A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (18 page)

Larry R., a white man who read the book in 1966 after graduating from college, was similarly unimpressed, saying he couldn’t understand why anyone would complain about being left in a large suburban home while someone else earned the money. “I don’t have much patience with people who do not worry about food and shelter lamenting that they are bored.”

Even middle-class women who remain grateful to Friedan for writing
The Feminine Mystique
often mention that, in retrospect, they are taken aback by how little Friedan seemed to know about the issues facing women who had to work out of necessity.

Friedan actively encouraged the belief that she was writing from her own middle-class experience, speaking to the largely apolitical, white, middle-class, suburban woman because she had been one herself. She too, she told her readers, had “lived according to the feminine mystique as a suburban housewife,” only gradually coming to see that something was wrong with how she and other American women were being told to organize their lives. “I sensed it first as a question mark in my own life, as a wife and mother of three small children, half-guiltily and therefore halfheartedly, almost in spite of myself, using my abilities and education in work that took me away from home.”

Her epiphany came in 1957, according to her account in an early chapter of the book, when she interviewed her college classmates fifteen years after their graduation from Smith College and found “a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique. I wondered if other women faced this schizophrenic split, and what it meant.” And so, in her telling, she set out on a journey of discovery that culminated in
The Feminine Mystique
.

Friedan repeated this account in a 1973
New York Times
reminiscence called “Up from the Kitchen Floor.” “Until I started writing the book,” she wrote, “I wasn’t even conscious of the woman problem.... I, like other women, thought there was something wrong with
me
because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor.”

Friedan’s version of her own past was accepted as gospel until 1998, when historian Daniel Horowitz published—to Friedan’s considerable chagrin—his meticulously researched (and very sympathetic) account of Friedan’s intellectual and political history, which was much closer to that of activist Gerda Lerner than to the suburban housewives Friedan targeted in her book.

In 1943, four years before she married Carl Friedan, Betty Goldstein hadn’t been thinking about orgasms when she wrote about kitchens. “Men, there’s a revolution in your own kitchen,” she had warned in an admiring review of Elizabeth Hawes’s
Why Women Cry
. It was the revolt of “the forgotten female,” she wrote, “finally waking up to the fact that she can produce other things besides babies.”

Betty Goldstein’s concerns about gender equality and her critical attitudes toward mainstream social scientists were forged long before she became Betty Friedan, the suburban housewife raising three children. At Smith College she had been an outstanding psychology student and a committed political activist, and after graduation, she wrote for union newspapers. Goldstein was familiar with the work of left-wing feminists such as Hawes, Eve Merriam, and Betty Millard, and wrote many articles about working women’s struggles and needs.

After she married Carl Friedan, she continued this work, although she took a year off after having her first child. In 1952 she permanently lost or left—it is unclear which—her regular job with the United Electrical Workers union. From that point on, she struggled to establish herself as a self-employed writer.

In 1950, the Friedans moved to Parkway Village, a racially integrated development in Queens, among whose tenants were civil rights leader Roy Wilkins and several UN staff members. In her years there, Friedan was certainly not an isolated, apolitical housewife. She edited a community newsletter, participated in a babysitting cooperative, and in 1952 helped organize a rent strike. In a 1953 piece she wrote for the
UE News
, “Women Fight for a Better Life!” Friedan celebrated the struggles of immigrant, African-American, and union workers.

As the 1950s progressed, Friedan distanced herself, geographically as well as politically, from the leftist circles in which she had originally trained as a writer. In 1956 the Friedans moved to the suburbs of Rock-land County, New York. She remained an engaged community activist but switched her focus to education, founding an “Intellectual Resources Pool” that offered adult education classes; brought in artists, scientists, and writers to enrich the school curriculum; and set up mentoring relationships between students and professionals. She forged a career as a freelance writer, gradually adapting her work to an audience of middle-class women rather than the union members for whom she had written during the previous decade.

Friedan’s selective version of her own history has led many people to think that she didn’t understand or sympathize with the obstacles facing working women and minorities. But in early drafts of
The Feminine Mystique,
she drew parallels between the prejudices against women and those against African Americans and Jews. Even in its final, watered-down version,
The Feminine Mystique
several times mentions Friedan’s support for the civil rights movement and “for oppressed workers.”

And only a few years after the book’s appearance, as chair of the National Organization for Women, Friedan broadened her agenda to
include many of the issues Lerner had suggested. Sociologist Cynthia Fuchs Epstein notes that most of the early legal cases NOW pursued were taken on behalf of working-class women, including African-American working women.

But there is no denying that
The Feminine Mystique
focused on the problems facing comparatively privileged white housewives, those who had more education than the three years of high school that George Gallup had found typical in his 1962 survey for the
Saturday Evening Post
. Although Friedan noted that “housewives of all educational levels” suffered from the feminine mystique, she assumed—not entirely without justification—that “the problem that has no name” was especially acute for women who had a middle-class standard of living and enough education that if they went back to work or school, they could find “meaningful” middle-class jobs.

Friedan’s bias toward women from middle-class backgrounds, or married to middle-class husbands, was evident in her suggestion that women who wanted to work should hire housekeepers and nannies to take over their chores at home. Her book never discusses the issues facing the women who worked in those domestic jobs. In fact, several passages imply that such work, together with other types of service or clerical work, was beneath the talents of her readers. This elitist prejudice came from the same Betty Goldstein who as a student at Smith College had actively supported a drive to organize a union for maids in the campus dorms.

