THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE: The Problem That Has No Name
The problem had no name, at first.
Betty Friedan investigated the lives of some women who were living in suburbia following World War II—and she included her own experience in her study because she was one of those suburban women herself.
Friedan found a name for the problem that she described as having had no name.
She called it the feminine mystique.
And she reported not only her investigative findings, but also offered an astute analysis of the problem in her book The Feminine Mystique (1963).
50th Anniversary Edition, Published 2013
Friedan’s original 1963 book proved to be a candle in the dark days that led to an enlightenment; it was a kickoff of the second wave of feminist consciousness and activism.
But it was not the only one:
Gail Collins states in her introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition:
The Feminine Mystique did not create the women’s rights movement.
Those commissions on the status of women were created 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.
My (Anne’s) own opinion is that, in addition to the Commission and the Civil Rights Act that Gail pointed out, there was worldwide turmoil afoot as well, particularly in America, that loosed the soil of complacency.
As we surely well know, there were dramatic global events occurring that coincided with the publication of the book:
Five years-five assassinations1963-1968
Civil Rights Movement (Rosa Parks)
Second Vatican Council R.C. Church Reforms,1962-1965, Pope St. John XXIII
Vietnam War: All the above-mentioned events occurred upon a backdrop of the war with all the civil protests surrounding it.
This was a time of unsettlement and change! It rocked foundations and loosened the soil in covert ways.
Was something subliminal going on?
A great awakening was on the horizon—actually it was already in the works around the time that Friedan’s book was published.
I believe it was all part of a whole—and that whole was happening in the 1960’s.
I have this weird little theory about the music that rose up in the mid-50’s: the arrival of early Rock music that came in on the American bedrock of sexism and racism and the blinded incarceration of the society in both of these “isms” during that seemingly quiet era of the 1950s.
Could song titles like “Shake, Rattle and Roll” or “Jailhouse Rock” have subconsciously come about from a subliminal insight: the shaking of the foundations and breaking free?
When I hear renditions of “Rock Around the Clock” on Sirius 50’s channel, I have to wonder.
With its lyrics of “We’re gonna rock around the clock tonight…‘till broad daylight,” I can almost hear the prophet Isaiah of Hebrew Testament fame singing along with cheers, like this:
The level of rebelliousness in the Rock & Roll music of that period may have, indeed, included a prelude to the brash awakening and removal of blinders that was to arrive.
The Feminine Mystique surely was that flame that kindled the fire that erupted into the awakening, once it took hold.
So what did Betty Friedan actually find in her investigations of postwar suburban women that later burst into the flame of the women’s movement?
In the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition, Gail Collins describes it this way:
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone.
Betty Friedan opened The Feminine Mystique with this:
As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: ‘Is this all?’
Friedan continued a few pages later:
No other road to fulfillment was offered to women in the middle of the twentieth century.
I do not accept…that there is no problem because American women have luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of.
The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill. It is not caused by a lack of material advantages.
[These] are women whose greatest ambition has been marriage and children. Yet, analysts began to believe that the basic human need is to grow.
And if growth is a vital need for all women—indeed, for all humans—then within the confines of the role of suburban housewifery, there was no room to grow.
Because growth is vitally important for all of us, this might be a good place to mention the negative critiques of the book for its omissions in examining growth—or lack of—in segments of the American population.
Collins refers to this omission, saying that:
many fans… are right to be a bit flummoxed that although Friedan was writing about the civil rights movement, she barely mentions African American women.
Collins offers this perspective:
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.
In contexts other than Collins’, Friedan has been criticized for:
focusing solely on the plight of middle-class white women, and not giving enough attention to the differing situations encountered by women in less stable economic situations, or women of other races, such as African-American. Latina, Asian-American, and Native-American.
Also ignored were:
white working-class and poor women, or the needs of women without men, without children, without homes.
In the context of her book, Friedan makes clear that the women she saw as victimized by sexism were college-educated white women".
I (Anne) understand Collins’ perspective and I agree with it. The African-American (and other women’s) stories, so vital that they are, tell radically different tales. To do justice to those stories, they need to be told for their own value.
I would like to offer at this point, as succinct a definition of the feminine mystique as Friedan describes it, that I can come up with, which is:
The Feminine Mystique describes the assumption that women would be fulfilled from their housework, sexual lives, and children.
Friedan did find that there was a dissatisfaction that many women felt with their lives as housewives and mothers.
Her thesis in The Feminine Mystique is that the societal expectation of women to find fulfillment solely through domesticity and motherhood is a false and oppressive "myth" that leads to widespread dissatisfaction and a lack of personal identity among women, urging them to reclaim their individual ambitions and pursue meaningful lives beyond the home.
Friedan, of course, does not preclude women’s wanting, and having, a home life with husband and children—and any type of house, if she wishes and could attain it.
Friedan did not reject a woman’s wanting, and having, a home life with husband and children—and any type of house, if she wished and could attain it.
And, she stated that a woman should not have to choose between marriage and career when she said "no” to the housewife image. Friedan said: “that was the mistaken choice of the feminine mystique.
_____________________________________
In 1997, Friedan wrote a retrospective in the 50th edition of The Feminine Mystique. Her treatise is an excellent summary of the movement of white women from naive, and manipulated, darkness to critical light.
Betty Friedan
1921-2006
…Only three decades ago, [I wrote about] when women were defined only in sexual relation to men—man’s wife, sex object, mother, housewife—and never as persons defining themselves by their own actions in society.
That image, which I called ‘the feminine mystique,’ was so pervasive, coming at us from the women’s magazines, the movies, the television commercials, all the mass media, and the textbooks of psychology and sociology, that each woman thought she was alone; it was her personal guilt if she didn’t get a [summit sexual experience] waxing the family-room floor.
Sketch by Anne Andersson,1974, from an original, artist unknown.
No matter how much she had wanted that husband, those children, that split-level suburban house and all the appliances, which were supposed to be the limits of women’s dreams in those years after World War II, she sometimes felt a longing for something more.
I called it ‘the problem that had no name’ because women were blamed then for a lot of problems—not getting the kitchen sink white enough, not pressing the husband’s shirt smooth enough….
I myself witnessed the smoothly pressed shirt example Friedan mentions, except that it was about trousers.
When my husband and I were at a neighborhood party of Long Island split-level homeowners in 1972, one of the neighbors (also my friend) privately commented to me with dismay when she noticed her husband’s wrinkled trousers: she was actually guilting herself over not having noticed them earlier and ironed his trousers before they left for the party. She felt embarrassed for herself—an example of the feminine mystique, which held that it was her duty as housewife to be in charge of his clothes.
Betty Friedan continued:
But there was no blame for a problem that had nothing to do with husband, children, home, sex—
—[no blame for] a problem I heard [about] from so many women after I served my own time as a suburban housewife, fired from a newspaper job for being pregnant, guilty anyway as women were made to feel for working outside the home, that they were undermining their husband’s masculinity and their own femininity and neglecting their children.
Anna Quindlen, in her Afterword to the 50th anniversary edition, wrote:
In every great manifesto there are riveting moments of self-awareness.
In The Feminine Mystique one of them is the rhetorical question “Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house.”
Betty Friedan wrote:
Sexual politics started out as a reaction against the feminine mystique.
It was an explosion of women’s pent up anger and rage against the put-downs they had to accept when they were completely dependent on men, the rage they took out on their own bodies and covertly on husbands and kids.
That rage fueled the first battles of the women’s movement….
And what did those battles look like? What were the ways that women fought back—the methods they used—once those women were awakened?
…to be continued
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