A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (26 page)

Other young women had so fully absorbed the postwar rhetoric about equality and self-fulfillment that they reacted with shock and indignation when they discovered there were unspoken exceptions when it came to women. As a girl, Sherry Bogartz grew up playing baseball with her brothers in an old cow pasture by her parents’ chicken farm. She was furious when she found out they could join Little League but she could not. As a college freshman in 1963, never having heard of feminism or
The Feminine Mystique
, Bogartz circulated a petition demanding an end to special curfews and dress codes for female students. She later became a leader of the women’s liberation movement in San Diego, then moved to New York to work for the Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition.

Many other women of Bogartz’s age group reported developing, on their own, a powerful sense that it was unfair of society to bar women from so many new opportunities. “I totally believed the propaganda that
America was the shining light of ‘the free world,’” said Jolene J. “So I was totally angry when those freedoms were denied to me.”

A large group of young women had their gender consciousness raised by their experiences in the civil rights movement, something that, unbeknownst to them, had also happened to their foremothers in the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement. In the 1840s and 1850s, idealistic women had flocked to the abolitionist cause, outraged by the horrors of slavery, but they often became frustrated when men refused to allow them to speak at meetings or vote on important strategy decisions, and some eventually began to organize on behalf of women’s rights as well.

When Angelina Grimke’s future husband, also an abolitionist, suggested that she focus on the antislavery cause rather than dividing her energies between that and women’s rights, she responded: “Can you not see that woman could do, and would do, a hundred times more for the slave if she were not fettered?” Abolitionist and feminist Abby Kelley remarked that women “have good cause to be grateful to the slave for the benefits we have received to
ourselves
, in working for
him
. In striving to strike his irons off, we found most surely, that
we
were manacled
ourselves
.”

In the 1960s, some women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the youth section of the southern civil rights movement, underwent a similar evolution. In 1964, Mary King and Casey Hayden, two white women who had spent many nights discussing Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
and Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel about women’s struggle for independence,
The Golden Notebook
, circulated an anonymous paper pointing out that “much talent and experience are being wasted by this movement when women are not given jobs commensurate with their ability.” In 1965, they signed their names to a more extensive article, “Sex and Caste: A Kind of a Memo,” arguing that the movement needed to improve women’s status.

Some young people came to believe that racism, war, and social inequality were deeply embedded in America’s fundamental political and economic institutions. Many of them joined various groups of the New
Left, where male chauvinism was in some ways more blatant than in places where it was still disguised as a chivalrous concern for women’s delicate nature. Young men in this movement rejected middle-class conventions about the sanctity of premarital chastity, marriage, and the male-breadwinner role, but in repudiating traditional forms of male obligation, they did not renounce male entitlement. And when they talked about sexual liberation, they often meant that a woman had the duty to say yes rather than the right to say yes or no.

Leaders of organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society often cultivated an aggressive style that turned contemptuous if their female comrades challenged them. Women who attempted to raise the issue of male-female equality in these groups were sometimes shouted down and sexually insulted at raucous meetings. Disillusioned and angry, many came to embrace a far more militant version of feminism than Friedan espoused.

For women from these different backgrounds,
The Feminine Mystique
was less often a revelation than a welcome vindication of decisions they had already reached. Lorraine Dusky recalls reading the book in 1964, as a college senior. “Heated arguments with my Midwestern, middle-class parents over my career choice had given way to their grudging acceptance.... I was a journalism major and managing editor of Wayne State University’s
Daily Collegian
, hell-bent on a career to rival Brenda Starr’s with or without the Mystery Man.” The book, she remembers, “pumped high octane gas into my resolve.”

But by the time others read it, they felt they had already gone beyond the issues Friedan addressed. Judith Lorber, who became a professor of sociology and women’s studies in 1972, notes that although she still has her paperback copy of
The Feminine Mystique
, there is no underlining in it and she did not write anything in the margins because she “was not a homemaker and had been determined since the age of fourteen never to be ‘just a housewife.’” Lorber’s underlining and enthusiasm were saved for Shulamith Firestone’s
The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
and Kate Millett’s
Sexual Politics
.

Like Lorber, younger women were often more influenced by books that raised a sharper critique of male privilege than was found in
The Feminine Mystique
. Such women often cite Simone de Beauvoir, as well as the works of Firestone, Millett, Germaine Greer, Juliet Mitchell, Robin Morgan, and Marilyn French as their inspiration.

 

THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT CERTAINLY WOULD HAVE TAKEN OFF WITHOUT Friedan’s book, but acknowledging this only makes what the book
did
achieve all the more powerful and moving.
The Feminine Mystique
electrified a layer of women “in between,” women who might otherwise have been lost entirely, to themselves and to the women’s movement.

This generation of women was just beginning to be caught up in the societal sea change that was drawing more women into the workplace, increasing the economic and cultural importance of education, making the labor of a full-time housewife less essential to families, and raising aspirations for personal growth and equal opportunity. They longed, however inarticulately, to participate in these social changes, but they had few resources to help them resist the cultural insistence that their longings were unnatural and illegitimate.

Having little or no access to the support systems and alternative messages about women’s capabilities the suffrage struggle had spawned and that would return to the fore in the late 1960s, these women reacted with self-doubt and guilt rather than outrage to the frustrations they were experiencing. Isolated as they were in their individual families, they might well have wasted their lives mired in depression—or even, some believe, lost their very sanity—if Friedan had not reached into their homes, using the same language as the women’s magazines that were their main sources of information, in a way that encouraged them to embrace rather than repudiate their aspirations for a life beyond the home. Many of them were inspired to do exactly what Friedan urged—use their education and talents in meaningful work that served a higher purpose.

