A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (24 page)

The Feminine Mystique
synthesized a wide range of scholarly research and contemporary social criticism. It translated important sociological and psychological findings into accessible language and personalized such research by combining it with the stories of individual housewives. Friedan also produced a dramatic journalistic exposé of the advertisers who tried to sell to women, the psychiatric community that tried to pacify them, and the educators who patronized them. The resulting account melded riveting personal stories with challenging intellectual criticism. And the title was brilliant in its own right, a striking catchphrase that provided a simple summary of how women were constrained by prevailing social expectations.

 

IN
THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
AND IN HER LATER AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING, Friedan claimed that the book’s origins lay in the hostile reception she received from women’s magazines when she first argued that women’s frustration was caused by the narrow roles they were forced into rather
than by exposure to an education that diverted them from their proper feminine aspirations. Friedan reported that when she used the questionnaire for her 1957 survey of her Smith College classmates as the basis of an article titled “Are Women Wasting Their Time in College?”
McCall’s
rejected it, the
Ladies’ Home Journal
rewrote it to say the opposite of what she intended, and the editor of
Redbook
declared that Friedan had “gone off her rocker.”

In her 2000 book,
Life So Far
, Friedan stated that these adamant rejections made her realize that her article “would never get printed in one of those big women’s magazines,” because it “threatened the whole firmament they stood on . . . the whole amorphous, vague, invisible miasma around ‘the role of women,’ ‘feminine fulfillment’ as it was then defined by men and psychological followers of Freud, and taken for granted by everyone as true.” That day, she recounted, she phoned her agent “and told her not to send that article to any more magazines. I was going to write a book.”

Once again, Friedan’s narrative is gripping but does not accord with the evidence. When I examined Friedan’s papers at the Schlesinger Library and the records of her publisher, the W. W. Norton Company, at Columbia University, I found no independent confirmation of Friedan’s claims that editors had reacted with outrage to this article. A letter by Friedan herself noted that after the
Ladies’ Home Journal
decided not to publish the article, several other women’s magazines had expressed interest but wanted it to be more broad than the Smith survey. Friedan wrote that this interest was what made her begin “to realize there was a book here.”

Actually, Friedan had no lack of supporters in the women’s magazines. The public affairs editor of the
Ladies’ Home Journal
in the 1950s and 1960s was Margaret Hickey, a longtime feminist, daughter of a suffragist, and, starting in 1961, member of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. And Friedan’s correspondence shows that several editors were sympathetic to her views.

Of course, some editors vehemently opposed Friedan’s arguments, and others agreed with her but were reluctant to publish anything that
might offend advertisers who used the feminine mystique to pitch their wares. In some cases, Horowitz shows, various women’s magazines seem to have pressured Friedan to revise articles she wrote during the 1950s, toning down points that might be considered feminist. In at least one case, they removed favorable references to struggles against religious and racial prejudice.

Still, as early as 1955,
Charm
accepted the article “I Went Back to Work,” about Friedan’s own experience returning to paid employment after having a child. She had done so, she told readers, “both from economic necessity and from personal choice.” In the next few years, Friedan was able to publish several laudatory articles about women who successfully combined marriage and careers, and by 1959 she had a book contract for what became
The Feminine Mystique
.

On December 18, 1959, her editor, George Brockwell, wrote to
Reader’s Digest
that “Good Housekeeping has just signed up one Betty Friedan to do the leading article in their anniversary issue next May. This article will be on women’s search for identity . . . and will be so good that your magazine people may be tempted. I know it will be good, for it will in effect be an abridgement of the prospectus of the book Mrs. Friedan is doing for us. We are very high on this project and expect it to be a big one. I therefore hope that your magazine people can be persuaded to wait for the book rather than jumping at the Good Housekeeping article.”

In 1960,
Good Housekeeping
duly published that abridgement, titled “Women Are People Too.” In May 1961,
Mademoiselle
published a Friedan piece that became “The Crisis in Women’s Identity” in the final version of her book. And in 1962, Friedan’s publisher pushed back the publication date by a month to allow both the
Ladies’ Home Journal
and
McCall’s
to publish excerpts before the book was in stores.

As Norton’s prepublicity memos enthused, it was unprecedented for two competing mass-circulation magazines to excerpt the same book. Having these appear in the two largest English-language magazines in the world gave
The Feminine Mystique
a huge boost and partially offset the bad luck that the book came out during a 114-day strike of all the
New York newspapers, which made it impossible to get reviews or place ads in that important market during the critical first months.

For the rest of her life, Friedan insisted that her publisher had done nothing to promote the book until she browbeat him into hiring an independent publicist. But by the end of 1962, Norton had already sold the book club rights to Book Find for $5,000 (the equivalent of more than $36,000 in 2010 dollars), collected endorsements from many prominent individuals, and was projecting that
The Feminine Mystique
would be a best seller backed by “national advertising and other promotions.”

The newspaper strike was a huge blow to publicity plans for the book’s launch, but by the time Friedan’s new publicist came onboard in April, supposedly to rescue the book from oblivion, it was already in its fifth printing, and Norton had taken out ads in several major newspapers. In a note to Norton about plans for West Coast promotions, the publicist pointed out that Friedan had already made about twenty television and radio appearances before she took on the campaign.
The Feminine Mystique
sold approximately 60,000 copies in hardback, a large amount even nowadays, and nearly 1.5 million copies in paperback.

