The Feminine Mystique Read online

  Further praise for The Feminine Mystique

  “Written with a passionate drive…it will leave you with some haunting facts as well as a few hair-raising stories. That The Feminine Mystique is at the same time a scholarly work, appropriate for serious study, only adds to its usefulness.”

  —Lillian Smith, Saturday Review

  “A highly readable, provocative book.”

  —Lucy Freeman, New York Times Book Review

  “The most important book of the twentieth century is The Feminine Mystique. Betty Friedan is to women what Martin Luther King, Jr., was to blacks.”

  —Barbara Seaman, author of Free and Female

  “The Feminine Mystique stated the trouble with women so clearly that every woman could recognize herself in the diagnosis…. Things are different between men and women because we now have words for the trouble. Betty gave them to us.”

  —Caroline Bird, author of Lives of Our Own

  The Feminine Mystique

  Betty Friedan

  The Feminine Mystique

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  New York London

  Copyright © 1997, 1991, 1974, 1963 by Betty Friedan

  Introduction by Anna Quindlen copyright © 2001 by Anna Quindlen

  First published as a Norton paperback 2001

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to

  Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Friedan, Betty.

  The feminine mystique/by Betty Friedan; with a new introduction.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-33932-1

  1. Feminism—United States. 2. Women—United States—Social conditions. 3.

  Women—Psychology. I. Title.

  HQ1426.F844 1997

  305.42’0973—DC21

  97–8877

  CIP

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  For all the new women,

  and the new men

  Contents

  Introduction by Anna Quindlen

  Metamorphosis: Two Generations Later

  Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  1 The Problem That Has No Name

  2 The Happy Housewife Heroine

  3 The Crisis in Woman’s Identity

  4 The Passionate Journey

  5 The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud

  6 The Functional Freeze, the Feminine Protest, and Margaret Mead

  7 The Sex-Directed Educators

  8 The Mistaken Choice

  9 The Sexual Sell

  10 Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available

  11 The Sex-Seekers

  12 Progressive Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp

  13 The Forfeited Self

  14 A New Life Plan for Women

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Reading Group Guide

  Introduction

  Anna Quindlen

  My mother is reading a paperback book at the kitchen table. This is odd. My mother is not a great reader, and usually she reads only before bed, hardcover books that come from the Book-of-the-Month Club, novels by Taylor Caldwell and Daphne du Maurier and Mary Stewart. But she is hunched over this paperback, frowning, twin divots between her dark brows. I cannot remember many of the specific details of my childhood, but I remember this moment well. I am twelve.

  This is how I first encountered Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. When I read the book myself, eight years later, as an assignment for a women’s studies class at Barnard, I immediately understand why my mother had become so engrossed that she found herself reading in the place usually reserved for cooking. I don’t believe she was particularly enthralled by Friedan’s systematic evisceration of the theories of Sigmund Freud, or the prescient indictment of American consumerism.

  I think it was probably the notion of seeing her own life there in the pages of that book, the endless, thankless cycle of dishes and vacuuming and meals and her husband’s ironing and her children’s laundry. “I begin to feel I have no personality,” one woman told Friedan. “I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?”

  “Who am I?” my mother must have been asking herself at the table in the kitchen, and with her millions of others who would pore over this painstakingly reported, fiercely opinionated book. My mother had everything a woman after World War II was told she could want, told by the magazines and the movies and the television commercials: a husband with a good job, five healthy children, a lovely home in the suburbs, a patio and a powder room. But in the drawer of her bureau she kept a small portfolio of the drawings she had done in high school, the pages growing yellower year by year. My bag lunches for school sometimes included a hard-boiled egg, and on its shell she would paint in watercolors, the face of a princess, a seaside scene. I cracked those eggs without thinking twice.

  It has been almost forty years since The Feminine Mystique was first published in 1963, and since then so much has changed, and too little, too, so that rereading the book now feels both revolutionary and utterly contemporary. It changed my life. I am far from alone in this. Susan Brownmiller says the same in the opening pages of her memoir of the women’s movement. It changed Friedan’s life, too. She became a celebrity, a pariah, a standard bearer, a target. She founded the National Organization for Women and her name became synonymous with the Equal Rights Amendment and late-twentieth-century feminism.