Lifting so many women out of such deep self-doubt and despair was a tremendous accomplishment. And even after the revival of the women’s
movement,
The Feminine Mystique
remained especially powerful for women whose families or communities had kept them isolated from new ideas and possibilities. I talked to women—and some men—who, long after the 1950s, had been raised to follow that decade’s patterns in their values and lives—people in small communities in Utah, Idaho, California, and Georgia who found themselves just as miserable in the 1980s or 1990s as the women who had embraced Friedan in 1963. They described stumbling upon the book almost accidentally—in one case having a librarian whisper that she might want to read it—and finding it as much a revelation as did Friedan’s original readers.

One unexpected testimony to the book’s continued power to reach people trapped in personal dependence came from a prominent gay historian I interviewed. In the 1990s he had a stay-at-home boyfriend “who suffered from the same anxieties as the housewives Friedan profiled.” At his advice, his partner read the book, taking comfort from the idea that the depression he had at first experienced as a personal inadequacy was an understandable reaction to the lack of independent meaning in his life.

A few years later, the historian picked up Friedan’s book himself and was “astounded” by its power. “Her diatribes against homosexuals were repellent. I was shocked to see that she reflected uncritically the biases of the 1950s. . . . But the book still spoke to me, a gay man of the twenty-first century.”

 

AFTER STRIPPING AWAY THE GRANDIOSE CLAIMS ABOUT THE IMPACT OF
THE Feminine Mystique
, its achievements are still impressive. The book was a journalistic tour de force, combining scholarship, investigative reporting, and a compelling personal voice. And for an important layer of women, reading the book was a life-changing experience.

Friedan exposed her readers to a rigorous criticism of mainstream psychiatry and social sciences, introducing them to the progressive ideas embedded in the new humanistic psychology. To modern readers, Friedan’s acceptance of many 1950s shibboleths about controlling mothers, weak men, and the “ominous” growth of homosexuality seems particularly
dated, but at the time, Friedan was highly effective in exposing the contradictions in this ideology. As historian James Gilbert points out, she repeated the Freudians’ indictment of mom-ism “only to sabotage their arguments, turning them upside down to plea for the liberation of women from cultural stereotypes.” If you want men to be free of controlling wives and mothers, she argued, you must free women from the compulsion to focus all their energy on marriage and motherhood.

For an older generation of educators who already disliked the anti-intellectual trends in women’s education, Friedan’s book was a godsend. “I assigned it to every class I could get away with,” one midwestern professor told me. “And it really helped my female students understand the need to take their education seriously.”

Linda Barker read
The Feminine Mystique
in 1963, at age eighteen, when the book was chosen as the summer reading for the entire incoming freshman class at Connecticut College for Women. She did not experience the wave of relief reported by so many housewives who read the book in the early 1960s, but she believes Friedan’s arguments helped inoculate her against going down the same path. She remembers, “We certainly had more choices with all the new conveniences” of modern society. But “what was I going to do with those choices? I didn’t want to expand housewifery to the full time available.”

Rebecca Adams recalls that during her senior year in college, all the women were required to attend an evening meeting on
The Feminine Mystique
hosted by the dean of women. The discussion had little impact on her at the time. She and her friends went back to their dorm and spent more time making fun of the dean than talking about Friedan’s ideas. Adams graduated, married, and went to work as a social welfare case-worker. In her eighth month of pregnancy, she quit her job to stay home. But a few years later, having just finished playing with her daughter, she began to vacuum the carpet. “All of a sudden, I heard this voice that said, ‘there’s more to life than this,’ and that meeting with the dean of women popped into my mind along with Betty Friedan and
The Feminine Mystique
.” Soon afterward she began taking classes at a nearby university.

Even before these young women began to act on ideas that they got from the book, the older women Friedan had inspired to go back to school or seek meaningful work were swelling the ranks of profeminist educators and mentors. They founded domestic violence shelters, inaugurated classes for displaced homemakers, and started women’s centers. A disproportionate number of the early women’s studies programs and women’s centers in America were established by women who entered this line of work after reading Friedan and going back to school.

The Feminine Mystique
also built personal and political bridges between the generations: an older woman who sent the book to her young niece; a housewife who got it from her teenage babysitter; daughters who belatedly learned to sympathize with their mothers’ depression or anger by reading the book.

Heather Booth’s mother read the book shortly after it was published, when Heather was still in her teens. “She thought it was very important and tried to engage me in a conversation about women’s role,” Booth reports, but Heather couldn’t really understand the “problem without a name.” Like many other socially aware young people, Booth was more concerned about the civil rights struggle. She worked with the Congress of Racial Equality and with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and went to Mississippi to organize during the summer of 1964.

Only after she returned did Booth get drawn into the discussions of women’s roles that were beginning to take place on campuses in 1965 and 1966. She helped conduct a study that revealed the tremendous disparity in how male and female students were treated in class, and she read Friedan for herself about the same time. “It was a bolt of lightning—there is a problem and we need to name it and address it. And the people who have the problem need to lead that fight to correct the problem.”

The very title of Friedan’s book made an enormous contribution to the movement, capturing and concentrating many women’s feeling that they were being sold a bill of goods. The genius of the phrase was that it could stand in for many types of discontent in many facets of women’s lives. Melinda Rice, who never read the book, “used the phrase all the
time. But to me it didn’t have anything to do with the problems of housewives. It was the laws and social customs that kept women second-class citizens and discriminated against us in pay and promotions. Later I came to call those laws and customs ‘sexist.’ But at first, ‘the feminine mystique’ was the only phrase I had to explain what I hated without reciting a whole litany of grievances.”