A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (17 page)

Journalist Laura M. credits Friedan’s book with reinforcing a cautious approach to marriage that ultimately stood her in good stead. “I was surrounded by girls who were very into becoming a Mrs., getting a teaching certificate along the way, ‘just in case.’ When I read the book, it confirmed that there was good reason for my distaste for this ‘domestic goddess’
lifestyle. When I fell in love and became a mother years later, I feared I would be like a bird flying into a cage and having the door shut after her.” In fact, “domestic life turned out to be wonderful.... But that was only because I took care to choose a man who wanted me to have a career and would participate fully as a parent. The book was life-changing for me.”

Ruth Fost reports that the book affected her husband almost as much as it affected her. “He began taking a more active role in child rearing (changing diapers, bathing, bedtime—most men did not do this in 1963)” and supported her decision to take a job. “I have enjoyed the bliss of parenting (now add grandparenting!) and working since 1963.”

Fost acknowledged that Friedan’s own “marriage (and many others) could not withstand the conflict that her liberating theories demanded. But somehow, my husband and I (it takes two to make this work) were able to choreograph our lives to be independent and interdependent—giving each other the room to do what we needed to do for ourselves, for each other and for our children to find happiness and fulfillment.” It was
The Feminine Mystique
, she says, that launched them on this path.

Harry J. also believes that reading
The Feminine Mystique
improved his marriage. He and his wife were both raised strict Catholics. “We married in 1966 and approached married life just as our parents and society directed. We became breadwinner and homemaker without any second thoughts.” But their marriage had some problems, and when he read Friedan’s book in 1973, he found it “an eye-opener. My recollection is that it was a stunning description of the forces at work in our life.” He adds that it “made me aware of my wife’s need to someday escape this condition. I believe it prepared me to support her changing from homemaker to individual career woman.”

Even reading the book in the 1990s, Trent Mauer came away with a clearer sense that marriage should be a true partnership. It made him resolve to improve his own domestic skills so that he “would never need to be with a woman because I didn’t know how to cook or do laundry or care for children. I wanted to know that I would only be with her because I wanted to, and I wanted to make sure that she would never have to doubt
why I was with her.” Trent also vowed to make sure “that she would never have to go through the types of experiences that Friedan described.”

 

SOME WOMEN WERE INTRODUCED TO FRIEDAN’S BOOK AS TEENAGERS BY their mother or an older female friend. Sunny M. read the book together with her mother when she was fifteen, three years after it was published. “My mother wanted me to have what she felt that she had not been allowed to have.”

In a tribute to Friedan on the National Organization for Women web site, Linda Morse reported that a neighbor handed her the book when she was in her teens, saying, “Here, you read it, it’s too late for me.” Many of the women who wrote to Friedan soon after the book’s publication expressed the same sense that it was too late for them but not for the next generation of women. One, describing herself as a college dropout and “victim of the Feminine Mystique,” expressed her hope that her daughter could grow up without the “servile feeling” that had haunted her own life. Another declared, “It would be a crime to let another generation go as mine had,” and prayed that her daughter could “avoid becoming a miserable housewife!”

Jessica T., now a nationally syndicated columnist, remembers: “I first heard of
The Feminine Mystique
when my mother, a stay-at-home farm wife who had dropped out of college to marry my father, began talking about it at the family dinner table. The culture of our rural farming community and our family was very patriarchal, and my sweet, self-effacing mother was not regarded by any of us as our father’s equal.

“We loved and revered her,” Jessica continues, “but Dad was definitely the boss. When Mom started talking about feeling ‘trapped’ like other housewives in the book, we all looked at her as if she had two heads.” Jessica was about twelve at the time. The experience reinforced her resolve, already formed by seeing “how circumscribed” her mother’s life was, “to chart a course as different from hers as I possibly could.”

Marjorie Schmiege’s daughter Cynthia said that her mother’s discovery of the book not only relieved Marjorie’s depression but also changed the
goals she held for her children, opening opportunities for Cynthia that she might never have had were it not for Friedan’s influence.

Other women came to the book on their own as teenagers or young women, and it helped them understand why they did not want to follow in their mothers’ footsteps. Mary Rinato Berman vividly recalls reading the book in the park near her home in 1963, during the summer after she graduated from high school. Mary grew up in a six-story, forty-two-unit apartment building in New York, populated by a mix of Italian and Jewish families. Her Catholic parents had a “fairly balanced” marriage, but in a building where “everyone kept their doors open and we kids felt comfortable in all of the apartments,” she had seen forty-one other marriages up close, and it wasn’t pretty. She remembers “knowing of husbands with girlfriends living in the neighborhood, seeing women with bruises, hearing complaints when the women would get together.”

The husband next door “regularly beat up his wife. He was also the biggest celebrator of Valentine’s Day—armloads of flowers, chocolates, and the like. It definitely gave me a total dislike of the holiday.

“Then along came
The Feminine Mystique
and . . . I remember thinking that it didn’t have to be that way.”

Historian Ruth Rosen and sociologist Wini Breines have pointed out that many women who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s developed a deep suspicion of marriage and motherhood not by reading Friedan but by observing life in a “normal” family. These young women came to see their mothers as negative role models: the epitome of what they did not want to be. Friedan reinforced their determination not to repeat their mothers’ lives.

One young woman wrote to Friedan that the book perfectly captured the story of her mother, who had stayed home for twenty-three years and raised four children: “The emptiness of her life appalls me: her helplessness and dependence on my father frightens me.” As Linda Smolak put it decades later, reading Friedan “articulated what scared me to death about being a ‘homemaker/housewife.’”

