The Feminine Mystique / Betty Friedan

For today’s Sunday Salon, I finished Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

Last year my friend Amanda pointed me at HumanEvents.com’s Top 10 Most Harmful Books. HumanEvents.com is a rabidly conservative group. I do not criticize them for making a list of books they don’t like; I’ve made my own. In fact, they have links to purchase the entire list from Amazon.com. But to me, this was like waving the red flag in front of the bull. I want to read these books after that.

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is on that list at number 7. Here’s what they wrote:

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in “a comfortable concentration camp”–a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that “Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley’s radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

As if the only person to criticize something is a person who partook. Bah!

The bulk of my contact with feminism is with friends who bemoan the stereotypes of women in the media that somehow force women to try to achieve an unrealistic position. That is not Friedan’s complaint. Times have changed. Our culture has changed. There are significant challenges in women’s rights, but they are not necessarily the same challenges that Friedan saw hampering women in the 1940s and 1950s. The point being that I come from a different world, and putting myself back into the world of Leave It To Beaver is not possible. My reactions to this book will inevitably be that of a male child of the 1980s.

Friedan’s main thesis of the book is that the life of a housewife does not entail the kind of sense of purpose and intellectual fulfillment that most women require in order to be happy. After the pioneering strides of the women’s movement in the 1920s, she saw a retreat of women back to the home and role of housewife after World War II. Many felt this was the natural place for a woman.

Friedan saw this as aided and abetted by Freud’s theory of penis envy and functionalist psychology, which gave a scientific imprimatur to this retreat. I’d never heard of functionalism before. I know Freud had much more cachet years ago, but it seems that both had far more indirect influence than Friedan gives them. I’d simply call the retreat something of a backlash. It would have happened with Freud or functionalism. Of more direct influence is what Friedan calls the sex-directed educator: a turn to classes in home economics and women and marriage.

Still, Friedan notes that the first feminist movement that earned women the right to vote as well as changes in many laws faced far more opposition. By and large, according to Friedan, women became housewives of their own volition. They chose the path of their own depression. Perhaps as a reaction to a modern world. Perhaps as a reaction to the atrocities of World War II. But Friedan also identifies and identity crisis among women as well. The traditional role for boys forced them to decide what they wanted to be in life. The role of breadwinner was mostly foreordained, but that leaves a wide choice of professions from which boys had to choose. Women on the other hand didn’t really face that choice in large numbers prior to the war. Faced with risking unhappiness in a career, many women fell back on a traditional role that they believed would provide automatic fulfillment: wife and mother.

If there is any group that Friedan blames in The Feminine Mystique, it’s that of business and advertisers who manipulate women through well-planned campaigns in order to sell more product. In a telling and I think under-explored note toward the end of the chapter, Friedan relates a conversation with an advertising researcher:

That’s what I mean, I said. Why doesn’t the pie-mix ad tell the woman he could use the time saved to be an astronomer?

It wouldn’t be too difficult, he replied. A few images—the astronomer gets her man, the astronomer as the heroine, make it glamorous for a woman to be an astronomer … but no, he shrugged again. The client would be too frightened. He wants to sell pie mix. The woman has to want to stay in the kitchen.

The exchange shows the complicity of business perfectly. The pie mix business sole reason for existence is to make money through the selling of pie mix. It isn’t a social betterment agency. While we can change the rules of the game, the purpose of a business will not change. But it also makes me ask, Why isn’t anyone else running these ads? The Army and Marines make all sorts of ads to try to make joining the military sexy and desirable. They are pretty effective. I don’t see the Society for Women Engineers running similar ads. Ads that colleges and universities run, while populated by multi-cultural and gender-balanced students, are uniformly boring. I keep reading in the newspapers about shortages of suitably educated Americans in the sciences. So why aren’t the businesses that depend on a steady supply of new scientists and technicians making recruiting ads that sell the professions needed. Again, the few I see are boring as hell.

In addition to a lack of purpose and fulfillment, Friedan devotes a couple of chapters to ways housewives seek to fill that hole inside that the wind blows through. One method is through ever-expanding housework. She notes that most housework really isn’t a full time job, yet most housewives spend full time on it, and have some left over for the husband when he comes home. She sees this as an unconscious decision from women to create more busywork to fill their time because being a housewife is supposed to fill that need inside. In her view, it doesn’t. The extra housework simply leaves her feeling tired and still empty.

A second method Friedan saw housewives attempt to fill that hole is through sexual adventure. I personally have seen many people, women and men, do exactly this. So it’s no surprise that Friedan saw housewives illicit affairs as manifestations of the same tendency we still see. But it’s at this point that I really started seeing the book go off course. Friedan uses the opportunity to criticize a whole host of sexual practices she sees as harmful. In other words, she was a prude. Particularly galling to me is her description of homosexuals as forever childlike, afraid of age, grasping at youth in their in their continual search for reassurance in some sexual magic. She doesn’t think it a coincidence that homosexuals started coming out in greater numbers at the same time as the feminine mystique took hold. It might not be coincidence, but I doubt it’s causal. Friedan had in mind that smothering moms were creating through a Freudian mechanism greater numbers of gay men. This is where I roll my eyes. And she thought Freud too bound to his cultural prejudices.

After this, Friedan really jumps the rails for one more chapter, in which she blames housewives for a malaise in children during the fifties. Children without purpose or direction getting in more trouble than ever. Friedan’s position is that if women weren’t quite so doting that children would have to find their own way in the world, developing better identities of their own along the way. Instead, she sees them as acting out their mother’s unfulfilled phantasies. (Her spelling of the word weirds me out throughout the book.) Perhaps she’s right. I don’t have the social science background to say otherwise for sure. But my guess is that it’s far more related to a large increase in living standards and attached leisure time after the second World War. In other words, prior to 1940, living standards were much lower, and the United States was far more rural. Kids had extensive chores. They worked. They were kept occupied. Economically, the U.S. experienced a great leap in income for the median American following the war. It was now possible for women to stay at home doing housework, very different from rural homemaking during the 1800s. And it was possible for children to lounge around with little to occupy them.

But she brings it all back together for her final chapter: A New Life Plan for Women. Throughout the book she bemoans the trend for women to cut short their educations, frequently marrying at younger ages than in previous decades. She saw the lack of education as prime cause of the difficulties women had in making any sort of transition away from the house. He first recommendation is for women to imply stop buying in to the feminine mystique and make an effort to find fulfillment away from the role as housewife.

There are, of course, a number of practical problems involved in making a serious professional commitment. But somehow those problems only seem insurmountable a woman is still half-submerged in the false dilemmas and guilts of the feminine mystique—or when her desire for something more is only phantasy, and she is unwilling to make the necessary effort. Over and over, women told me that the crucial first step for them was simply to take the first trip to the alumnae employment agency, or to send for the application for teacher certification, or to make appointments with former job contacts in the city. It is amazing how many obstacles and rationalizations the feminine mystique can throw up to keep a woman from making that trip or writing that letter.

Friedan recommends education. If not earlier, then as soon as is practically possible. She believes that the more education focussed on making women productive members of society as opposed to housewives and as opposed to continuing education the better the chance that women will find fulfillment. She discourages women from dropping out and marrying early. She praises innovative programs at a few universities that allow for part-time and intensive education geared toward older women who still have children to care for as well as impatience with the slow pace of a normal four-year degree.

In order to appease traditionalists, I’ve often heard feminists argue that feminism is really arguing for a choice for women. Friedan really isn’t doing that. She’s does not argue for taking a woman’s choice to stay at home away from her. But she consistently argues throughout the The Feminine Mystique that full-time housewife is the wrong choice. It deprives women of their happiness and society of the contributions the best and the brightest could be making.

Either through the awareness created by Friedan and through economic pressure, the problem of the feminine mystique as Friedan described it is largely in the past. Of course, it’s been replaced by other pressures, perhaps more harmful and insidious. This book, even with warts, is hardly harmful unless one still clings to the idea that a woman’s place is in the home. Which I’m sure the panelists at HumanEvents.com still do.

Title: The feminine mystique
Author: Betty Friedan
Imprint / publisher: Dell
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 384 p. (includes notes and index)
Publication date: 1963 (9th printing Mar 1966)
Subject: Feminism — United States
Subject: Women — United States — Social conditions
Subject: Women — Psychology
Subject: United States — Social conditions — 1945-
LC classification: HQ1420 .F7