  And it changed the lives of millions upon millions of other women who jettisoned empty hours of endless housework and found work, and meaning, outside of raising their children and feeding their husbands. Out of Friedan’s argument that women had been coaxed into selling out their intellect and their ambitions for the paltry price of a new washing machine—“A baked potato is not as big as the world,” she noted puckishly of their stunted aspirations—came a great wave of change in which women demanded equality and parity under the law and in the workplace. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, girls in Little League, women rabbis: it is no exaggeration to say that The Feminine Mystique set the stage for them all.

  What Friedan gave to the world was “the problem that has no name.” She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial. “If a woman had a problem in the 1950’s and 1960’s, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself,” Friedan wrote, based on both her reporting and her own experience.

  This was preposterous, she argued. Instead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick. She reinforced her sense of what was wrong with studies showing diminished ambitions for students at women’s colleges like Vassar and Smith, increasing psychological treatment for young mothers in the suburbs, lower ages of marriage and childbirth as the mystique became the only goal in the lives of women. Tho
se who think of the book as solely a feminist manifesto ought to revisit its pages to get a sense of the magnitude of the research and reporting Friedan undertook.

  It is an ambitious book in that way, a book wary of those many who will want to attack both the messenger and the message, a book carefully marshaling and buttressing its arguments. And it is an ambitious book in its scope, too. It might have been an important one simply on the basis of its early chapters detailing the vague malaise afflicting women who were thought to be a uniquely blessed and contented generation. But it is an enduring one because of the other related issues Friedan addresses. Her explication of the role of consumerism to reinforce American social strata is stunning, even now that we take the buying and the selling of ourselves for granted. 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.”

  At moments like those the reader must remind herself that this book was written well before the consumer movement, the anti-war movement, the movement toward a counterculture. It was prescient, and it continues to be so. For while the lives of women have changed radically in many ways since Friedan described a generation of educated housewives maniacally arranging the silverware and dressing to welcome their husbands home from work, the covert messages the culture sends to women today are still pernicious. So the chapters that describe the overinvestment of mothers in their children, “the cult of the child,” still resonate both with women who have chosen not to work outside the home and those who have, both of whom feel under cultural fire. And the description of children who never grow up might as well have been written yesterday. “Behind the senseless vandalism, the riots in Florida at spring vacation, the promiscuity, the rise in teenage venereal disease and illegitimate pregnancies, the alarming dropouts from high school and college, was this new passivity. For those bored, lazy, ‘gimme’ kids, ‘kicks was the only way to kill the monotony of vacant time.’” Forty years ago those words appeared. It seems scarcely possible.

  In those forty years The Feminine Mystique has sometimes been devalued. Friedan the author became inextricably intertwined with Friedan the public figure, the latter often identified with internecine squabbles with other feminist leaders and a combative public persona. In hindsight the shortcomings of the book become clear. Too much attention is paid to the role of institutions and publications in the reinforcement of female passivity, too little to the role of individual men who have enjoyed the services of a servant class and still resent its loss. Friedan’s own revisiting of the material in The Second Stage (1981) was not as rigorous or well-researched as The Feminine Mystique had been. While she attempted to make valid points about why some women have chosen to embrace childrearing and a domestic life, the revisionist message of this second book appeared to be an apologia for the ferocity of her first.

  Perhaps there also has come to be a certain feeling among the smug overachievers of the post-Mystique generation that time had passed, and passed the book by, that we had moved away from the primer into the advanced course in seizing control of our own lives. I plead guilty on this count. I expected to revisit this book as I would a period piece, interesting, worthy of notice and of homage, yet a little dated and obvious as well. The daughter of a quiet and contained housewife, I had become an opinion columnist in the onslaught of change that this book began, and I expected to be properly grateful. Which is to say, slightly condescending.

