A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (7 page)

Friedan heaped scorn on the idea that women could solve the problem, as many psychiatrists suggested, by achieving a more satisfying sexual life. One hundred years earlier, when Victorian culture permitted men, but not women, to “gratify their basic sexual needs,” many of women’s
problems may have been sexual in nature. But that was not the issue facing modern women. Indeed, Friedan argued that women had been encouraged to seek too
much
fulfillment in their sexual lives, leading some women to wrongly conclude that an affair or a new husband would assuage their pain.

The source of “the problem with no name,” she insisted, was that modern culture did not allow women, as it allowed men, to gratify a need that was just as important as sex—the “need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings.” Denied permission to pursue this goal, misled into thinking that service to their family was the highest and only aspiration women should have, many developed “a hunger” that neither food nor sex could fill.

The women most likely to feel this hunger, Friedan said, were those who had chosen not to work outside the home. She noted that “career women may have other problems,” but the women who suffered “this nameless aching dissatisfaction” were the very ones “whose greatest ambition has been marriage and children.” Having been told that achieving these goals should satisfy their every need and aspiration, these women were afraid to admit their secret doubts and discontents. “There may be no psychological terms for the harm” done when women suppressed their hunger for stimulation and knowledge, Friedan declared. But terrible things happened “when women try to live according to an image that makes them deny their minds.”

The response to these ideas was electric. Hundreds of women wrote letters to Friedan after reading a 1960
Good Housekeeping
article that previewed her book, or the excerpts of
The Feminine Mystique
that appeared in
Ladies’ Home Journal
and
McCall’s
in early 1963, or the book itself, either in hardback in 1963 or in paperback in 1964.

The
Good Housekeeping
article was far more cautious than
The Feminine Mystique
. Its central argument was summed up in the title: “Women Are People Too,” a notion that hardly seems revolutionary today. Yet letters poured in, many of them laboriously written by hand, both to the journal and to Friedan herself. The same excited phrases tumbled off their pages:
“I can’t say how grateful I am”; “thank you”; the article “struck at my heart.” “Hoorah for giving this ‘misfit’ courage for self-fulfillment!” “I am one of the people you wrote about.” “I felt that the article was written just for me.” It is such “a great comfort” to find out I am not “an incurable mental case,” to “realize others feel the same,” to “know I am not alone in my quest to find who I really am!”

The writers used words such as “desperate” and “overwhelming” to describe their lives. One woman wrote: “My husband cannot understand why I have suddenly turned miserable after 11 years of a good marriage.” Until reading the article, she continued, “I had been unhappily living in the belief that my feelings about marriage were all wrong, that no other woman feels as I do.... Now that I know I am not alone in feeling as I do the future seems quite a bit brighter.”

In a letter dated August 21, 1960, one woman wrote, “For the past year, I have been in a quandary, trying to find an answer to some of the questions you pose in your article. There were times when I felt that the only answer was to consult a psychiatrist and had I the money, probably would have! The times of anger, bitterness and general frustration are simply too numerous to mention, but if I’d had any idea that hundreds of other women were feeling the same way, I don’t believe I would have felt so completely alone.”

Another woman mentioned that the article had come too late for her: “If I had only had these words and thoughts brought to my attention 10 years ago, perhaps my life would not have taken on the somewhat tragic aspect that it did. Because from just such frustrations as not feeling like a human being, I divorced my husband.”

Three years later, the letters responding to
The Feminine Mystique
were filled with similar sentiments. The book, declared one woman, “perfectly” described the forces that had been “flinging me against a wall of self incrimination.” Another explained: “I thought these problems and situations were only mine, and mine alone . . . and the knowledge that my neighbor-housewifes [
sic
] also have problems” came as such a “relief.”

One suburban housewife wrote that she had “everything materially there is to have” but frequently fled into the bathroom “to cry in the towel.” She hoped husbands would read the book. “Mine wouldn’t. . . . But at least it has helped me understand my feelings and attitudes a little better. Even if I can’t change any part of my life now, I will feel better for knowing I’m no[t] an oddball after all.”

Another wrote, “Only the other night, while talking to my husband of my discontent at being a housewife and mother only, I cried out in anguish, ‘What kind of women [
sic
] am I.’ Now it is a comfort to realize that I am a normal women [
sic
], entangled in the world of today. . . . My husband has up to now felt I could not combine being a mother with educating myself for a future role in the world. Since he has been reading your book too, I feel he will realize that these two roles are really one.... I’m determined now to make a start, perhaps earning money ironing or baby sitting to pay for each course.”

A thirty-one-year-old housewife with four children proclaimed: “You have freed me from such a mass of subconscious and conscious guilt feelings, that I feel, today, as though I had been filled with helium and turned loose!” And a nineteen-year-old college sophomore enthused, “I was so enthralled, my heart beating only for the next word—next fact—next idea—I had to stop and
do something
to express my fervor: I splashed out a big sign, ‘YEA BETTY FRIEDAN’ to tape on the wall in front of me.”

A few housewives sent Friedan poems they had written. “Time goes on,” was the first line of one poem. “I stay behind.” Another ended with: “She waits/ Listening/ In the dead dark/ To the sea beating itself to death on the beach . . . /She died waiting.”

Many women offered themselves as case studies of how the feminine mystique had deformed women’s psyches. “I am a classic example of arrested development,” wrote one woman, referring to Friedan’s description of how women had been infantalized by society’s expectations. “I would have been the class of 1953 had I not dropped out of college after two years.... But my internal demand for self-expression . . . has been eating
away at me for about five years.” A Florida mother of four wrote that for years she had been trying in vain to explain to her husband her need “to have a purpose.” “All I’ve ever achieved was to feel guilty about wanting to be more than a housewife and a mother.”

