The Feminine Mystique (4 page)

It is awesome to see these waves begin to transform the political landscape. A lot of Republicans joining Democrats finally in voting to increase the minimum wage. The Republicans retreating from their brutal attacks on Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start, food stamps, children’s inocculations, student loans, environmental protection, even affirmative action. The concrete concerns of life, women’s concerns, now front and center, taking priority over the abstractions of budget balancing. And new movement confronting the concrete new realities of the growing income discrepancy in America affecting women, men, and their children, fueling the politics of hate. I was happy in 1996 to join other, new, younger women leaders in alliance with the militant new leadership of the AFL-CIO in planning speakouts against this growing income chasm, in favor of a “living wage” for everyone, no longer women versus men. What has to be faced now by women and men together are the life-threatening excesses of the culture of greed, of brutal, unbridled corporate power. There has to be a new way of defining and measuring the bottom line of corporate and personal competition and success, and national budget priorities. The welfare of the people, the
common good
, has to take priority over the narrow measure of the next quarter’s stock-market price increase, escalating executive compensation, and even over our separate “single issue.” And some visionary CEOs as well as male politicians begin to see this.

But the women are beginning to get impatient. The Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, which had raised millions of dollars to elect liberal senators and President Clinton, voted to disband in protest against money as a dominant force in American politics, and against the betrayal of the politicians who supported so-called welfare reform, which abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

New birth-control technology even beyond RU486, as well as the evolving national consensus, will soon make the whole issue of abortion obsolete. As important as it was, it should never have been a “single issue” litmus test for the women’s movement. The male spin doctors and political advisers to presidents and both political parties still do not “get” the totality of women’s new empowerment or they would not have advised the passage and signing of a welfare bill that pushed one million children into poverty.

For the women’s movement, for this nation, other issues of choice must now involve us. Choice having to do with diverse patterns of family life and career and the economic wherewithal for women and men of all ages and races to have “choice” in their lives not just the very rich—choices of how we live and choices of how we die.

The paradox continues to deepen, opening new serious consideration of real values in women’s experience that were hidden beneath the feminine mystique. There is much talk lately of a third sector, of civic virtue, Harvard professors and others discovering that the real bonds that keep a society flourishing are not necessarily wealth, oil, trade, technology, but bonds of civic engagement, the
voluntary associations
that observers from De Tocqueville on saw as the lifeblood of American democracy. The decline of these organizations is blamed in part on women working. All those years when women did the PTAs, and Scouts, and church and sodalities and Ladies Village Improvement Society for free, no one valued them much at all. Now that women take themselves seriously, and get paid and taken seriously, such community work, in its
absence
in 1996 America, is now being taken seriously, too. Some social scientists and political gurus, right and left, propose that the third sector can take over much of the welfare responsibilities of government. But the women, who constituted the third sector, know that it cannot all alone assume the larger responsibilities of government. Our democracy requires a new sense of combined public, private, civic, and corporate responsibility.

In 1996 I flew back to Peoria, to help give a funeral eulogy to my best friend from high school and college, Harriet Vance Parkhurst, mother of five, Republican committeewoman and ingrained democrat. Harriet went home to Peoria after World War II, married a high-school classmate who became a Republican state senator, and while raising five kids chaired and championed every community campaign and new cause from a museum and symphony to Head Start and women’s rights. There were front-page news stories and long editorials in the Peoria papers on Harriet’s death. She wasn’t rich and famous, she had no male signs of power. I like to think this new serious tribute to a woman who
led the community
in nourishing those bonds once silently taken for granted as women’s lot was not only a personal tribute to my dear friend, but a new sign of the seriousness with which women’s contributions, once masked, trivialized by the feminine mystique, are now taken.

In other ways, too, it’s the widening of the circle since we broke through the feminine mystique, not the either-or, win-lose battles, that stirs me now. A reporter asks me, in one of those perennial evaluations of whither-women, “What is the main battle now for women, who’s winning, who’s losing?” And I think that question almost sounds obsolete; that’s not the way to put it. Women put up a great battle, in Congress and the states, to get breast cancer taken seriously, get mammograms covered by health insurance. But the bigger, new threat to women’s lives is lung cancer, with cigarette advertising using feminist themes to get women hooked on smoking while men are quitting.

