientist, a writer, an unembarrassed self-promoter—a person, in short, whose life was not defined by her sex or by the gender roles imposed upon the members of that sex. Friedan suggests that Mead may have thought, okay, there are all those women out there… but then there’s me! And that makes sense. Anglophones of the 21st century may be preoccupied with the question, “What are your pronouns?”, but we all have the same subject pronoun for ourselves: “I”, which is ungendered. This grammatical happenstance falls in line with one of the key premises of The Feminine Mystique, that the first-person experience of human consciousness is the same for women as it is for men. Friedan says outright that what separates humans from the rest of the animals is our minds. She makes it clear that while a mind may reside within a body, it is not defined by the body in which it happens to reside. Thus, the foremost project of feminism, this book suggests, is to create a world in which men look at women and see fellow humans whose minds are not lesser than or even different from but interchangeable with their own.
7: The Sex-Directed Educators
Another theme running through The Feminine Mystique is that, as we are all minds, it is primarily through lifelong work on an intellectual project that we truly find fulfillment. This chapter sounds the alarm that, while first-wave feminists had led young women to pursue higher education at much the same rate that young men of their respective classes did, postwar ideology about a woman’s proper place had drastically changed the type of education that college women received. Rather than undertaking a course of study that might lead to graduate education, professional school, or even the workforce, they were being taught, essentially, home economics, with a smattering of liberal arts mixed in so that the future wife and mother could hold up her end of a conversation with an educated husband and help her children with their homework. Since the students had bought into the mid-century ideology about gender roles even more than their professors had, they didn’t protest. In interviews, they told Friedan that, even though they had been top students in high school, they soon gave up on their few serious classes: after all, what was the point? They weren’t going to use their degrees; they probably wouldn’t even get their degrees, as they hoped to find husbands before finding themselves as old maids of 22. Besides, boys didn’t like girls who were too brainy. Friedan was unimpressed by this generation—what today we call the Silents. “In the last analysis, millions of able women in this free land chose, themselves, not to use the door education could have opened for them. The choice—and the responsibility—for the race back home was finally their own.”
8: The Mistaken Choice
This chapter begins with a discussion of why women who had entered the workforce in increasing numbers from the beginning of the century up to the start of war, and then during the war demonstrated themselves capable of taking on any job men could do, fled back to the home after the war. Friedan cites the scariness of the wider world, especially once the Soviets had the bomb and the Cold War began in earnest, and the discouragement that came from being pushed out of the workforce once men returned from the battlefields. But before long she circles back around to Freud. As noted, Freud had laid the blame for men’s neuroses at the feet of their mothers, and in the mid-20th century, the national conversation repeatedly returned to the supposed epidemic of bad mothering. Women were drilled with the message (from, for instance, the male editors of women’s magazines) that they had to get back into the house and do their real jobs as moms. The mistake Friedan refers to in the title of the chapter is that, according to psychoanalytic theory, it is over-mothering that leads to neurosis: to use the Lacanian rather than the strictly Freudian formulation, the woman’s lack of a phallus prevents her accession into the symbolic order, and thus it is through their sons that mothers participate in the world outside the domestic sphere. Friedan points out that, in a society in which mothers could participate in that world directly, they wouldn’t have to saddle their sons with the burden of living for two. Working mothers, she contends, have better-adjusted kids. (And she throws in another point: if the culture was so fixated on the shortcomings of mothers, didn’t it stand to reason that perhaps some thought ought to be spared for the question of how to mold the next generation of mothers—i.e., how to raise daughters, not just sons?)
9: The Sexual Sell
This was another dynamite chapter—my favorite after chapter two. And while I spend most of this book thinking, “Oh! Okay, so this is the book that the Mad Men crew adapted into the character of Betty Draper!”, this chapter fills in pretty much the rest of the show.
