Betty Friedan "The Feminine Mystique" Note: Scroll to the bottom for the Excerpt!!

Betty Friedan Fighting for Feminism: A Failed Attempt at Equality

Are you really a feminist? Feminists are people who strive to overcome power imbalances and discrimination based on gender and sex, in other words, they strive for equality. Over the past century, the feminist movement has ebbed and flowed in and out of style in the United States. As World War II came to a close, many American women felt the push to take on domestic roles again, rather than continuing on in the workplace, as the feminist movement wavered. However, not all women were satisfied with these social norms. One such person was Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique and one of the first Americans in the 1960s to help reinvigorate the waning feminist movement. Her book can be viewed as a general success; Friedan reopened the conversation about societal expectations for women. Unfortunately, she did not address the problems faced by anyone other than economically well-off white women. Despite the fact that Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique unmistakably reignited the feminist movement, her failure to include the struggles that minority and lower-class women faced made Friedan’s teachings restrictive and irrational, and therefore invalidated her credibility as a feminist who wanted equality for all.

Like Rosie the Riveter, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique became a symbol that united women in the fight against rampant sexism. Friedan was married, had three children, identified as both a “suburban housewife” and a “freelance magazine writer” (Rotskoff 120). As such a person, she embodied the women that she portrayed in The Feminine Mystique. Contrary to her explanation that she first became an activist when confronting the idea of housewifery and sexist gender norms, Friedan spent “almost two decades of participation in left-wing labor union activity and other progressive social causes” before writing The Feminine Mystique (Rotskoff 122). Friedan’s journey of tackling sexism began when she spoke with other women who felt as if their lives lacked a purpose (Friedan 68-9). In doing so, Friedan ascertained that the dissatisfaction she felt with her own life was not unique. Upon this realization, Friedan began to analyze the problems facing women in an attempt to help free them from the never-ending frustration with the lack of purpose that plagued their lives.

The Feminine Mystique sparked the second-wave feminist movement in the United States. By articulating that “our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role,” Friedan explained that women are more than just their sexuality and gender, and need to be treated as such in order to serve as productive members of society (Friedan 77). Considering that no other American writer had taken on the task of defining the problems facing women, Friedan’s work was downright revolutionary. As the Los Angeles Times published in 1963, “Her ideas may emancipate many,” suggesting that, by giving women access to a detailed description of the problems they faced, Friedan instilled an opportunity for change in the women who read her work (Armstrong). Friedan rekindled feminism by helping women see their lives and struggles in a new light: “Hundreds of women have testified that the book changed their lives, and historical accounts often credit it with launching the recent [second-wave] feminist movement” (Meyerowitz 1455-6).  Clearly, Friedan had a decided impact on women’s lives by reintroducing feminism to American women.

Friedan’s account of the problems facing women in the 1960s became the accepted description of post-war culture of American women. Friedan was a pioneer in writing about women’s situation during the time period, causing “virtually all [historians] accept her version of the dominant ideology, the conservative promotion of domesticity” as the accurate description of post-World War II American culture (Meyerowitz 1456). There is no question that Betty Friedan impacted the historical perception of women’s condition during the post-war era; however, she was the neither the most radical nor the most inclusive proponent of feminism and women’s rights.

Friedan was not the first woman to undertake the problems of sexism, in fact, her French predecessor, Simone de Beauvoir, published a key piece of existential feminist philosophy, The Second Sex, nearly a decade before Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique. Although her work came much later, Friedan’s writing struck a chord with Americans where de Beauvoir’s did not. Friedan’s book had a larger influence over Americans because “her text was more accessible… her ideological disposition was more suitable” than de Beauvoir’s more radical – but inclusive – philosophy (Dijkstra 300). Simone de Beauvoir extended her views on the problems facing women to include all members of the female sex, regardless of race, ethnicity, or social class.  Although not a global feminist leader like de Beauvoir, Friedan was a principal feminist in America.

