Sunday, February 24, 2013

Looking Back at a Domestic Cri de Coeur


By JANET MASLIN  Published: February 18, 2013

On my first day of work at The New York Times, a young reporter spied me in the newsroom and rushed up to say hello. “Hey!” she said. “It’s another one of us!” We were both in our 20s at a time when young women at The Times were a novelty, and that big smile from Anna Quindlen was an amazingly generous icebreaker. That was that: friends for life.
Three and a half decades later I was embarrassed to tell Anna that I had never read “The Feminine Mystique,” which was published 50 years ago this Tuesday. It has now been reissued, with an introduction by the Times Op-Ed columnist Gail Collins and an afterword by Anna. Anna and I talk about books all the time; how had this one never come up in conversation?
She wasn’t surprised. She hears “The Feminine Mystique” name-dropped by people who, she can tell, haven’t read it at all.
“It is a cliché of our own time,” Betty Friedan wrote in her 1963 manifesto — which, yes, I have just finished reading — “that women spent half a century fighting for ‘rights,’ and the next half wondering whether they wanted them at all. ‘Rights’ have a dull sound to people who have grown up after they have been won.”
Among the many truisms in the book, that one leaps out at me most. Unlike friends who went to women’s colleges, I went to a coed campus and studied math; “The Feminine Mystique” was not required reading. By the time I became a journalist, Friedan’s sleepwalking housewives were so long gone that I could enter the professional world with a short memory and an undisguised advantage. The top editor who hired me in 1977 told me, perfectly nicely, that I was “the right age and the right sex.” He told Anna that if she hadn’t been female, she never would have gotten in the door.
Friedan wrote about the period between World War II and 1960, when women married young, abandoned their ambitions, had large families that fueled the baby boom, moved to the suburbs and valued femininity above all else. This was the era during which Adlai Stevenson, soon to make his second bid for president, told Smith College’s Class of 1955: “I think there is much you can do about our crisis in the humble role of housewife. I could wish you no better vocation than that.”
Read today, “The Feminine Mystique” is a fascinating mixture of antiquated attitudes (like that one) and others that have remained unchanged. Foisting sexual precocity on the very young goes way back, we find out; JonBenet Ramsey’s parents didn’t invent it. Remember that YouTube video of 7-year-old girls mimicking Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” dance moves? In Friedan’s day a newspaper ad for a child’s dress featured the tag line “She Too Can Join the Man-Trap Set.”
This gasp factor keeps “The Feminine Mystique” evergreen. Friedan, a suburban housewife herself (though with a more complicated history than she let on), played reporter to collect evidence of how and why young married women felt so stifled. She claimed to be writing about “the problem that has no name,” but she executed a brilliant marketing coup in naming it. She was writing about depression, frustration, emptiness, guilt and dishonesty; she was analyzing the way psychiatrists, women’s magazines, marketers, educators and social scientists routinely lied to women about their need for feminine glamour. But mystique itself is a glamorous word, and it put a seductive spin on a set of dismal problems.
Her chapter on advertising, “The Sexual Sell,” is the most obvious stunner. Thanks to “Mad Men,” we have some inkling of what marketers thought of women, but Friedan brought her own anger to describing it. After writing about how they tried to make housework sound important, scientific and even therapeutic — instant cake mix was pitched as an outlet for creativity, not as a way of being lazy — she sat down with a motivational-research expert (male), who explained that ads had to be careful not to scare women with the prospect of making them so efficient that they would have free time.
What would be so bad about that? she asked. “Why doesn’t the pie-mix ad tell the woman she could use the time saved to be an astronomer?” Even an algebraic topologist who also shuffled computer punch cards — hey, I tried — would find that a silly question. The expert then tossed off a few suggestions, like “the astronomer gets her man.”
Parts of the book now seem repetitive and obvious, but perhaps because these ideas were so new they warranted repetition. Though her topics include Freud (shredded here), Margaret Mead (ditto) and the arrested development of young wives, Friedan repeatedly returns to women as lost souls. Equating the helpless housewife and the concentration camp inmate is as shrill now as it must have been in 1963.
One big gap in “The Feminine Mystique” concerns popular culture. Aside from looking closely at women’s magazines (what easy targets), Friedan ignores the messages sent by television, books, movies and celebrities, though lonely housewives must have been well aware of these influences. Did she not wonder why shows like “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” presented housework as something to be done in full makeup and party clothes? Why did she overlook the new world of rebellious teenagers? Why mention the novel “Peyton Place” without parsing its values? I suppose it’s safe to say that Friedan had quite a lot else on her mind.
In 1963 she prophetically suggested that the era of “The Feminine Mystique” might be a larval stage, after which women would break out of their cocoons and get moving again. As time passed and she added retrospective material — an epilogue in 1973, a new introduction in 1997 — she gave the book much-needed context and described its consequences. Yet she made enemies along the way, and not just the suburbanites who ran her out of Rockland County. She had her differences with later waves of feminists too.
I have a photograph of myself with Betty Friedan. We were together on a radio show. I was there because I was a critic for The Times and I arrived at The Times because of opportunities her book created. I wish I had known how much I owed her. 

No comments: