A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (23 page)

So despite its silence about the specific needs of working-class and minority women, and despite its occasional lapses into elitism,
The Feminine
Mystique
’s assault on stereotypes about femininity and its defense of women’s right to work were certainly in the interests of working women, black and white. And the prominence Friedan achieved as a result of the book helped make her a leader of a movement that improved the status of working-class as well as middle-class women. The relationship of
The Feminine Mystique
to the origins and evolution of the feminist movement, however, is more complex than many of the book’s fans or critics realize.

A NUMBER OF MYTHS ABOUT THE ORIGINS AND IMPACT OF
THE FEMININE Mystique
have been perpetuated over the years, some by Friedan herself. One myth widely repeated in feminist circles is that the book awakened women to their discontent, igniting the contemporary women’s movement. The antifeminist version claims that until
The Feminine Mystique
came along, women were “living in peace in what they considered to be a normal, traditional” life. Friedan’s book “wrenched” them from their homes.

But Friedan did not “discover” what so many 1950s housewives were feeling, nor did her book launch the movement that eventually transformed women’s place in American society. These two processes were separated by several years, and giving the book or its author too much credit for these developments ignores the rich history of female resistance that Friedan herself portrayed in her chapter on the struggle for suffrage, “The Passionate Journey.” It also discounts the massive societal shifts already eroding the traditional boundaries of a woman’s place by the time of the book’s publication and disregards the multiple sources of the movement that erupted in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In describing how she came to write
The Feminine Mystique
, Betty Friedan portrayed herself as just another unhappy housewife who stumbled upon her subject almost by accident. To the extent that she acknowledged having been anything but a homemaker, it was to accuse herself of having perpetuated the feminine mystique as a freelance writer for women’s magazines. “I helped create this image,” Friedan declared in her chapter about “The Happy Housewife Heroine.” “I have watched
American women for fifteen years try to conform to it. But I can no longer deny my own knowledge of its terrible implications.”

In her 1976 book,
It Changed My Life,
Friedan wrote that as she examined her sources for
The Feminine Mystique
in 1962, “I sensed the inescapable implications of the trail of evidence I had followed—that if I was right, the very assumptions on which I and other women were basing our lives and on which the experts were advising us were wrong. I thought, I must be crazy. . . . But all along I also felt this calm, strange sureness, as if in tune with something much larger, more important than myself that had to be taken seriously. At first I seemed alone in that awareness.”

A compelling story, but untrue. Daniel Horowitz’s exhaustive study of Friedan’s political background shows that Friedan’s critique of women’s place in American society can be traced back to her left-wing activism in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1951, reporting on a meeting of rank-and-file women organized by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, Friedan paid tribute to working women’s determination to no longer “be paid or treated as some inferior species by their bosses, or by any male workers who have swallowed the bosses’ thinking.”

As Friedan attempted to reach a new audience of middle-class readers in the mid-1950s, she downplayed her ties to the labor movement and to the Left, in part because she had seen firsthand how the climate of guilt by association during the Red Scare of the 1950s had derailed careers. Her boyfriend at Berkeley, physicist David Bohm, had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and accused of espionage. Although he was acquitted at a subsequent trial, his academic career in the United States was destroyed.

Bohm’s case was only one of many. In 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy charged Dorothy Kenyon, the U.S. representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, with being a “fellow traveler”—someone who worked with the Communist Party without being an official member. A Senate investigating committee cleared Kenyon, but her political career was ruined. The same year, Richard Nixon used similar red-baiting tactics to defeat Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas in a Senate race.

Civil rights activist and feminist pioneer Pauli Murray has described in her autobiography how insidious the atmosphere at that time was. The onus was placed on individuals to prove they were
not
subversive, rather than on the government or employers to prove they were. Murray, an African-American woman who had been denied admission to Harvard Law School because of her sex, went on to study at the University of California at Berkeley and at Yale, becoming a well-respected attorney and later an ordained Episcopal priest. She was rigorously vetted for her loyalty when she applied to practice law in New York State, but when she pursued a position in a Cornell University program that was helping Liberia codify its laws, she was turned down. The hiring officer told her that although they had no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing on her part, the university needed “one hundred percent protection” from any insinuations of disloyalty, and her past associations might be suspect in “the troublous times in which we live.”

In those “troublous” political times, many individuals and groups turned on—and turned in—past associates to prove their loyalty and save their own jobs. Hollywood celebrities went before HUAC to name acquaintances they had seen at left-wing political meetings or had heard make statements that could be construed as sympathetic to communism. Many political groups required prospective members to take loyalty oaths before they could join.

The NAACP and the National Council of Negro Women instructed their members to “prove our patriotism” by refusing to work with any individuals or groups suspected of being subversive. Some Americans dissociated themselves entirely from civil rights activists because while equal rights might be fine in principle, “communists were trying to stir the Negroes up.”

Friedan never issued the anticommunist denunciations that were a staple of public writing at the time, but she was determined not to be blacklisted or discredited because of her prior associations. That meant glossing over a large part of her life. Friedan’s secretary Pat Aleskovsky had worked many weekends typing Friedan’s manuscript, even leaving
dinner parties to take Friedan’s dictation over the phone. But Friedan told Aleskovsky that she could not mention her in the acknowledgments for fear of exposing the book to red-baiting smears, because Pat’s husband had once been named as a suspected communist at a public HUAC hearing.

When Friedan learned that Daniel Horowitz was exploring her radical past for his book,
Betty Friedan and the Making of
The Feminine Mystique, she denied him permission to quote anything from her unpublished papers, told confidantes that he was attacking her, and threatened to sue him. She viewed his research as an extension of the McCarthyism she had seen so many others subjected to. And just as Friedan feared, even almost forty years after her book’s publication, some social commentators used Horowitz’s findings about Friedan’s background to argue that feminism had been part of a communist plot.