While Friedan paved the way for the reinvigoration of the American feminist movement, narrated the accepted historical account of post-war culture, and captured the American audience more than other philosophers, her ideas lacked complexity: she did not address the intersection of ways women were – and still are – oppressed, most notably by social class and race. Throughout her book, Friedan focuses on privileged, white, middle- and upper-class women who did not represent the entirety of the American female population; they were not discriminated against because of their class or race. Friedan’s argument is less credible because she failed to include the hardships that the women she excluded from her narrative had to endure. Furthermore, the number of women who worked outside the home outnumbered their housewife counterparts, proving that, while many of them needed to do so because of their personal situation, women did take on roles that deviated from housewifery: “millions of working- and middle-class women – of various racial and ethnic backgrounds – worked outside the home, often struggling to improve working conditions on the job” (Rotskoff 121). These working women prove that domesticity was not a universal problem, and consequently that the feminine mystique did not influence the lives of all women in the same way. By excluding the stories of other racial and social groups, “Friedan missed an opportunity to prove that women could indeed combine family commitments with involvement beyond the home….that working mothers could maintain strong family ties, inspiring both love and respect in their children” (Coontz 126). Women could clearly be part of a family, a home, the workplace, and simultaneously find their identities. Because Friedan did not portray the problems facing a significant portion of American women, her description was not accurate nor inclusive, making it a less valuable piece of feminist literature.

Betty Friedan clearly influenced feminism; she confronted the stereotypical role of a domestic housewife, and in doing so, altered the way history remembers women and feminism during the post-war era, as well as the way some women came to view the potential of their lives. She became a role-model for modern feminism. However, by neglecting the oppression that lower-class women of color felt, Friedan excluded a considerable number of members of the female sex from her widely accepted image of post-war culture. This leads to the conclusion that Friedan’s work hinders the American understanding of post-war culture as a direct result of her limited and classist claims about the problems facing women of the 1960s. If she had broadened her focus to include all women, Friedan would have been more radical and revolutionary, and potentially could have spurred the feminist movement to go further, faster. Friedan did contribute to the feminist movement; however, her simplistic approach of explaining the problems that women faced suppressed the stories of non-white, lower-class women, which ultimately inhibited American society’s advancement toward the equality which should be shared among all people, regardless of their gender, sex, race, ethnicity, or class.  

The Feminine Mystique Extended Reading Summary

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique directs attention to the struggles that women faced during the 1960s, some of which are still present today. Friedan did what no American writer had done before: she acknowledged and analyzed the problems facing the American women who undertook the role of middle-class housewives. According to Friedan, a woman’s identity – or lack thereof – is the beginning of her problems. Women were meant for men, or so society told young, impressionable girls as they grew up, who didn’t want to be like their mothers, but who weren’t sure who they wanted to be themselves.

In her book, Friedan expresses the belief that the problems of American women stemmed from the feminine mystique. The feminine mystique is the belief that a woman’s existence revolves around being a wife, mother, and a housewife, but nothing else. Friedan opposes the validity of the feminine mystique; she explains that society molds women to conform to predesigned gender roles, such as femininity and domesticity, a practice that oppresses and manipulates women. Friedan argues that women have the potential to take on more than housewifery, but that they need to overcome societal expectations in order to do so.

Friedan insists that a woman’s lack of personal identity is the root of the problems that she faces. Friedan claims that the feminine mystique keeps women from finding themselves and their identities, thereby reducing their capacity to be successful members of society (Friedan 77). Friedan furthers her point by demonstrating one of many double standards between men and women in American society during the post-war era: men were expected to scrutinize their identity, but women were expected to go from girl to wife to mother without once questioning who they want to be, which ultimately led to what Friedan christened “the problem that has no name.” Friedan tries to liberate the women who feel the suffocation of this unnamable problem by sharing the experiences and insights she gained while studying the phenomenon of the American housewife and the pressures society put on girls to abandon their independence in the quest to become ideal women. Friedan urges women to be more than just housewives, to understand who they are as individuals, so that they can live and enjoy their lives and experiences for themselves.

