A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (2 page)

My examination of the women and men who read and responded to
The Feminine Mystique
began, as all research on Betty Friedan and her times must, at the Schlesinger Library, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with its rich store of letters that Friedan received and wrote. I also combed through the oral histories my students and I had taken over the past two decades to find relevant stories from people who had formed families in that era.

In seeking other individuals to interview, I purposely avoided people who had known Friedan personally or had become leaders of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s. I use few quotes from such individuals in this book and did not seek interviews with them, although I make extensive use of the tremendously helpful conversations I had with groundbreaking women’s historian Ruth Rosen.

To find interview subjects, I posted requests on women’s magazines’ Web sites; spread the word on professional, religious, and women’s studies listservs; and recruited students to ask friends and relatives whether they had heard of or read
The Feminine Mystique
. Staff members at The Evergreen State College were especially generous in relating their own encounters with the book or sending me to their mothers and their mothers’ friends they had heard mention the book. Almost everyone I interviewed provided me with still more names.

Unless otherwise noted, the individuals whose full names I use were personally interviewed by me or responded to a detailed e-mail survey and gave me permission to use their names. When a first name and last initial are used, these are pseudonyms for persons who asked not to be named, or for someone described in one of my or my students’ oral histories. Quotes from unnamed individuals are from the letters Friedan received, now housed at the Schlesinger Library, although I do identify some of the public figures who wrote to her, such as Helen Gurley Brown, Gerda Lerner, and Anne Parsons.

To make this book more readable, I have substituted a lengthy bibliographic essay for endnotes and pared the number of references to other authors’ works in the text. But every page of this book owes a tremendous debt not only to the women and men who shared their stories with me but also to the many historians and sociologists who have made it their life’s work to research these matters. I hope readers will look at my bibliography to get a sense of the rich work that has already been done in this field.

NEARLY HALF A CENTURY AFTER ITS PUBLICATION, BETTY FRIEDAN’S 1963 best seller,
The Feminine Mystique
, still generates extreme reactions, both pro and con. In 2006, it was ranked thirty-seventh on a list of the twentieth century’s best works of journalism, compiled by a panel of experts assembled by New York University’s journalism department. But when the editors of the right-wing magazine
Human Events
compiled their own list of “the ten most harmful books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” in 2007, they put
The Feminine Mystique
at number seven—not far below Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
.

The Feminine Mystique
has been credited—or blamed—for destroying, single-handedly and almost overnight, the 1950s consensus that women’s place was in the home. Friedan’s book “pulled the trigger on history,” in the words of
Future Shock
author Alvin Toffler. Her writing “awakened women to their oppression,” according to a fellow leader of the National Organization for Women, which Friedan helped establish a few years after
The Feminine Mystique
hit the best-seller list. Following Friedan’s death at age eighty-five in February 2006, dozens of news accounts reported that
The Feminine Mystique
ignited the women’s movement, launched a social revolution, and “transformed the social fabric” of the United States and countries around the world.

Opponents of the feminist movement are equally convinced that
The Feminine Mystique
revolutionized America, but they believe the book changed things for the worse. Prior to Betty Friedan, wrote one author, middle-class women “were living in peace in what they considered to be a normal, traditional, worthwhile lifestyle.” Since
The Feminine Mystique
, “life has never been the same.” In her 2006 book,
Women Who Made the World Worse
,
National Review
’s Kate O’Beirne complained that Friedan
persuaded women that “selfless devotion was a recipe for misery.” Laura Schlessinger, of the
Dr. Laura
radio show, has charged that
The Feminine Mystique
’s disparagement “of so-called ‘women’s work’ . . . turned family life upside down and wrenched women from their homes.” And Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in September 2008 that although
The Feminine Mystique
was correct in pointing out that postwar America took the ideal of femininity “to absurd extremes,” the book was also the source of “modern feminism’s Original Sin”—an attack on stay-at-home motherhood. Friedan’s book “did indeed pull the trigger on history,” Sommers concludes, but in doing so, she “took aim at the lives of millions of American women.”

Even people who have never read the book often react strongly to its title. In addition to interviewing people who had read
The Feminine Mystique
when it first came out, I asked others who had never read it to tell me what they knew about it. Their responses were surprisingly specific and vehement. The book was “full of drivel about how women had been mystified and tricked into being homemakers,” opined one woman. Another reported that the book explained how women’s sexuality had been controlled through the ages and assured me that Friedan had called for an end to marital rape and sexual harassment—ideas that do not appear anywhere in the book’s 350-plus pages. The grandmother of a student of mine insisted that this was the book that “told women to burn their bras.” Another student’s mother told her that
The Feminine Mystique
documented how women in the 1950s were excluded from many legal rights and paid much less than men—although in fact the book spends very little time discussing legal and economic discrimination against women.

Interestingly, many women I talked with were initially sure they had read
The Feminine Mystique
, only to discover in the course of our discussions or correspondence that they actually had not. When they tried to explain the gap between what they “remembered” and what I told them the book actually said, they usually decided that the title had conjured up such a vivid image in their minds that over time they had come to believe they had read it.

As a matter of fact, I was one such person. I first heard of
The Feminine Mystique
when I was an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964. But I didn’t hear about it from “Berkeley radicals.” Instead, it was my mother, a homemaker in Salt Lake City, Utah, who told me about it. She had attended the University of Washington at the end of the 1930s and married my father in the early 1940s. While Dad was away during World War II, she had done her part for the war effort, working in a shipyard. After the war ended, she quit work to follow my dad around the country as he went to college on the GI Bill, attended graduate school, and established himself in his career.