The basic idea here is that, when Friedan claimed that mid-century gender roles left women miserable, many viewed it as a kind of heresy—it was an article of faith in American culture at the time that they were the keys to total fulfillment. But advertising executives knew full well that women were miserable, and they liked it that way. Women’s misery was an inexhaustible source of profits. As in chapter two, Friedan substantiates these claims with ample evidence, but whereas in the earlier chapter she analyzed magazine articles, she doesn’t go to magazine ads or TV commercials for this one. Instead, she actually secured an invitation to examine the internal files of an ad agency, and reports back on the strategic documents. According to these documents, the market segment the ad execs hoped to grow were overeducated, frustrated housewives: working women were too busy to buy things, and docile housewives saw no need to buy things, happy to do the chores the way their mothers had taught them. But the frustrated ones were eager to flock to the stores just as an excuse to get out of the house. Once there… ever wonder why for some people laundry is so complicated? Two different kinds of detergent, bleach, fabric softener, dryer sheets, and a washer and dryer with more buttons and dials than the cockpit of a 747? Yes, to sell more product—but why were companies able to sell more product? The research showed that the target market was full of intelligent women stuck at home and aching to exercise some expertise in something. If laundry is complicated—if it’s not something your husband can do without messing up—then perhaps you’re not wasting your life doing the housework.
10: Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available
This chapter responds to research indicating that full-time housewives complained that there weren’t enough hours in the day to do all the chores, while working women who lived in equally large homes, who had just as many kids making messes, whose husbands did just as little of the housework, were able to get their houses in order to roughly the same standard in a small fraction of the time. The explanation Friedan proposes brings me back to that Black Mirror episode I said I’d follow up on. In the second segment of “White Christmas”, we learn that people are uploading copies of themselves into little tamagotchis and putting those fully conscious entities in charge of running the household: adjusting the temperature of the living room, making the toast exactly how the original person likes. The copies initially protest against being doomed to lives of slavery, but all the coordinator has to do is push a button to simulate six months in a white void with nothing to do, and the digital entities appear on screen begging for something, anything, to take up their time. Similarly, Friedan explains that compared to vegetating in a suburban house day after day after day, turning one hour’s worth of chores into sixteen hours of busywork can actually be an appealing alternative. (Another popular alternative, Friedan notes, was to get a prescription for tranquilizers. Or just start drinking at 10 a.m.)
11: The Sex-Seekers
Though we’re headed toward the chapters in which Friedan lays out her solutions to the problems American women faced in the mid-20th century, I’m sure you can already guess what they are: as noted in the blurb about chapter seven, it’s basically to give women a proper education and then give them the opportunity to pursue some lifelong intellectual project. And as if to sweeten the deal, Friedan hardly lets a mention of sex go by without throwing in a comment about how research shows that highly educated women have more and better orgasms than women with less education. Much of this research came from Alfred Kinsey, and this chapter reminds us that the U.S. of the mid-20th century was Sigmund Freud’s America, and Margaret Mead’s America, but also Alfred Kinsey’s America. Sex was a much bigger part of the national conversation than it had heretofore been, and Friedan found that the women she interviewed were often eager to bring it up. In response to non-sexual questions, they would talk about their extramarital affairs, their husbands’ affairs, their thoughts of affairs. Friedan chalked it up to, once again, looking for something to fill an empty life.
But sex has an extra resonance that housework doesn’t: remember, this was an unusual era in which the age of marriage had dropped precipitously. To say that most women who got married after 1940 hadn’t held out for a good match, Friedan contends, would be missing the point: they hadn’t even had a chance to form a sense of identity yet, so there was nothing for a potential suitor to match up with. To these suitors, what did these essentially interchangeable little girls really bring to a marriage? Their reproductive capacity—and, even more bluntly, access to sex. Licit sex, obtainable on demand. So if you internalize that this is what you’re valued for, is it any surprise that it might be what you turn to in order to find value in your life?