To prevent the disease-like spread of the feminine mystique through American culture, Friedan asserts that women must be empowered to identify themselves in a way that is not related to someone else – Sally’s mother, Joe’s wife – but truly for themselves. Unfortunately, as the women of the 1960s did not have many independent women to look up to as role models, they did not do so, and the majority of women turned to the media to decipher how to life a happy, successful life. The public image that they found in the media was a generalized housewife, who fully abided to the demands of the feminine mystique, rather than helping women discover their individual identities.

While Betty Friedan was one of the only American feminists publishing work in the 1960s, she was preceded by Simone de Beauvoir, a French existentialist, who published her views on the challenges facing women in her work, The Second Sex. An existentialist, de Beauvoir writes that everyone is utterly and completely free to do as they wish, but goes farther to say that women must break through more societal barriers and restrictions in order to achieve the same freedom as men. Unlike Friedan, de Beauvoir does not restrict her teachings to one class of women, but broadens her claims to the entire sex, making her philosophy more inclusive than Friedan’s. However, their fundamental messages were the same: women face barriers in their lives that men do not, and consequently have to endure the burden of overcoming the challenges that stem from the patriarchal systems that plague the world.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Charlotte. "The Feminine Mystique Explored." Los Angeles Times [Los Angeles] 2 June 1963: n. pag. ProQuest Newsstand. Web. 13 Nov. 2014. <http://search.proquest.com/hnplatimes/docview/168342876/321D18CB706A4703PQ/1?accountid=14109>.

I used this source to provide insight on how Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was viewed around the time it was published. It is a non-biased, credible source because it is a newspaper article published in the Los Angeles Times. 

Coontz, Stephanie. A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Print.

Stephanie Coontz is an author and a faculty member at Evergreen State College. Her book is credible because it was published by a reputable publishing company. I used her work to provide a critique of Friedan's work.

Dijkstra, Sandra. "Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan: The Politics of Omission." Feminist Studies 6 (1980): 290-303. JSTOR. Web. 13 Nov. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177743>.

Sandra Dijkstra is the president of her foundation, the Sandra Dijkstra Literacy Agency, which works to sell books that will truly impact the readers. She has her Ph.D. in French literature, which is why her article comparing de Beauvoir and Friedan's relative impacts is knowledgeable. Feminist Studies, the journal in which the article was published in, is a scholarly journal of women's studies that was created in 1972.  

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. Print. Betty Friedan was a feminist who published three books and helped start the National Organization for Women. Her book, The Feminine Mystique, is what my paper focuses on, making it an invaluable sources of information. 

Meyerowitz, Joanne. "Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946-1958." Journal of American History 79 (1993): 1455-82. JSTOR. Web. 10 Nov. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2080212?seq=2>.

Joanne Meyerowitz is a Chair of American Studies and a professor of History & American Studies at Yale University. She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford, and is the author of numerous books and articles on gender and social issues. I use this source to describe and analyze women and post-war America.

Rotskoff, Lori E. "Home-Grown Radical or Home-Bound Housewife? Rethinking the Origins of 1960s Feminism through the Life and Work of Betty Friedan." Rev. of Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism, by Daniel Horowitz. Reviews in American History 28 (2000): 120-27. JSTOR. Web. 12 Nov. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/30031135>.

Lori Rotskoff, who taught undergraduate students at Yale and Sarah Lawrence College after earning her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale, has been published numerous times as an author and a reviewer. I use her work to give background on Betty Friedan and to critique Friedan's claims. Reviews in American History, the journal the review is published in, is published by the John Hopkins University Press, making it a reputable source of information.

Excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique

The Problem That Has No Name

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….she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – “Is this all?”