Friedan’s ability to portray herself as an apolitical suburban housewife allowed her book to reach many women who shared her dissatisfactions but might never have bought the book had they known of her previous political associations. One woman wrote to tell Friedan that it had inspired her to become a Republican activist. Another wanted to start an Ayn Rand-Betty Friedan club, which goaded Friedan into replying that she had no desire to be associated with Rand’s views. (Rand was an ardent proponent of free market capitalism.) A woman who was reading the book with her minister husband reported that it had been recommended by the president of the Baptist Women’s Mission Society. Another noted that the book reinforced ideas she was already teaching in her church group for Mormon teens.

While Friedan’s silence about her left-wing associations during the 1940s might be understandable in the repressive political atmosphere in which she was writing, her refusal to fully acknowledge her intellectual and personal debts is more difficult to justify. Friedan had a pattern of building up her own achievements by downplaying aid from others and by exaggerating the hostility or disinterest with which her ideas were initially received. Although she usually cited her primary sources—interviews she had done, studies she had read—Friedan was less conscientious about
secondary sources. For example, Friedan’s chapter on motivational research and “The Sexual Sell” is hugely indebted to Vance Packard’s 1957 book,
The Hidden Persuaders
, but that chapter credits only the staff of the Institute for Motivational Research, a group she undoubtedly learned of from Packard.

In her book’s preface
,
Friedan argued, with considerable exaggeration, that feminism had died out completely after World War II, leaving the ideology of “the happy housewife” unchallenged. Therefore, in Friedan’s account, she was forced to “hunt down” the origins of the mystique and its effect on women. She “found a few pieces of the puzzle in previous studies of women,” she conceded, “but not many,” for previous writers had accepted the feminine mystique and used its tenets to analyze women. She acknowledged in passing that reading “Simone de Beauvoir’s insights into French women” and the work of American sociologist Mirra Komarovsky had been “provocative” for her. But this brief reference minimized the tremendous debt Friedan and her book owed to both those thinkers.

De Beauvoir’s 1949 book,
The Second Sex,
which appeared in translation in America in 1953, rigorously analyzed the consequences of a woman’s enforced domesticity, exploring how it deformed her individual personality and the institution of marriage itself. But more than a decade passed before Friedan acknowledged that she, “who had helped start women on the new road,” had herself been “started on that road by de Beauvoir.” Even then, Friedan claimed that she had been influenced by the book’s existentialism rather than by its feminism, which she dismissed as “depressing.”
The Second Sex
, she said, “just made me want to crawl in bed and pull the covers over my head. It did not lead to any action to change the lot of women, which somehow
The Feminine Mystique
did.”

Because de Beauvoir was a prominent left-wing French intellectual, she did not get much of a hearing in the mainstream press of 1950s America. Even the liberal magazine
The Nation
warned its readers that de Beauvoir had “certain political leanings.” So perhaps Friedan’s reluctance to admit the influence of
The Second Sex
was part of her desire to establish her political respectability.

But 1953 was also the year that Mirra Komarovsky, a thoroughly respectable academic, published
Women in the Modern World: Their Education and Their Dilemma
s. While more cautious in her conclusions than Friedan, Komarovsky pioneered the use of intensive life histories and interviews to explore the anxieties of modern housewives, especially those who had gone to college before marriage. She then proceeded to dismantle the arguments against women’s education by Freudian psychoanalysts and some family-life professionals.

Friedan never mentioned these aspects of Komarovsky’s work. Later in
The Feminine Mystique
she referred to Komarovsky’s “brilliant” analysis of how girls learn to play the womanly roles expected of them, but otherwise Friedan lumped Komarovsky with the antifeminists, unfairly charging her with “virtually endorsing the continued
infantalizing
of American women.”

Friedan also failed to acknowledge the work of Elizabeth Hawes, whom she had reviewed in the 1940s, or that of Eve Merriam, a poet and leftist activist who wrote a 1959 article “The Myth of the Necessary Housewife,” arguing that no society in history had wasted the talents of half its adult population the way America was doing. Merriam was known at the time to be at work on a book critiquing the ideology of domesticity. This came out in 1964 under the title
When Nora Slammed the Door
.

As
The Feminine Mystique
neared publication, Friedan and her publisher worried that it would be eclipsed by the many other books on women’s issues that were already out or scheduled to appear around the same time. A vice president at Norton, soliciting a cover blurb from best-selling author and American icon Pearl S. Buck, wrote: “One of our main problems is that much is being written these days about the plight (or whatever it is) of the educated American woman; therefore this one will have to fight its way out of a thicket.”

In a review in the August 1963 issue of
Marriage and Family Living
, prominent sociologist Jessie Bernard mentioned that
The Feminine Mystique
had arrived on her desk just one day after she had sent off her own manuscript discussing educated women’s retreat into the home. But, she
said generously, Friedan has analyzed the same topic “in far greater detail and far more passionately.”

Several women wrote to tell Friedan that they had been planning to write a book on the same topic. Said one: “It is amusing to think that the title of my proposed book was ‘Somebody spit on the stove.’ Now, Miss Friedan has!” Another woman mused that “I ought to have hated that book and you,” because she had proposed a book on the same topic six years earlier and had never written it, even though several publishers had expressed interest. “But I
don’t
hate either the book or you because you’ve done an infinitely better and more important job than I would have.”

It in no way disparages Friedan’s accomplishments to point out that
The Feminine Mystique
was not ahead of its time. Books don’t become best sellers because they are ahead of their time. They become best sellers when they tap into concerns that people are already mulling over, pull together ideas and data that have not yet spread beyond specialists and experts, and bring these all together in a way that is easy to understand and explain to others.