Friedan was a lively and sought-after lecturer, with a knack for fanning controversy and stimulating buzz. Even her ferocious ego helped get the book talked about. Once, while on the television show
Girl Talk
, Friedan warned host Virginia Graham during the break that if she wasn’t given more time to make her points, she would chant the word “orgasm” ten times.

Some of Friedan’s more outrageous or acerbic statements to the press made her sound like the 1960s counterpart of the incendiary Ann Coulter, only with less leg and more brain. But unlike Coulter, Friedan did more than pander to her audience’s prejudices.
The Feminine Mystique
challenged its readers to expand their horizons intellectually as well as emotionally and to channel the indignation that her argument produced into constructive change in their own lives.

The book did not, however, transform women’s societal role. In 1965, women’s legal status still had more in common with the 1920s than the 1970s, and the political agenda of women’s rights activists remained extremely
modest. Almost no one was raising the demands that would become central to the women’s movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s—establishment of preschool and child care centers; the right to contraception and abortion; criminalization of sexual harassment and marital rape; protection against domestic abuse or sexual violence; abolition of laws penalizing unwed mothers or reinforcing a husband’s authority over his wife. It was even hard to find anyone suggesting that husbands share child care and housework.

The specific agenda Friedan presented in
The Feminine Mystique
broke no new ground in this regard. She mentioned that the work of the President’s Commission might mitigate discrimination and made a passing reference to the need for maternity leave and child care, but most of her concluding chapter focused on women’s need to get an education and to make sure their life plan included developing the capacity to engage in creative work. She did not advocate that women organize to oppose the multitude of laws and practices that relegated women to second-class citizenship, restricted their access to many jobs, and gave husbands the final say over family decisions and finances. When such a movement did emerge, it was not as a direct result of
The Feminine Mystique
, although that book brought Friedan the fame that allowed her to play a major leadership role.

 

SOME THREE YEARS AFTER SHE PUBLISHED
THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
, Friedan was instrumental in founding the National Organization for Women. She became its first president, a position she held until 1970. The immensely successful Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970 was Friedan’s idea, and she helped organize the Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. She was a towering figure in the second wave of the women’s movement. But here, too, Friedan is often given—and sometimes claimed for herself—too much individual credit.

In Friedan’s account, after she gained national attention with
The Feminine Mystique
, she was approached by an “underground” group of women who shared her ideas but couldn’t risk their jobs or reputations
by seeming too militant. They begged her to put aside the new book she was writing and build a new women’s movement. The decisive moment, she explained to a
New York Times
reporter in 1970, came when a female attorney who worked for the recently formed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission pulled Friedan into her office.

Closing her door and breaking down in tears, the woman begged the writer to do something: “‘Mrs. Friedan,’ she said, ‘You’re the only one who can do it. You have to start an NAACP for women.’” Such incidents, Friedan told the reporter, made her realize that “women needed a movement. So, I guess I started it.”

Since then, many accounts of Friedan’s life have claimed that the feminist movement was moribund in the early 1960s and that Friedan “single-handedly” revived it. In fact, however, a core group of activists had been building feminist networks during the previous two decades, and by the early 1960s they had been joined by significant numbers of female government appointees who were chafing at the slow pace of change and already discussing the possibility of building an independent women’s rights movement.

It is certainly true that when Friedan was honing her ideas in the 1950s and early 1960s, the National Woman’s Party and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs were nothing like the powerful movement that had organized to win women the vote in the first two decades of the twentieth century. But feminists were networking behind the scenes and had achieved some successes. In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, responding to their pressure, urged Congress to pass a measure requiring equal pay for equal work, pointing out that women had cast a majority of ballots in the previous election. Congress did not act on his request, but Eisenhower did appoint more women to government posts.

John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960 by a very narrow margin, and like Eisenhower, he recognized the importance of securing women’s support. In 1961, on the advice of Esther Peterson, head of the Women’s Bureau and assistant secretary of labor, Kennedy created
the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, to “develop plans for fostering the full partnership of men and women in our national life.” In 1962, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women began a campaign, with the president’s approval, to get similar state commissions established across America. Such commissions were a key precursor to NOW, because they brought together women activists who had not been in regular touch, allowing them to compare notes, develop collective strategies, and often broaden their goals.

Another important development was the gradual abating of the sharp conflicts that had divided feminists since the 1920s over whether to press for an Equal Rights Amendment or try to preserve and expand protective legislation. In 1961, Eleanor Roosevelt remarked that the spread of unionization had extended many needed work protections to men as well as women, so that special protective legislation was becoming less necessary and the ERA might soon become a desirable goal. Esther Peterson and most of the members of the President’s Commission continued to oppose the ERA, but the commission’s Committee on Civil and Political Rights was co-chaired by an ERA proponent, and Pauli Murray, by then a noted civil rights lawyer, proposed a way to move beyond the debate. She suggested that sex-based discrimination be attacked, just as was being done with racial discrimination, as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

There was progress on other fronts as well. In July 1962, Kennedy ordered all federal agencies to disregard gender in hiring, training, and promoting employees. A year later, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act. In October 1963 the President’s Commission on the Status of Women issued its final report, documenting the extent of sex discrimination and recommending reforms such as making marriage an economic partnership in which property was seen as belonging to both spouses. In addition to proposing this new protection for housewives, the committee also called for paid maternity leave for working women and for making child care available to families.

Although the report was published eight months after Friedan’s book, she knew it was in the works and referred to it in her book as an encouraging
sign of the potential for change. Within a year the commission had distributed more than 80,000 copies of the report, which was also translated into Swedish, Italian, and Japanese. In 1965, the report was published as a commercial book, edited by Margaret Mead, and sold extremely well.