Every writer yearns to create a book that will seize the moment — to perfectly encapsulate the problem of an era before other people even notice the problem exists. Of course, that almost never happens. Mostly we’re happy if we can manage to explain, in an interesting way, something people already know is going on. But Betty Friedan won the gold ring. When “The Feminine Mystique” emerged in 1963, it created a reaction so intense that Friedan could later write another book about the things women said to her about the first one (“It Changed My Life”). If there’s a list of the most important books of the 20th century, “The Feminine Mystique” is on it. It also made one conservative magazine’s exclusive roundup of the “10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries,” which if not flattering is at least a testimony to the wallop it packed.
A version of this article appeared in print on January 27, 2013, on page MM42 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘At a Time When Women Can Be Free, Finally, To Move On to Something More’.
We’re still reading it today. In “A Strange Stirring,” her book about “The Feminine Mystique” and its impact, Stephanie Coontz writes that her students “responded viscerally” to chapters like “The Sexual Sell” that spoke to their own feelings of being under pressure to buy consumer goods and “to present themselves as objects to be consumed.” And of course, if you want to understand what has happened to American women over the last half-century, their extraordinary journey from Doris Day to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and beyond, you have to start with this book.
Critics — and many fans — feel obliged to point out the things that “The Feminine Mystique” ignores, and they are right to be a bit flummoxed that although Friedan was writing during the civil rights movement, she barely mentions African-American women. Working-class women make their appearance mainly in a few suggestions that married women who want to work might want to hire a housekeeper or a nanny. Remarkably, Friedan managed to write a whole book indicting American society for its attitudes toward women without discussing its laws. In 1963, most women weren’t able to get credit without a male co-signer. In some states they couldn’t sit on juries; in others, their husbands had control not only of their property but also of their earnings. Although Friedan obsesses about women getting jobs, she does not mention that newspapers were allowed to divide their help-wanted ads into categories for men and women, or that it was perfectly legal for an employer to announce that certain jobs were for men only. Even the federal government did it.
In a strange way, all those deficits are the book’s strength. “The Feminine Mystique” is a very specific cry of rage about the way intelligent, well-educated women were kept out of the mainstream of American professional life and regarded as little more than a set of reproductive organs in heels. It is supremely, specifically personal, and that’s what gives it such gut-punching power. Friedan dropped out of her postgraduate studies because, she said, her academic success was threatening to her boyfriend. She was furious about the way the female college students of the next generation had been programmed to regard getting an MRS. degree as the be-all and end-all of their experience in higher education. She was enraged by the way the psychiatric profession regarded housewives’ unhappiness as a symptom of an out-of-whack libido. She was angry at the way the economy appeared to see her entire sex as simple consumption machines who built national prosperity by buying new appliances for the kitchen and searching madly for the perfect laundry detergent.
And don’t get her started on women’s magazines. Friedan wrote for them, and she piles up one astonishingly awful example of the selling of the feminine mystique after another. There’s one short story about a young woman who planned to “be something,” then married, wore out six copies of Dr. Spock’s child-care book and wound up declaiming: “I’m lucky! Lucky! I’M SO GLAD TO BE A WOMAN!” You really can envision the team from the mental hospital strapping her to a gurney.
The postwar suburbs were either heaven or hell for their inhabitants — endless stretches of brand-new houses on quarter-acre lots, occupied, during weekday hours, entirely by women and children. I grew up in one in Cincinnati, where the dads drove off to work every morning in what was then the only family car, leaving behind a land in which the only adult males were Tommy the milkman and Art, who drove an old bus outfitted with shelves of groceries that he sold to the stranded housewives. The moms were busy, mainly with the several small kids, but they were not overworked. The high point of the day came at 4 or 5, when the chores were done, dinner was in the oven and the women could congregate in someone’s kitchen or on the back porch to drink and talk. In our house at least, that was followed by my father’s arrival and a second cocktail hour, during which my parents discussed their day while the older children took the younger ones for endless walks in the stroller. Perhaps the only way Friedan’s household resembled mine was in the drinking.