Now, here’s where we bump up against a reminder that we’re reading a book from another era. Friedan says repeatedly, in a number of different contexts, that one of the main problems with mid-century American ideology about women is that it freezes them at an immature stage of development. The same is true of men, she charges. In postwar America, a man went from a house with a mom in it to another house with a mom in it—this time the mother of his own children, but she performed motherly duties for him as well, making his meals, cleaning up after him. At least he got out of the house, though, and could lead a life of his own. The eternal child he had married was told to live her life through her husband—this was the moral of so many of the stories in those magazines. So a man would return from the demands of work to the demands of home—“How was your day, dear? Tell me all about it!”—and, even in the rare cases that he hadn’t made a fatally bad match at age eighteen, having to live for two was just too much. By his thirties he might have an apartment in the city where he could carry on with city gals—or, Friedan speculates with an eye on the Kinsey reports, he might swear off women altogether. To Friedan, at least circa 1963, homosexuality wasn’t an innate sexual orientation, but a sign of psychological immaturity. It’s the same view put forward in roughly the same period by Philip Wylie, several of whose interestingly terrible books I wrote about back in the ’00s. And in the next chapter, reflecting the views of the time, Friedan blames autism on bad mothering!
12: Progressive Dehumanization
The autism thing is just a brief digression, though—the central thesis of this chapter would be considered by some to be even more controversial. Subtitled “The Comfortable Concentration Camp”, it looks at the research that had been done on the psychological effects of spending extended periods imprisoned by the Nazis at places like Dachau and Buchenwald, and draws parallels to research done on the psychological state of American housewives. It’s a provocative argument, but a carefully considered one, argued in depth and difficult to reduce to a sentence, but the core of it is that the Nazis turned their victims into “walking corpses” by cutting them off from everything they had used to define themselves, while “the housewife role [makes] it almost impossible for a woman of adult intelligence to retain a sense of human identity, the firm core of self or ‘I’ without which a human being, man or woman, is not truly alive.” And it isn’t just the housewives themselves who feel the impact: the rest of this chapter looks at the problems that were beginning to crop up among the children of these housewives, known today as the Boomers. Friedan argues that it’s the other half of the equation from the previous chapter: if a woman’s sole identity is as a “wife and mother”, then for the first half of that role she must live through her husband, and for the second half she must live through her children. And the children couldn’t bear that burden any better than the husband could. Not to mention that it’s hard for a child to develop into a mature adult when raised by a woman who never did so herself.
13: The Forfeited Self
From Freud, Mead, and Kinsey, we move to another key shaper of mid-century thought, Abraham Maslow. In all honesty, by this point Friedan is really just covering a lot of the same material from slightly different angles. For pretty much the entire book, Friedan has been arguing that women have been prevented from achieving even a fraction of their full potential, and now here’s Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs with a handy label for what women have been deprived of: “self-actualization”.
14: A New Life Plan for Women
You know the life plan: stay in school, find your intellectual passion, make following that passion the center of your life, and thereby become a full person. If you happen to marry, your husband will be happier partnered to a fully-formed equal than supporting a domestic drudge who’s never had a life of her own. You’ll have better sex, your kids will be better-adjusted, and you might end up contributing more to the world than some genetic material. This chapter is largely about how to adopt this plan even if the ship would seem to have sailed, discussing university programs that allowed housewives to earn a degree one or two classes at a time, even if it took ten years. Don’t just fill the idle hours by dabbling in painting—get an M.F.A.! Don’t just stuff envelopes for the candidate of your choice—get a degree in political science and work your way up to campaign strategist!
I dunno. I thought that, as an exposé of a poisonous ideology and the many ways that ideology had stunted and twisted American society in the mid-20th century, The Feminine Mystique was brilliant; the analysis in chapter two was extraordinary, and chapter nine could hardly have been more compelling. As a polemic, it doesn’t work quite as well. George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia that, when he was shot, he felt “a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well.” A lot of utopian writing seems to be a matter of the author declaring that, in fact, this world does not suit me so well, so I’m going to imagine one that does. Betty Friedan took her education very seriously and applied it to the lifelong intellectual work of writing this book and using it as a springboard for decades of activism. Her prescription for making the world a better place is for everyone to follow in her footsteps. But people are different. That might be utopia for her. It would very likely be utopia for me too! But it probably wouldn’t be utopia for everyone. The book is more solidly grounded when it sticks to detailing the ways in which America during the years when the Boomers were born was a dystopia.
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