Another woman, married eight years with two children, wrote that she had been “fighting a battle with the ‘feminine mystique’ for four years,” with a husband who “is very good as a husband but who believes women are inferior by the will of God, so it hasn’t been an easy struggle. Although I stood highest in my high school class and read constantly, none of my ideas were important.” She thanked Friedan for giving her “that extra boost I needed to know I am important to myself and my children and not just a diaper changer.”

In one letter, a woman described herself as “trapped, with no hope of freedom.... After twenty years of home, husband, and children, I finally got a chance to fulfill a dream. I went to college four evenings a week for two and a half semesters and then had to drop out. My husband gave me a choice—school or him. . . . I love my husband and so I gave up school. However, I will try to raise my sons to realize that women are people with the same dreams, hopes, and feelings as men. . . . I will also try to help my daughter realize you can be feminine, a woman, and a full person at the same time. It is too late for me, but not for them.”

Some women reported that they were reading the book with their husbands, and a few husbands wrote to say that they now understood their wives’ depression better and would try to help them pursue outside interests. One husband, a father to two girls, thanked Friedan for making him feel a little constructive guilt about women’s lack of options.

Other women complained that their husbands felt threatened, as one put it, by the idea “that I might have any interest other than him and the children.” In a January 1964 letter, a woman who had been “uprooted” by her husband to move “to the boondocks of Alaska” wrote: “All I can say Betty is your husband must be a gem. You should bow down to the East every night and give thanks to the proud, individualistic male who can allow his wife to find her identity without it dissolving their marriage.
To work in your direction would cost me my second husband as it did my first, so I’ll be a coward and bake my pies and tend my cottage and dream of all the prose I could write and the conversations I could have with interesting people.” As it turned out, Friedan’s marriage was not as solid as this woman assumed, and it fell apart soon after
The Feminine Mystique
became a best seller.

Some of Friedan’s readers were professionals who already opposed the prevailing cultural prescriptions for women and thanked Friedan for giving them ammunition and validation. Many more had gone to college but dropped out before graduation to marry, or had married immediately after graduation, giving up earlier aspirations of training for a professional career to raise children who had arrived in quick succession.

Still, many readers were women who had never been to college and clearly did not have a middle-class background. Their letters often contained spelling and grammar mistakes, or specifically mentioned their lack of money and resources, sometimes complaining that the book was too expensive. Lisa F. told me that she went through the 1950s without reading any books, and no periodicals except the women’s magazines next to the hair dryer on her weekly visits to the beauty parlor. But when she read the article in
Good Housekeeping
, she knew she had to get that book when it came out. When she finally heard that it was in the local bookstore, “I marched right down and bought it out of my weekly food budget. It was the first non-fiction book I ever read all the way through, and I had to look up several words in my husband’s dictionary.” Journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen remembers that when she was twelve years old, she was struck by the sight of her mother, who was not normally much of a reader, “hunched over this paperback, frowning, twin divots between her dark brows.”

In a three-page handwritten letter dated October 20, 1963, one woman wrote in response to reading Friedan’s article in
LIFE
magazine, “Education, I have none of. But every single word you wrote was and always did go round and round in my mind till I absolutely had to stop thinking that way, so sure was I that I was some kind of nut.”

“My husband cannot understand,” she continued. “He needs only me. I need the whole world, in my mind that is.” Her children and grand-children are “a delicious big part” of that world, she wrote, but they “cannot be my whole world.”

Laura W. recalled that when she was about fifteen, in either 1963 or 1964, she had seen her mother, who had completed only two years of high school and was married to a brewery worker, hide the book in her closet when she thought no one was looking. Laura remembered sneaking in later to look at it, thinking it might be an “adult book about how to be mysterious and sexy.” Instead, it looked disappointingly boring. But she realized she had never before seen her mother read anything except magazines “and I felt somehow that it wouldn’t be good for anyone else in the family to find out.” Years later, Laura’s mother confided that she too had suffered from the problem with no name.

Not all readers felt a shock of recognition. Many disagreed vehemently with Friedan’s views. An editor at the
Ladies’ Home Journal
wrote to Friedan that she was sorry to report that the “huge” response to the book excerpt in the January 1963 issue contained “more cons than pros,” although, she noted, “the pros are extremely articulate.” In its next issue, the magazine reported that of the “hundreds” of letters they received, 80 percent were hostile. When
McCall’s
published a different excerpt the next month, historian Jessica Weiss reports, 87 percent of the people who wrote to the magazine criticized Friedan’s views.

Individuals also wrote directly to Friedan to express their disapproval. A few academics and the occasional businesswoman thought she exaggerated the prevalence of the mystique. But most of the critical letters Friedan received unwittingly confirmed the strength of the ideology she described. “It is reward enough for me to see my husband busy but happy, my children leaders in their own schools, because I am home each day making beds, cooking good meals, and ready to listen . . . to problems, sorrows, and joys,” wrote a New Jersey housewife, who thanked God for equipping women with the ability “to be all-loving, self-sacrificing, gentle, feminine.” Another letter declared: “Real women are wanted, needed,
loved, and desired because we are happy, having learned the finest lesson of all: selflessness.”

Most of the angry letters were from people who had not read the entire book, having seen enough in an excerpt or a review to know that they disagreed. A woman responding to an excerpt in the
Chicago Tribune
gave Friedan some acerbic advice: “If you are married, Miss F. I pity your husband and family. If you are not married—
DON’T
EVER MARRY—until you can feel like and be A REAL WOMAN.” It was signed “from one who is.”

A letter dated February 18, 1963, from a woman who had read the excerpt in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, fairly shouted with indignation:
“Please
! More emphasis on contented homemakers and less on frustrated lost identities. Leave the breadwinner to ‘hubby’—result—more inflated male egos.” This last result, apparently, was a good thing.