In “The Feminine Mystique,” Friedan tried to portray herself as the typical middle-class housewife of the early ’60s. But really, the Smith graduate who worked for a series of left-wing and union newspapers in Manhattan before matrimony and motherhood was no such thing. She was from a smaller cadre of women who went to college holding two self-images simultaneously: the future stay-at-home housewife and the serious student who cared about grades and reading lists and serious discussions, who took the same courses as the men — or who, like Friedan, went to Smith and presumed her courses were actually harder. Then she was off to graduate school until the boy she was dating took her for a walk in the Berkeley hills and said, “Nothing can come of this, between us. Because I’ll never win a fellowship like yours.” Friedan gave up her academic career, came East and “lived in the present, working on newspapers with no particular plan. I married, had children, lived according to the feminine mystique as a suburban housewife.”
Did that really happen? Did that one remark from a jealous suitor really send Friedan off to New York and marriage to an entirely different man? It doesn’t actually matter. What matters is that as a housewife — even one who kept writing freelance magazine articles on the side — Friedan was bored out of her mind. The difference between her era and the past, she understood, was that the nature of housework had changed when Americans moved from the farm to the cities, and then the suburbs. The farm wife had a crucial economic role in the family, which depended on her to manufacture the clothes, the soap, the candles and the cheese; to grow the vegetables and raise the chickens; and to participate in the informal housewife economy where she could trade the things she made for other vital family supplies.
The suburban housewife had no economic point at all, and modern appliances had stripped her of most of the time-consuming chores of the past as well. A woman’s sense of self, Friedan wrote, “once rested on necessary work and achievement in the home.” But that vanished in an era when housework “is no longer really necessary or really uses much ability — in a country and at a time when women can be free, finally, to move on to something more.”
Friedan’s analysis of what was bothering her turned into “The Feminine Mystique.” And when it hit the stands, women who were feeling bored and trapped by their perfect homes and marriages picked up the book and mentally repositioned themselves in the world. “Some of the women were outraged that ‘The Feminine Mystique’ placed their choices into question, and others, like myself, felt at last they had been understood,” said Madeleine Kunin, who argued about it at her book club in Cambridge, Mass., where she was the wife of a medical student. Kunin later rejoined the working world herself. Like Friedan, she overachieved, and eventually she became governor of Vermont.
As far as I know, none of the moms in my neighborhood read “The Feminine Mystique.” If they ever questioned their choices, it was later, when an inherent flaw became apparent in the ideal suburban lifestyle that was celebrated in all those women’s magazines that drove Friedan nuts. The feminine mystique was built around the central feminine role as mother, but the first generation of suburbanites had their babies young, and the children were grown and gone while their role-deprived moms were still in the primes of their lives. We looked back from our new homes at college dorms and understood that this was an emptiness we had to protect ourselves against. Later, when we got our late-arriving hands on “The Feminine Mystique,” it was an aha! moment. Friedan’s obsession about having a career — the one answer she seemed to grab at for every single problem — made perfect sense.
“The Feminine Mystique” became the kind of best seller that defines an author’s life. In 1966, Friedan was researching another book in Washington when she wound up at a conference of state commissions on the status of women, where attendees were angry over the fact that the federal government had made it clear it had no intention of enforcing a law against job discrimination on the basis of sex that was included in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (This is a good time to point out that “The Feminine Mystique” did not create the women’s rights movement. Those commissions on the status of women were started by the Kennedy administration before the book was published, and the Civil Rights Act was being debated in Congress while American housewives were still just starting to pass Friedan’s book around.)
It was in Friedan’s hotel room that the angry conference-goers met to discuss what they should do when the Johnson administration showed no interest in pursuing the issue. (Friedan was universally known as a difficult personality, and at one point she locked herself in the bathroom and told everyone to go home, but no one did.) The next day, it was Friedan’s coterie that angrily passed around notes at lunch, creating, on the spot, the National Organization for Women, which Friedan would head. It would be NOW, under Friedan, that would file suits on behalf of exactly the kind of average, unglamorous, working women that “The Feminine Mystique” is always criticized for ignoring. And in 1970, it was Friedan who called for the great march to celebrate the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage, creating a mass turnout in cities around the country that would drive home to the nation exactly how determined women were to transform their lives and their society. In New York, the marchers were denied a parade permit for Fifth Avenue and were told to keep to the sidewalks. Friedan, at the head of the pack, took the lead again. “There was no way we were about to walk down Fifth Avenue in a little thin line,” she wrote later. “I waved my arms over my head and yelled, ‘Take to the streets!’ What a moment that was.”
Excerpted from the introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition of “The Feminine Mystique,” by Betty Friedan, to be published next month by W.W. Norton & Company.
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