Many daughters raised by homemaker mothers had similar reactions to their mothers’ lives even if they had not read Friedan. In an interview
conducted by a researcher in the 1950s, one young woman commented, “I feel deathly afraid of devoting all my time and energy to being a wife and mother and then being nothing in middle age, because that’s what happened to my own mother in her marriage.”

Journalist and best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich reports having the same fear. She was born in 1941 in Butte, Montana, into a working-class family supported by her father, a miner. By the time she was in her mid-teens, he had earned a degree from the Butte School of Mines and the family had risen into the middle class. Ehrenreich later told Ruth Rosen that in those days, “you had to steel yourself as a girl if you didn’t want to follow a prescribed role.... Even at a young age, I could understand that the only good thing you could do as a woman was to be a housewife, but you would never have any respect that way. Because I don’t think my father respected my mother. She was a full-time housewife, and that’s what I did not want to be.”

Some daughters grew up simmering with anger toward their mothers, whom they resented for trying to mold them into their own housewifely image. Polly J. says, “I felt nothing but contempt for [my mother] when I was in my teens. She never stood up to my dad. She never had an original idea, and she wasn’t interested in anything my brothers and I were learning about, except the grades we were getting and if my homework looked neat.

“She was so sweet with the neighbors,” Polly remembers, making a little face at the word “sweet,” “but she sure bossed us around—especially me, because I was ‘the girl’ and my job was to keep the house picked up and never go downtown wearing pants. I hated all her petty rules and put-downs of my behavior. Only much later did it occur to me that her attitude might have come out of her own frustration or depression.”

Judith Lorber recalls that her mother didn’t like doing housework but explained that it was something a wife did for her husband. “She implied that the more you loved him, the less onerous housework was.” The teenage Judith resented being required to help with the dishes and the cleaning while her brother did not have to do any work around the house. “My mother kept saying I had to be domesticated, and I said domestication
was for cows! The end result was that I did everything I could to be the opposite of my homemaker mother.”

Several women said that reading
The Feminine Mystique
allowed them to understand their mothers better and let go of their anger or resentment. “I had a lot of issues with my mother growing up, which I couldn’t even begin to resolve until my late twenties,” reports June Pulliam, now a college professor. When she was in her thirties, Pulliam assigned
The Feminine Mystique
in a class. “For the first time I understood the thwarted existence of my own mother and my father’s sisters and the mothers of my friends.... It was as if someone had gone back and shown me a movie of my childhood with the director’s commentary about my mother’s grumbling discontent with her domestic role.”

Kathy Heskin’s mother graduated from college in 1930 “but was not allowed to work, either before or after her marriage. She was a woman who had great sadness and depression, and her mental illness progressed over the years, partly due to her frustration with life.” When Kathy was sixteen and a counselor at summer camp, her mother wrote her a six-page letter about how deeply she had been affected by reading
The Feminine Mystique
. Her letter “was passionate and utterly bewildering,” but “as sixteen-year-olds will, I forgot all about it until I was much older.” Only then did she read the book herself. There were just two times, Kathy says, when she felt she understood her mother—“when I read the book of Job and when I read
The Feminine Mystique
.”

Gary Gerst reports that reading
The Feminine Mystique
in 1968 or 1969 was just as transformative for him as a son—and as a future husband: “I gained a new sadness and empathy for my mom’s squelched abilities.” When he asked his mother about what he’d learned from the book, she admitted that she had actually read it much earlier but had never told her husband and family.

“I realized,” recalls Gary, “that this was like a ‘banned book’ and she had to hide it from Dad.” As she opened up to him about her musical and math talents and all the other interests she had put to one side for her marriage, Gary recognized for the first time how much of his mother’s
life “had been subverted or abandoned to ‘be attractive to’ or ‘complement’ a man.” For Gary, “the problem with no name” meant that women “had been muffled, ignored, not even allowed to give voice to a truth or even able to describe it. How awful that such discontent by so many for so long was muted without even a term with which to understand it.... I know that from then on it also influenced what type of women I wished to date and eventually marry. I sought strong women who were not about to surrender their dreams or self to assigned servitude or silence.”

ONE MONTH AFTER
THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
WAS PUBLISHED, FRIEDAN received a letter from Gerda Lerner, a civil rights activist with a background in left-wing politics who later became a pioneer in women’s history. Lerner congratulated Friedan on a “splendid . . . job which desperately needed doing.” But she expressed concern that Friedan had addressed herself “solely to the problems of middle class, college-educated women.” Lerner reminded Friedan that “working women, especially Negro women, labor not only under the disadvantages imposed by the feminine mystique, but under the more pressing disadvantages of economic discrimination,” and suggested that in addition to Friedan’s proposals for expanding women’s access to higher education, such women needed child care centers and maternity benefits.

Many critics have since gone further, dismissing
The Feminine Mystique
as written by a middle-class housewife who did not understand the needs of working women or minorities and who addressed problems unique to elite, educated readers. Even at the time of its publication, some people had the same reaction. Janice B., a sales clerk with two children in 1962, read the excerpt in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
and couldn’t understand what middle-class homemakers were making such a fuss about. “It wasn’t that hard to go get a job,” she recalls. “And having a job sure didn’t solve all my problems as a wife and mother.”

Vietta Helme, who read the book in the 1970s, recalls that Friedan’s experiences were “utterly foreign to me as a working-class farm kid.” Helme says that she could understand that it might have had “some value for over-privileged women,” but “it was too far out of my demographic to have much meaning for me.”

Lorraine G., an African-American woman who never read the book, wrote in an e-mail to me that she and her friends “were too busy struggling to achieve the American dream to be concerned with women who appeared to have it all.” The summaries of Friedan’s book she read while pursuing her doctorate in sociology led her to believe that the audience for
The Feminine Mystique
was “white women [who] had the luxury of being bored with their middle-class, full-time homemaker role, a role that most working women would cherish.”