…

In the fifteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children’s clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running all day. They changed the sheets on the beds twice a week instead of once, took the rug-hooking class in adult education, and pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career. Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the men to make the major decisions. They gloried in their role as women, and wrote proudly on the census blank: “Occupation: housewife.”

…

“Even so, most men, and some women, still did not know that this problem was real. But those who had faced it honestly knew that all the superficial remedies, the sympathetic advice, the scolding words and the cheering words were somehow drowning the problem in unreality. A bitter laugh was beginning to be heard from American women. They were admired, envied, pitied, theorized over until they were sick of it, offered drastic solutions or silly choices that no one could take seriously. They got all kinds of advice from the growing armies of marriage and child-guidance counselors, psychotherapists, and armchair psychologists, on how to adjust to their role as housewives. No other road to fulfillment was offered to American women in the middle of the twentieth century. Most adjusted to their role and suffered or ignored the problem that has no name. It can be less painful, for a woman, not to hear the strange, dissatisfied voice stirring within her.

…

It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women. This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough. I do not accept the answer that there is no problem because American women have luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of; part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold. The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill. It persists in women whose husbands are struggling internes and law clerks, or prosperous doctors and lawyers….It is not caused by lack of material advantages; it may not even be felt by women preoccupied with desperate problems of hunger, poverty or illness. And women who think it will be solved by more money, a bigger house, a second car, moving to a better suburb, often discover it gets worse.

It is no longer possible today to blame the problem on loss of femininity: to say that education and independence and equality with men have made American women unfeminine. I have heard so many women try to deny this dissatisfied voice with themselves because it does not fit the pretty picture of femininity the experts have given them….Women who suffer this problem, in whom this voice is stirring, have lived their whole lives in pursuit of feminine fulfillment. They are not career women (although career women may have other problems); they are women whose greatest ambition has been marriage and children….They are the ones who quit high school and college to marry, or marked time in some job in which they had no real interest until they married. These women are very “feminine” in the usual sense, and yet they still suffer the problem.

…

Can the problem that has no name be somehow related to the domestic routine of the housewife? When a woman tries to put the problem into words, she often merely describes the daily life she leads. What is there in this recital of comfortable domestic detail that could possibly cause a feeling of desperation? Is she trapped simply by the enormous demands of her role as a modern housewife: wife, mistress, mother, nurse, consumer, cook, chauffeur; expert on interior decoration, child care, appliance repair, furniture refinishing, nutrition, and education? … She can never spend more than 15 minutes on any one thing; she has no time to read books, only magazines; even if she had time, she has lost the power to concentrate. At the end of the day, she is so terribly tired that sometimes her husband has to take over and put the children to bed.

…

It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban housewife, the continual demands on her time. But the chains that bind in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit. They are chains made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices. They are not easily seen and not easily shaken off.

…

I began to see in a strange new light the American return to early marriage and the large families that are causing the population explosion; the recent movement to natural childbirth and breast-feeding; suburban conformity, and the new neuroses, character pathologies and sexual problems being reported by the doctors. I began to see new dimensions to old problems that have long been taken for granted among women….

If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a matter of loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone recognizes. It is the key to these other new and old problems which have been torturing women and their husbands and children, and puzzling their doctors and educators for years. It may well be the key to our future as a nation and a culture. We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”

The Crisis in Woman’s Identity

…

The Feminine Mystique permits, even encourages, women to ignore the question of their identity. The mystique says they can answer the question “Who am I?” by saying “Tom’s wife…Mary’s mother.” But I don’t think the mystique would have such over American women if they did not fear to face this terrifying blank which makes them unable to see themselves after twenty-pone. The truth is – and how long it has been true, I’m not sure, but it was true in my generation and it is true of the girls growing up today – an American woman no longer has a private image to tell her who she is, or can be, or wants to be.

