A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (8 page)

An April 28, 1963, letter from a man who had read a newspaper excerpt inadvertently bolstered Friedan’s contention that psychiatry was often used to dismiss women’s aspirations. “Any woman who asks herself, ‘Is this all?’ as in the first paragraph, is in need of psychiatric counseling. . . . Your book-article will only contribute to the further instability of the few neurotic women who take it seriously.” Another man had read “the main part” of a speech she gave at Southern Methodist University and was outraged at the idea of encouraging housewives to find jobs: “Do you advocate throwing another 30 million or so males out on the street so women can ‘find’ themselves?”

Ridgely Hunt, a writer for the
Chicago Tribune
, turned Friedan’s argument upside down, suggesting that men had become trapped in their basements because magazines like
Popular Mechanics
had persuaded them to fill their time building plywood commodes and motorized ice sleds. Mocking Friedan’s account of women’s desire to do something more meaningful with their lives, he described the contemporary man as asking: “Is there no worthier goal toward which I can direct my finely machined intelligence than this tawdry business of earning a living and supporting my family?” But “no one is listening to him,” declared Hunt. “His wife is off to a painting lesson so she can express her inner self.”

Such ridicule was by no means rare, but Hunt’s was intriguing given his personal evolution. A war correspondent who specialized in masculine stories about camping with the Green Berets, riding along in fire engines, and scuba diving to ocean wrecks, Hunt was well known for his hostile attitudes toward women and hippies. Yet by the end of the 1960s he had left his wife and three children and was dressing in women’s clothes and growing his hair long. In the mid-1970s, he had sex-reassignment surgery and became Nancy Hunt.

Contrary to many caricatures of the work,
The Feminine Mystique
never urged women to leave their families or even to pursue full-time careers. The final chapter, “A New Life Plan for Women,” advocated what social conservatives now suggest women should do as an alternative to working while their children are young. Assuming that most women would opt out of work, or at least cut back to part-time, for several years to raise children, Friedan suggested that during this time they take a few classes or engage in volunteer activities that would be compatible with their family duties, then later pursue or resume a career.

Friedan proposed a “GI Bill for Women” to reintegrate housewives and mothers into public life in the same way the GI Bill had helped the mostly male veterans obtain higher education and job training after their prolonged absence during the war. If women’s role in raising families was the valued public service that so many politicians claimed, she argued, why not develop a similar government program to subsidize tuition and books—“even, if necessary, some household help”—for women who had taken time away from work or education to raise children and then wanted to go back to school and prepare themselves for a profession?

“The whole concept of women’s education would be regeared from four-year college to a life plan under which a woman could continue her education, without conflict with her marriage, her husband and her children.” For women who had not been able to attend college before marriage and childbearing, she suggested that society subsidize a summer immersion program designed to make it possible for them to succeed in future studies.

The Feminine Mystique
contained no call for women to band together to improve their legal and political rights. Instead, it urged women, as individuals, to reject the debilitating myth that their sole purpose and happiness in life came from being a wife and mother, and to develop a life plan that would give meaning to the years after their children left home. For all its differences with George Gallup’s description of housewives in the
Saturday Evening Post
,
The Feminine Mystique
ended with a similar recommendation, although Friedan encouraged women to develop their additional goals early in life and not put them aside entirely even when the children were young. And she rejected the prevailing view that women who
did
want to work or pursue education throughout their lives would be harming their marriage or their children.

Nowhere does the book advocate that most women pursue full-time careers or even suggest that women ask their husbands to help them with child care and housework if they went to school or took a job. In fact, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many feminists criticized the book for failing to confront male privilege in the home.

There is no male-bashing anywhere in
The Feminine Mystique
. Friedan actually placed more blame on women than on men for the prevalence of the mystique, which she called their “mistaken choice,” and she wrote repeatedly that women would become
better
wives and mothers if they developed interests beyond the home. Indeed, Friedan once suggested that her tombstone should read: “She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men.”

Friedan simply urged women to pursue an education and develop a life plan that would give meaning to the years after the children left home. That her book spurred such outrage in some quarters and such relief in others is testimony to how much many women still needed it, despite the changes already occurring in American society.

Toward its end,
The Feminine Mystique
does contain a few quotes that seem stunningly dismissive of the work of full-time housewives. In Chapter 10, Friedan comments that in decades past, “certain institutions concerned with the mentally retarded discovered that housework was
peculiarly suited to the capacities of feeble-minded girls,” adding acerbically that in those days “housework was much more difficult” than it is now. And in Chapter 12 she describes the suburban home as “a comfortable concentration camp,” claiming that women who had grown up wanting only to be a housewife were as much in danger of losing their identity and humanity “as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps.”

Still, any serious reader would understand that these quotes are hyperbole, because Friedan says repeatedly that women were
not
coerced into their constricted lives, but rather chose them. And after these inflammatory statements, she quickly concedes that the suburban home “is not a concentration camp, nor are American housewives on their way to the gas chamber.” All she is really saying, she assures her readers, is that many housewives “are in a trap, and to escape they must . . . live their own lives again according to a self-chosen purpose. They must begin to grow.”

That message—that they could and should begin to grow—was what most of the women who read the book cover to cover took away. Nine of the women interviewed for this book still had their original copies of
The Feminine Mystique
and allowed me to go through their yellow, dog-eared pages. Not one had underlined any of the acerbic quotes in the book, and few even remembered her saying these things.