Mom spent most of the 1950s raising my sister and me. But by the early 1960s, with me away at college and my sister in junior high school, Mom began to get involved in civic activities. Soon she took a paying part-time job as executive secretary of a community group.

Once a week she would call me at college and we would fill each other in on what we were doing and thinking. At one point she asked anxiously whether I thought she could handle going back to school to get her master’s degree. At other times she proudly detailed her most recent accomplishments. Once she recounted how bored, lonely, and insecure she had felt as a housewife. The cause, she had recently discovered, was that she had succumbed to an insidious “feminine mystique,” which she had recognized only when she read this new book by Betty Friedan.

“Do you know that sociologists misrepresent research to make women feel guilty if they aren’t completely happy as full-time housewives?” she asked. Wasn’t it scandalous that when a woman expressed aspirations for anything else in her life, psychiatrists tried to make her think she was sexually maladjusted? Was I aware that advertisers manipulated women into thinking that doing household chores was a creative act, and had housewives spending more time on it than they really needed to? “They can make a cake mix that tastes perfectly fine if you just add water. But the box tells us to add an egg so housewives will feel we’re actually baking!”

I remember listening to my mother’s grievances with a certain amount of impatience, feeling that they were irrelevant to my own life. My friends
and I certainly weren’t going to be
just
housewives. Looking back, I am ashamed to admit that at the time I believed it was largely a woman’s own fault if she wasn’t strong enough to defy social expectations and follow her dreams. But it is even sadder to realize, as I did while conducting interviews for this book, that most of these women also believed their problems were their own fault.

I was vaguely aware that women had once organized a long, hard fight to win the right to vote, but that was in the distant past. Far from identifying with other women, I—like many other independent women my age—prided myself on being
unlike
the rest of my sex. In the memorable words of feminist activist and author Jo Freeman, we grew up “believing there were three sexes: men, women, and me.” We knew we didn’t want to follow in our mothers’ footsteps, but it did not yet occur to us that it might require more than an individual decision to chart our own course, that we would need an organized movement to pry open new opportunities and overturn old prejudices. The only movement that really meant something to us in the early 1960s was the burgeoning civil rights movement.

It took a few years for female civil rights activists such as myself to begin to see that we too were subject to many societal prejudices because of our sex. Only gradually, quite a while after the book had inspired my mother and many other housewives, did my friends and I begin to use “the feminine mystique” as a useful label to describe the prejudices and discrimination we encountered.

In fact, it was soon
so
useful that at some point, long ago, the phrase “feminine mystique” became such a part of my consciousness that I was absolutely sure I had read Friedan’s book. So when JoAnn Miller, an editor at Basic Books, suggested that I write a biography not of Betty Friedan the author, but of the book she wrote, I jumped at the chance. I was certain that rereading this groundbreaking book would be an educational and inspiring experience. I also decided that I would assign
The Feminine Mystique
to my students to gauge how they would react to a book that had been so influential to an earlier generation.

After only a few pages I realized that in fact I had never read
The Feminine Mystique
, and after a few chapters I began to find much of it boring and dated. As it turned out, so did my students. The book seemed repetitive and overblown. It made claims about women’s history that I knew were oversimplified, exaggerating both the feminist victories of the 1920s and the antifeminist backlash of the 1940s and 1950s.

I was interested by Friedan’s account of how she had “lived according to the feminine mystique as a suburban housewife” and only gradually come to see that something was wrong with the way she and other American women were being told to organize their lives. But although the story of her journey of discovery was engrossing, her generalizations about women seemed so limited by her white middle-class experience that I thought the book’s prescriptions for improving women’s lives were irrelevant to working-class and African-American women.

And Friedan’s warnings about “the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene” sounded more like something that would come out of the mouth of a right-wing televangelist than a contemporary feminist. So too did her alarmist talk about permissive parenting, narcissistic self-indulgence, juvenile delinquency, and female promiscuity.

My initial reaction became more negative when I went on to discover that Friedan had misrepresented her own history and the origins of her ideas. Checking her account of the publishing history and reception of
The Feminine Mystique
against the actual historical record, I discovered disturbing discrepancies. I was put off by her egotism, which even her most ardent admirers have acknowledged was “towering,” and disliked her tendency to pump up her own accomplishments by claiming that the media, and even her own publisher, were almost uniformly hostile to her views.

I was also indignant that Friedan portrayed all women in that era as passive and preoccupied with their homes. What about the African-American women who had led civil rights demonstrations and organized community actions throughout the 1950s and early ’60s, standing up to racist mobs and police brutality—women such as Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates,
Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Dorothy Height, and so many more? What about the female labor organizers of the 1950s or the thousands of mothers who risked arrest in 1959 and 1960, pushing their children in strollers, to protest the mandatory air raid drills that they believed taught Americans to accept the possibility of nuclear war?

But gradually my appreciation of the book grew, as I talked to people who had read the book when it was first published in the early 1960s, went through the letters Friedan received after its publication, and revisited the era in which Friedan wrote. Paradoxically, the less relevant the book seemed now, the more grateful I became to Friedan for reaching out to the many women who, like my mother, had found it a revelation at the time—women who told me over and over that
The Feminine Mystique
transformed their lives, even that it actually “saved” their lives, or at least their sanity. A half century after they read the book, many of the women I talked to could still recall the desperation they had felt in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and their wave of relief when Friedan told them they were not alone and they were not crazy.