Despite its middle-class orientation, some uneducated and working-class women did embrace
The Feminine Mystique
. A postal clerk wrote to Friedan that it was “the most factual true book” she had ever read. Other letters praised the book but expressed a wish that the book could have been priced more affordably. One woman described herself as a housewife and mother of five with “a very poor education” and lamented that “if this is all there is for me to look forward to, I don’t want to go on.”

Still, the book was largely addressed to—and elicited the most heart-felt responses from—white women who had some higher education and
whose husbands provided enough economic security that they could choose whether to work. This rapidly growing group of women faced new and distinctive dilemmas in postwar America.

The 1950s saw a remarkable increase in the number of Americans who achieved economic security. In the thirteen years between 1947 and 1960, the average worker’s purchasing power increased by as much as it had during the previous fifty years. By 1960, nearly 60 percent of Americans had midrange incomes, about twice as many as in the prosperous years before the Great Depression.

One mark of this new prosperity was an explosion in the number of students in institutions of higher education. Men’s enrollment in college grew faster than that of women, largely because of the benefits of the GI Bill, but between 1940 and 1960, the number of female college graduates increased from 1.4 million to 3.5 million. The number of women who had completed a few years of college grew even faster.

In the 1940s, the number of women who entered college each year was less than a third of those who graduated from high school. By 1958 it was 40 percent, and by 1963 it had reached 45 percent. And this increase occurred even as the percentage of female high school graduates was also rising sharply. In 1930, only 32 percent of seventeen-year-old girls had graduated from high school. By 1963, that number had increased to 73 percent.

The Feminine Mystique
had its biggest impact on women in a generation caught between two worlds when it came to education. One world was that of their mothers and grandmothers, where any woman who aspired to go to college was consciously defying society’s expectations of her role, and such a woman often continued to challenge societal norms after graduation. The other was the world their daughters and granddaughters would inherit, where the definition of appropriate female behavior would broaden to include not only getting an education but utilizing that education in paid work even after marriage.

In the early twentieth century, it still took audacity for a woman to attend college, and doing so was often a sign of unconventional aspirations.
Women who entered college in the first two decades of the twentieth century tended to be fervent supporters of social causes such as votes for women, and most of them intended to make their mark after they graduated.

However, women who sought higher education in that era often felt they had to sacrifice family life. Up until 1900, more than half the graduates from women’s colleges remained single, many of them carving out careers in new fields such as social work. Even as late as 1940, more than 30 percent of female college graduates ages forty to forty-nine were unmarried, compared to less than 13 percent of high school graduates and grade school graduates the same age.

When it came to graduate work, women were especially likely to feel they had to choose between getting a master’s degree and a “Mrs. degree,” and even when they did marry, a stunningly small percentage of highly educated women had children. An analysis of the marriage and motherhood patterns of women who attended graduate school at Columbia University found that only a quarter of the women born before World War I became mothers.

In the 1940s and 1950s, attending college became much more compatible with getting married and becoming a mother. Many women went for only a year or two, then dropped out to marry. But even women who graduated from college were more likely to marry and have children than their counterparts in the early decades of the century. Of the female Columbia University graduate students born between 1925 and 1929, almost 90 percent became mothers, compared to only 25 percent of the women born prior to 1914.

For many women of the 1950s, however, the growing likelihood that a woman would attend college and also embark relatively early on raising a family presented new dilemmas rather than new opportunities. By then, going to college was a statement of status, signifying that a family had achieved a secure middle-class standing in society. But becoming a full-time homemaker after marriage was also a statement of status. So the value of a college education played out differently for daughters and sons.
For men, going to college was the way to get a good job. For women, it was the way to get a good husband.

In the transitional world of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, it was now socially acceptable, even desirable, for a woman to attend some college before embarking on marriage and motherhood, but the aspirations that a college education sometimes encouraged were still frowned upon. Society strongly discouraged women who intended to marry and have children from setting their sights on a lifelong career, or even from taking their studies very seriously.

As early as 1953, in a thoughtful book on the dilemmas of educated women, sociologist Mirra Komarovsky noted that “technological and social changes over the past century and a half have disturbed an old equilibrium without as yet replacing it with another. As a result, our society is a veritable crazy quilt of contradictory practices and beliefs.... The old and the new moralities exist side by side dividing the heart against itself.”

Komarovsky suggested that female students in the late 1940s and early 1950s were tempted by newer options and goals, but that they understood the likelihood of social censure if they pursued them. The reason so many came to espouse traditional roles “all the more passionately” during the 1950s, Komarovsky speculated, was that they were trying to silence or deny the other aspirations their education threatened to raise.

Whatever their motives, the vehemence with which postwar female college students insisted that marriage was their top priority was striking. Some young women stated in their college applications that their main goal in acquiring an education was to communicate better with their future husbands. One Vassar candidate wrote: “When I marry, I would like to converse with my husband’s friends and business acquaintances with a mature and confident manner that can only come from a thorough education.” Even when college students planned to work after graduation, they often attributed this to a desire to gain “some insight into the husband’s world” or expressed the hope that a year or so of work might give them organizational skills they could use in the home.

Many educators encouraged this growing preoccupation, seeing it as a welcome shift from the “antifamily” tendencies of earlier generations of female college students. During the 1950s, the president of Radcliffe College, the women-only counterpart to Harvard, assured incoming students that their education would prepare them “to be splendid wives and mothers.” If they were really lucky, they might even “marry Harvard men.”