  As casually as I once cracked those painstakingly painted eggs as a girl, I cracked the spine of this book. And, as my mother had been, in a different world, at a different time, under hugely different circumstances, I was enrapt. Four decades later, millions of individual transformations later, there is still so much to learn from this book about how sex and home and work and norms are used to twist the lives of women into weird and unnatural shapes. It set off a social and political explosion, yet it also speaks to the incomplete rebuilding of the leveled landscape. “Giving a name to the problem that had no name was the necessary first step,” Friedan concludes in the epilogue. “But it wasn’t enough.” Much, much more was necessary to change our lives. But as a first step, this one is extraordinary. As a writer, I say, “Brava!” As a beneficiary of the greatest social revolution in twentieth-century America, the resurgence of feminism that began with The Feminine Mystique, I am obliged to add, “Many, many thanks.”

  Metamorphosis

  Two Generations Later

  As we approach a new century—and a new millennium—it’s the men who have to break through to a new way of thinking about themselves and society. Too bad the women can’t do it for them, or go much further without them. Because it’s awesome to consider how women have changed the very possibilities of our lives and are changing the values of every part of our society since we broke through the feminine mystique only two generations ago. But it can’t go on in terms of women alone. There’s a new urgency coming from the changing situation of men, threatening to women unless men break through. Will women be forced to retreat from their empowered personhood, or will they join with men again in some new vision of human possibility, changing the man’s world which they fought so hard to enter?

  Consider the terms of women’s new empowerment, the startling changes since that time I wrote about, only three decades ago, 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 have an orgasm waxing the family-room floor. No matter how much she had wanted that husband, those children, that split-level suburban house and all the appliances thereof, 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, the children’s bedwetting, the husband’s ulcers, their own lack of orgasm. But there was no name for a problem that had nothing to do with husband, children, home, sex—the problem I heard 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 then for working outside the home, that they were undermining their husband’s masculinity and their own femininity and neglecting their children. I was not quite able to suppress the writing itch, so, like secret drinking in the morning because no other mommy in my suburban world “worked,” I freelanced for women’s magazines, writing articles about women and their children, breast feeding, natural childbirth, their homes and fashions. If I tried to write about a woman artist, a political concern, “American women won’t identify,” the editors would say. Those editors of women’s magazines were men.

  All the terms in every field and profession then were defined by men, who were virtually the only full professors, the law partners, the CEOs and company executives, the medical experts, the academicians, the hospital heads and clinic directors. There was no “woman’s vote” women voted as their husbands did. No pollster or political candidate talked about “women’s issues” women were not taken that seriously, women didn’t take themselves that seriously. Abortion was not a word printed in newspapers; it was a sleazy crime that shamed and terrified and often killed women, and whose practitioners could go to jail. It was only after we broke through the feminine mystique and said women are people, no more no less, and therefore demanded our human right to participate in the mainstream of society, to equal opportunity to earn and be trained
and have our own voice in the big decisions of our destiny, that the problems of women themselves became visible, and women began to take their own experience seriously.

  Consider, in the summer of 1996, that the women athletes taking the Olympic medals—from tennis, track and field, to soccer, basketball, kayak, mountainbike—in every possible competition, were virtually the main show, the target of prime-time television. In my growing up, or my daughter’s, there were no women playing in major sports—no serious athletic training for girls in schools, only boys—until the women’s movement demanded and won an end to sex discrimination in education, including athletic training, in Title 9 of the Civil Rights Act as Title 7 banned discrimination in employment—equal opportunity to work, and play, to the limit of one’s ability, for women and men.

  Consider in 1996 that the issue of abortion as women’s choice was the crucial issue splitting the Republican party. Long since the women’s movement declared the basic right of a woman to choose whether or when to have a child, long since the Supreme Court declared that right as inalienable as any right specified in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, as they were originally written of by and for the people that were men, long since the Democratic party committed itself to the right to choose, and long since the fundamentalist Religious Right has been fighting a vicious rearguard action, harassing and bombing abortion clinics. The Republican party won elections in the past inflaming fears and hate over the issue of abortion. In 1996 their platform’s demand for a constitutional amendment criminalizing abortion again, putting the fetus over the life of the woman, alienated many Republican women and men, a last desperate attempt to turn the clock back. As it became clear that women, now registered to vote in increasing majority over men, would elect the next president of the United States, not just choice but issues like family leave, the right to women not to be forced out of hospitals less than 48 hours after giving birth, the right of parents to take time off to take children to the dentist, or for a parent-teacher appointment became serious political business.