The public image, in the magazines and television commercials, is designed to sell washing machines, cake mixes, deodorants, detergents, rejuvenating face creams, hair tints. But the power of that image, on which companies spend millions of dollars for television time and ad space, comes from this: American women no longer know who they are. They are sorely in need of a new image to help them find their identity….American women are so unsure of who they should be that they look to this glossy public image to decide every detail of their lives. They look for the image they will no longer take from their mothers.

…

I think that this has been the unknown heart of woman’s problem in America for a long time, this lack of a private image. Public images that defy reason and have very little to do with women themselves have had the power to shape too much of their lives. These images would not have such power, if women were not suffering a crisis of identity.

…

It is my thesis that the core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity – a stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique. It is my thesis that as the Victorian culture did not permit women to accept or gratify their basic sexual needs, our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role.

…

The search for identity is not new, however, in American thought – though in every generation, each man who writes about it discovers it anew….

But why have theorists not recognized this same identity crisis in women? In terms of the old conventions and the new feminine mystique women are not expected to grow up to find out who they are, to choose their human identity. Anatomy is woman’s destiny, say the theorists of femininity; the identity of a woman is determined by her biology.

But is it? More and more women are asking themselves this question. As if they were waking from a coma, they ask, “Where am I…what am I doing here?” For the first time in their history, women are becoming aware of an identity crisis in their own lives, a crisis which began many generations ago, has grown worse with each succeeding generation, and will not until they, or their daughters, turn an unknown corner and make of themselves and their lives the new image that so many women now so desperately need.

In a sense that goes beyond any one woman’s life, I think this is the crisis of women growing up – a turning point from an immaturity that has been called femininity to full human identity. I think women had to suffer this crisis of identity, which began e a hundred years ago, and have to suffer it still today, simply to become fully human.

The Sexual Sell

…

If that gifted girl-child grows up to be a housewife, can even the manipulator make supermarket stamps use all of her human intelligence, her human energy, in the century she may live while that boy goes to the moon?

Never underestimate the power of a woman, says another ad. But that power was and is underestimated in America. Or rather, it is only estimated in terms that can be manipulated at the point of purchase. Woman’s human intelligence and energy do not really figure in. And yet, they exist, to be used for some higher purpose than housework and thing-buying – or wasted. Perhaps it is only a sick society, unwilling to face its own problems and unable to conceive of goals and purposes equal to the ability and knowledge of its members, that chooses to ignore the strength of women. Perhaps it is only a sick or immature society that chooses to make women “housewives,” not people. Perhaps it is only sick or immature men and women, unwilling to face the great challenges of society, who can retreat for long, without unbearable distress, into that thing-ridden house and make it the end of life itself.

The Forfeited Self

…

If women do not put forth, finally, that effort to become all that they have it in them to become, they will forfeit their own humanity. A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide. For that future half a century after the child-bearing years are over is a fact that an American woman cannot deny. Nor can she deny that as a housewife, the world is indeed rushing past her door while she just sits and watches. The terror she feels is real, if she has no place in that world.

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American woman alive. There is o way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps except by finally putting forth an effort – that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the narrow walls of home, to help shape the future. Only by such a personal commitment to the future can American women break out of the housewife trap and truly find fulfillment as wives and mothers – by fulfilling their own unique possibilities as separate human beings.

A New Life Plan for Women

…

…When their mothers’ fulfillment makes girls sure they want to be women, they will not have to “beat themselves down” to be feminine; they can stretch and stretch until their own efforts will tell them who they are. They will not need the regard of boy or man to feel alive. And when women do not need to live through their husbands and children, men will not fear the love and strength of women, not need another’s weakness to prove their own masculinity. They can finally see each other as they are. And this may be the next step in human evolution.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women’s intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love? Who knows of the possibilities of love when men and women share not only children, home, and garden, not only the fulfillment of their biological roles, but the responsibilities and passions of the work that creates the human future and the full human knowledge of who they are? It has barely begun, the search of women for themselves. But the time is at hand when the voices of the feminine mystique can no longer drown out the inner voice that is driving women on to become complete.