A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (6 page)

In September 1965, activists in the stewardesses’ union managed to get a hearing before the House Labor subcommittee to protest the airlines’ policy of forcing them to retire when they reached their early thirties, but the legislators failed to take their complaints seriously. Representative James Scheuer, a liberal who by his 1991 retirement supported women’s
rights, facetiously asked the complaining women to “stand up, so we can see the dimensions of the problem.” It took the EEOC several years to start enforcing the laws against sex discrimination, and not until 1971 did the Supreme Court invalidate a single state statute on the grounds of sex discrimination.

These attitudes eventually spurred women activists, including Betty Friedan, who had become a celebrity after
The Feminine Mystique
was published, to stop working through established channels and to found an organization devoted to ending all forms of sex discrimination. But when she was writing
The Feminine Mystique
in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Friedan did not choose to tackle issues of legal, economic, and political discrimination. Instead, she asked her readers to take a closer look at the supposedly happy housewife described in articles such as that of the
Saturday Evening Post
.

The Feminine Mystique
did not challenge the assertion that most housewives believed their “chief purpose” was to be wives and mothers. Nor did Friedan complain, as some intellectuals had already begun to do in the 1950s, that women were
too
content as housewives. Instead,
The Feminine Mystique
argued that beneath the daily routines and surface contentment of most housewives’ lives lay a deep well of insecurity, self-doubt, and unhappiness that they could not articulate even to themselves. And in describing that unhappiness as something more than an individual case of “the blues,” Friedan unleashed a wave of recognition and relief in thousands of women. Some of them had already realized that they were “unusual” and not “geared” for what society wanted of them. But many would have agreed with the women who told Gallup and his colleagues that their lives were easier than those of their own parents. Until they read Friedan, that had only made it harder for them to understand why they were not as delighted with those lives as Mrs. Charles Johnson appeared to be.

THE OPENING PARAGRAPH OF FRIEDAN’S BOOK IS ONE OF THE TWO OR THREE passages that women who read the book in the first years after its publication still remember most vividly.

“Everything just clicked,” said Sally A., who read it as a thirty-two-year-old housewife in Kansas. She told me she had often wondered whether she should see a psychiatrist because of her tendency to cry “for no reason” in the middle of the afternoon. “But I couldn’t afford it, and I was too much the daughter of my working-class folks to imagine doing something as self-indulgent as paying someone good money to talk about myself. Reading that book, though, it was like reading what I would have said to her if we’d been able to sit down for a cup of coffee.”

Friedan “called it perfectly,” said Lillian Rubin, looking back to her life long before she ever imagined she would become a nationally renowned psychologist and author. “The feeling didn’t have a name. It didn’t have a reason. So you turned it inward and assumed
you
were the problem. And so did everyone around you.”

Ruth Nemzoff ’s life was changed when a teenage girl who babysat for her made her aware that she was walking through her life in a fog. “‘Mrs. B,’ she said to me, ‘I think you need to read this book.’”

A husband in a small town in eastern Washington gave his wife the book because he had been worried about her moodiness. “I never even realized what I was feeling until I read that first chapter,” said Stella J. “I felt like she’d looked into my heart and put into words the feelings I’d been afraid to admit.”

Long before a slightly younger generation of women coined the phrase “the personal is political,” Betty Friedan used that concept, wrapped in the language of the emerging human-potential and self-help movements, to convince women who were hurting that they could and should do something about it. In fact, sociologist Wendy Simonds considers
The Feminine Mystique
the first modern self-help book for women, noting the similarities in the letters Friedan received and those sent more than twenty years later to Robin Norwood, author of
Women Who Love Too Much.
In both cases, readers experienced a shock of recognition and an overwhelming sense of relief to learn that they were not alone in their feelings. But one crucial difference speaks to the unique impact Friedan had on women who read her book.

In researching her own book,
Women and Self-Help Culture
, Simonds found that many readers of modern self-help books were repeat customers, buying many such books and constantly seeking out new articles on related topics. But they valued the books more for the
feelings
they elicited than for any particular information they imparted. Often the readers could not articulate exactly what they got from a self-help book they had liked, or even remember its central points. “When I don’t need it, why do I want to remember it?” asked one woman rhetorically. By contrast,
women who read Friedan’s book back in 1963 or 1964 could still say, nearly fifty years later, precisely what they learned from it.
The Feminine Mystique
may have been the first self-help book they ever read, but it was also the last many of them ever needed.

“I have a friend who reads those self-help books all the time,” Janet M. told me, “and they affect her just like people used to say about a meal in a Chinese restaurant: ‘It tastes good, but an hour later you’re hungry again.’
The Feminine Mystique
was filling. It stayed with you for the rest of your life.”

The Feminine Mystique
engaged its fans on both an intellectual and an emotional level. Somehow Friedan managed to write a book that was more than three hundred pages long, with chapters titled “The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud” and “The Functional Freeze, the Feminine Protest, and Margaret Mead,” and still evoke the kind of emotional response we now associate with chick flicks or confessional interviews on daytime talk shows. She took ideas and arguments that until then had been confined mainly to intellectual and political circles and she couched them in the language of the women’s magazines she had begun writing for in the 1950s.

There already
was
a name for the overt barriers women faced in American society: sex discrimination. Contrary to some of the myths that have grown up around Friedan’s book, plenty of people were already addressing this issue when
The Feminine Mystique
was published. But there was no name for the guilt, depression, and sense of hopelessness many housewives felt.

