The Feminine Mystique

M
y 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. Those 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.”