The large sections in bookstores and libraries now given over to books analyzing every aspect of women’s identity, in every historical period and far-flung nation or tribe, the endless variations on “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus,” and how-to-communicate with each other (“They just don’t get it”), are surfeiting. Men’s colleges have become almost extinct in America. When the courts decree that the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel can no longer be funded by the state unless they give women equal, and not separate, military training, the new attempt to claim that separate sex colleges or high schools are better for women, that the poor little dears will never learn to raise their voices if they have to study and compete with men, is, for me, reactive and regressive, a temporary obsolete timidity.

In colleges and universities from the smallest community college to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, women’s studies are not only taught as a serious separate discipline, but in every discipline now, new dimensions of thought and history are emerging as women scholars and men analyze women’s experience, once a “dark continent.” In June 1996 the first national conference devoted to female American writers of the 1800s, held at Trinity College in Hartford, received proposals for 250 papers. The level of interest and sophistication of those papers was “absolutely unimaginable” ten years ago, said the organizers of the conference. The nineteenth-century female writers “were dealing with the large social and political problems of the time, such as slavery, industrial capitalism and, after the Civil War, the color line,” said Joan D. Hedrick, a Trinity College history professor whose biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe won a Pulitzer Prize last year. “Women didn’t have a vote during this period—the only way they could represent themselves was through their writing.” But these writers were ignored as male deconstructionists and their feminist followers wiped out, in the postmodern canon, what professor Paul Lauter termed “the idea of sentiment, the idea of tears, the idea of being moved by literature, the idea of being political.”

And now women are bringing back those larger issues and
concerns with life
, beyond the dead abstractions, into politics, and not just letters. And so, today, women are no longer a “dark continent” in literature or any academic discipline, though some feminist scholars continue to debate “victim history.” In a review of
The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity
by the eminent historian George L. Mosse (
The New Republic
, June 10, 1996), Roy Porter says:

But the books so far that take on the masculine mystique and the so-called “men’s studies” and “men’s movement” have too often been literal copies in reverse of “women’s lib”—and thus, by definition, inauthentic. Or a revisionist desperate embrace of the outmoded, stunted, brutal youth-arrested machismo that still in America seems to define masculinity. Robert Bly in his poetry may exhort men to tears, but in those forest camps he led them to tribal chest-thumping, breast-beating exercises in caveman male impersonation, banging those drums in their fake-lion loincloths. The gun-obsessed militiamen have threatened the very foundation of society with that obsolete masculinity. We feminists have become so obsessed with the liberating force of our own authenticity, breaking through that obsolete feminine mystique, embracing the new possibilities of our own personhood, that we have lately regarded men mainly as they oppressed us—bosses, husbands, lovers, police—or failed to carry their share of the housework, child care, the
relationship
, the feelings we now demanded of them, even as we learned the professional skills and political power games and started to carry the earning responsibilities once expected only of men. Those straight-line corporate and professional careers still structured in terms of the lives of the men of the past whose wives took care of the details of life, we now know, pose real, sometimes insuperable, problems for women today. What we haven’t noticed is the crisis, the mounting desperation of the men still defined in terms of those no longer reliable, downsized, outshifted, disappearing lifetime corporate and professional careers. Because we know men have all that power (dead white men did!), we just don’t take seriously (and they don’t admit the seriousness of) those eight years American women now live longer than men: seventy-two, men’s life expectancy today; eighty, women’s.

The research I explored for my 1993 book
The Fountain of Age
showed two things crucial for living vital long lives: purposes and projects that use one’s abilities, structure one’s days, and keep one moving as a part of our changing society; and bonds of intimacy. But for men whose project was laid out in that no-longer-to-be-relied-on lifetime career, there’s chaos now. They need the flexibility women were forced to develop, raising kids, fitting profession, job, and family together somehow, inventing a changing pattern for life as it came along. For that long lifetime, men desperately need now the ease in creating and sustaining bonds of intimacy and sharing feelings that used to be relegated as women’s business. For, let’s face it finally, what used to be accepted—man-as-measure-of-all-things—must now be reconsidered. Women and men are now both occupying the mainstream of society and defining the terms. The standards, the definitions, the very measures we live by, have to change, are changing, as women’s and men’s shared new reality sweeps aside the obsolete remnants of the feminine mystique and its machismo counterpart.