“Sometimes, a woman would say, ‘I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete,’” Friedan wrote. “Or she would say, ‘I feel as if I don’t exist.’ Sometimes she blotted out the feeling with a tranquilizer. Sometimes she thought the problem was with her husband, or her children, or that what she really needed was to redecorate her house, or move to a better neighborhood, or have an affair, or another baby. Sometimes she went to a doctor with symptoms she could hardly describe: ‘A tired feeling . . . I get so angry with the children it scares me. . . . I feel like crying with no reason.’”

For more than fifteen years, Friedan told her readers, America’s psychiatrists, sociologists, women’s magazines, and television shows had portrayed the postwar housewife as the happiest person on the planet. To the extent that women believed this to accurately describe “everyone else,” they felt alone and inadequate. So when a housewife failed to attain the blissful contentment that all her counterparts supposedly enjoyed, Friedan said, she blamed herself—or perhaps her husband: “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.... She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never knew how many other women shared it. If she tried to tell her husband, he didn’t understand what she was talking about. She did not really understand it herself.”

When American families settled down to their favorite television shows each evening, contented homemakers such as June Cleaver, Harriet Nelson, and Donna Reed reigned supreme. True, there was the hyperactive title character of
I Love Lucy
, whose unrealistic fantasies about becoming an entertainer like her husband or developing a moneymaking business of her own provided an endless source of screwball comedy. But at the end of each episode Lucy always recognized that her efforts to escape being “just a housewife” had once more backfired and that her exasperated but loving husband had been right again. In 1962, the
Saturday Evening Post
was still assuring readers that few housewives even day-dreamed about any life other than that of a full-time homemaker, and that their occasional “blue” moods could easily be assuaged by a few words of praise for their cooking or their new hairdo.

Yet for those who cared to look, Friedan pointed out, signs of trouble had been clear for some time. Some doctors had begun to refer to women’s persistent complaints of fatigue and depression as “the housewife’s syndrome.” Women’s magazines were publishing articles with such titles as “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped” or “The Mother Who Ran Away.” Social commentators, revisiting Freud’s famous question “What does a woman want?” had fretted about why the American woman was “dissatisfied with a lot that women of other lands can only dream of,” as one journalist mused in the March 7, 1960, issue of
Newsweek
.

Most so-called experts, Friedan charged, never questioned the idea that all life’s meaning could be found in the role of wife and mother. Rather, they sought to identify what had led women to wrongly devalue these roles. Many blamed higher education for distracting women with lofty academic studies they would never use instead of properly preparing them for marriage and motherhood.

Some commentators noted that modern appliances were not yet efficient enough to compensate for the decline of household help since World War II, so young mothers were overwhelmed with work. Others expressed the opposite view, that mass production had taken over many of women’s more challenging household tasks, so that wives needed to try harder to find creativity and novelty in their work as homemakers.

Cultural critics claimed the American gospel of success made too many women desire careers and lose their femininity in the process. Psychiatrists and marriage counselors suggested that women’s dissatisfaction originated in sexual maladjustment.

All these explanations, Friedan argued, simply perpetuated the mystique that surrounded the roles of housewife and mother, denying women’s need for any other source of personal identity or meaning in their lives. Friedan assured her readers that their pain stemmed from a basic, unquenchable human drive to fully utilize one’s own abilities and talents for something larger than darning socks, producing tasty casseroles, and “just being there” for their husbands and children.

The Feminine Mystique
introduced its readers to theories such as that of Abraham Maslow, who believed human beings had a hierarchy of needs that must be satisfied in order: first, physiological needs such as hunger and thirst; second, safety and security needs; and then social needs such as love, intimacy, and belonging. But once those needs were met, he said, other needs became equally important—the need for self-esteem and respect, and the impulse to maximize one’s creative, intellectual, and moral possibilities. Having moved beyond the hardships of the Depression and World War II, said Maslow and his followers, Americans inevitably yearned for something more than a roof over their heads and a full stomach.

But, explained Friedan, when researchers in this field defined “the mentally healthy man” as “one who has reached the ‘highest excellence of which he is capable,’” they meant the male noun literally. They believed that women had no need to search for meaning in their lives beyond their roles as wives and mothers. Indeed, many warned women that if they did desire other avenues of personal growth, it was because they were inadequate sexual partners to their husbands or unnatural mothers to their children. Such ideas were wrong, said Friedan. Women, too, had an inner drive to live up to their intellectual and creative potential.

Friedan reminded her readers that in America’s new “affluent society,” commentators of many political stripes were expressing concern that the spread of mindless conformity and consumerism was turning men into drones incapable of taking risks, achieving greatness, or contributing to society’s progress. Yet the same people were telling women that mindless conformity and consumerism in the service of the family were the deepest fulfillment they would ever find and the greatest contribution they could make to society.

The first chapter of
The Feminine Mystique
lays out the theme Friedan returned to time and time again: Women, like men, have the need and desire to find larger meaning in their lives. The pain that women feel when this need goes unmet should be taken no less seriously just because many of them had satisfied the lower-order needs for safety, security, and physical comfort. “Part of the strange newness of the problem,” Friedan wrote, “is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old problems of . . . poverty, sickness, hunger, cold.... 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 . . . often discover it gets worse.”