Friedan was not looking for an audience of militants. She wanted to reach beyond the academics, career women, feminists, and leftists who had already questioned the feminine mystique in the 1940s and 1950s, although without calling it by that name, to women who were not yet aware of the sources of their unhappiness. And she managed to strike a chord in the kind of woman who knew at some level that her aspirations for life went beyond the recipes and homemaking hints in women’s magazines but who hesitated, out of guilt or self-doubt, to acknowledge those other needs and desires. The question is, why were so many women in that position in an era when so many social changes were already under way?

MANY DIFFERENT WOMEN RECOGNIZED THEMSELVES IN FRIEDAN’S PORTRAIT of Americans brainwashed by the feminine mystique. Some were “ordinary housewives” or their daughters, who had never known a family that was not organized on the male breadwinner-female homemaker model and had never been exposed to the kind of social criticism they encountered in Friedan’s work. They often wrote to Friedan that until they read her book, they had never imagined any alternative to the lives women were living. Others were self-described “spinsters,” “divorcees,” or “neurotic malcontents” who said they had always thought of themselves as “freaks” because they didn’t fit the norm.

But many women I interviewed reported having gone through a puzzling evolution—or devolution—in their lives. They had attended college, worked at jobs they enjoyed, or been raised in families that supported women’s aspirations for education and equal rights. Over and over, women described having been honors students, community activists, political organizers, or competent “working girls” before they married and had children. But somewhere during the late 1940s or the 1950s, they had abandoned any dream of resuming their former pursuits and lost the sense that they had anything to contribute to the world aside from being wives and mothers.

Friedan argued that this collective loss of confidence and aspiration was part of a major transformation that occurred after World War II, when a social sea change wiped out the memory of what feminism had
accomplished in the early twentieth century. One of her first tasks in the book was to remind women of what they had done in the past.

From the 1850s through the 1920s, Friedan explained, women had struggled to gain access to education, win the right to vote, and break down other barriers preventing them from entering the public world of work and politics. “The ones who fought that battle won more than empty paper rights,” she wrote. “They cast off the shadow of contempt and self-contempt that had degraded women for centuries,” finding a new confidence in their own capabilities.

Friedan described the “sense of possibility” that women felt in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The public was captivated by daring pilots Amelia Earhart and Elinor Smith Sullivan and by female athletes such as nineteen-year-old Gertrude Ederle, who not only was the first woman to swim the English Channel but also did it faster than any of the five men who had previously made it across. The “spirited career girls” of those decades—from such widely admired real-life women to the feisty heroines portrayed in films by Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell—were celebrated in popular culture, including by women’s magazines.

But after World War II, Friedan continued, “the image of the American woman as a changing, growing individual in a changing world was shattered. Her solo flight to find her own identity was forgotten in the rush for the security of togetherness. Her limitless world shrunk to the cozy walls of home.”

How, asked Friedan, had the exhilarating embrace of individual identity and feminist ideals in the 1920s given way to a vision of feminine fulfillment that prevented a woman from using her capabilities, from “even dream [ing] about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife”? What produced the “strange paradox” of the 1950s and early 1960s, when just as professions finally were opening to women, the term “‘career woman’ became a dirty word”? How was it that in the space of little more than a decade, the feminine mystique had become “so powerful that women grow up no longer knowing that they have the desires and capacities the mystique forbids”?

Friedan’s answer, described in painstaking detail in eight chapters packed with facts, figures, and quotations, was that the feminine mystique developed as part of a postwar backlash against the feminist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The attempt to drive women back into the home, she argued, was spearheaded by Freudian psychiatrists, conservative social scientists, and educators who increasingly claimed that when women prepared themselves for anything other than marriage and motherhood they were turning their back on their true feminine nature.

Friedan acknowledged that women had not been forced into accepting the feminine mystique. The call for women to return to the home had tapped into pent-up desires for stability among people whose families had been disrupted by the hardships of the Great Depression and World War II. Focusing on the family also seemed to alleviate the anxieties unleashed by Cold War tensions. Responding to these inducements, and misled by so-called experts who explained that it was abnormal to want anything else, women made the “mistaken choice” to retreat into domesticity. “What happened to women is part of what happened to all of us in the years after the war. We found excuses for not facing the problems we once had the courage to face.”

In Friedan’s view, women withdrew from the responsibilities and challenges of independence in the 1950s “just as men shrugged off the bomb, forgot the concentration camps, condoned corruption, and fell into helpless conformity.” It was easier and safer “to think about love and sex than about communism, McCarthy, and the uncontrolled bomb.... There was a kind of personal retreat, even on the part of the most far-sighted, the most spirited; we lowered our eyes from the horizon, and steadily contemplated our own navels.”

Business interests enthusiastically promoted this retreat into personal life because they saw in it a tremendous opportunity to expand the consumer goods sector of the postwar boom economy. In an exhaustive review of 1950s advertising manuals and surveys, including studies provided by Ernest Dichter, the decade’s leading advertising guru, Friedan showed that manufacturers explicitly defined the ideal consumer as a homemaker
who could be convinced to see housework as a way of expressing her individual creativity and affirming her femininity.

Friedan used the stunningly frank statements of the motivational researchers to reveal how they consciously tried to persuade women that buying household goods and foodstuffs would provide self-realization, sexual fulfillment, and a sense of eternal youthfulness. Advertisers became “the most powerful of [the mystique’s] perpetuators . . . flattering the American housewife, diverting her guilt and disguising her growing sense of emptiness.”