And so, in a politics where women’s newly conscious voting power now exceeds men’s, life concerns—care of young and old, sickness and health, the choice when and whether to have a baby,
family values
—now define the agenda more than the old abstractions of deficit and the missiles of death. In August 1996, the
New York Times
reports a fashion crisis: Women are no longer buying high-style clothes, men are. Ads and commercials sell “dad’s night to cook,” perfume, and face-lifts for men. That baby in the backpack makes young men now strong enough to be tender. They may grow up, those men, out of the child-man that has defined masculinity until now. And those women athletes, taking the spotlight at the ’96 Olympics, what standards will they change? The ads and the fashion magazines may still feature American prepubescent child-women, or push silicone-stuffed breasts that can’t even respond to human touch—but young girls growing up now are also sold the training shoes and the new ideals of strength. Will new women no longer need men to be taller, stronger, earn more?

Grown-up men and women, no longer obsessed with youth, outgrowing finally children’s games, and obsolete rituals of power and sex, become more and more authentically themselves. And they do not pretend that men are from Mars or women are from Venus. They even share each other’s interests, talk a common shorthand of work, love, play, kids, politics. We may now begin to glimpse the new human possibilities when women and men are finally free to be themselves, know each other for who they really are, and define the terms and measures of success, failure, joy, triumph, power, and the common good, together.

B
ETTY
F
RIEDAN

Washington, D.C.

April 1997

I
t is a decade now since the publication of
The Feminine Mystique
, and until I started writing the book, I wasn’t even conscious of the woman problem. Locked as we all were then in that mystique, which kept us passive and apart, and kept us from seeing our real problems and possibilities, I, like other women, thought there was something wrong with
me
because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor. I was a freak, writing that book—not that I waxed any floor, I must admit, in the throes of finishing it in 1963.

Each of us thought she was a freak ten years ago if she didn’t experience that mysterious orgastic fulfillment the commercials promised when waxing the kitchen floor. However much we enjoyed being Junior’s and Janey’s or Emily’s mother, or B.J.’s wife, if we still had ambitions, ideas about ourselves as people in our own right—well, we were simply freaks, neurotics, and we confessed our sin or neurosis to priest or psychoanalyst, and tried hard to adjust. We didn’t admit it to each other if we felt there should be more in life than peanut-butter sandwiches with the kids, if throwing powder into the washing machine didn’t make us relive our wedding night, if getting the socks or shirts pure white was not exactly a peak experience, even if we did feel guilty about the tattletale gray.

Some of us (in 1963, nearly half of all women in the United States) were already committing the unpardonable sin of working outside the home to help pay the mortgage or grocery bill. Those who did felt guilty, too—about betraying their femininity, undermining their husbands’ masculinity, and neglecting their children by daring to work for money at all, no matter how much it was needed. They couldn’t admit, even to themselves, that they resented being paid half what a man would have been paid for the job, or always being passed over for promotion, or writing the paper for which
he
got the degree and the raise.

A suburban neighbor of mine named Gertie was having coffee with me when the census taker came as I was writing
The Feminine Mystique
. “Occupation?” the census taker asked. “Housewife,” I said. Gertie, who had cheered me on in my efforts at writing and selling magazine articles, shook her head sadly. “You should take yourself more seriously,” she said. I hesitated, and then said to the census taker, “Actually, I’m a writer.” But, of course, I then was, and still am, like all married women in America, no matter what
else
we do between 9 and 5, a housewife. Of course single women didn’t put down “housewife” when the census taker came around, but even here society was less interested in what these women were doing as persons in the world than in asking, “Why isn’t a nice girl like you married?” And so they, too, were not encouraged to take themselves seriously.

It seems such a precarious accident that I ever wrote the book at all—but, in another way, my whole life had prepared me to write that book. All the pieces finally came together. In 1957, getting strangely bored with writing articles about breast feeding and the like for
Redbook
and the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, I put an unconscionable amount of time into a questionnaire for my fellow Smith graduates of the class of 1942, thinking I was going to disprove the current notion that education had fitted us ill for our role as women. But the questionnaire raised more questions than it answered for me—education had
not
exactly geared us to the role women were trying to play, it seemed. The suspicion arose as to whether it was the education or the role that was wrong.
McCall’s
commissioned an article based on my Smith alumnae questionnaire, but the then male publisher of
McCall’s
, during that great era of togetherness, turned the piece down in horror, despite underground efforts of female editors. The male
McCall’s
editors said it couldn’t be true.

I was next commissioned to do the article for
Ladies’ Home Journal
. That time I took it back, because they rewrote it to say just the opposite of what, in fact, I was trying to say. I tried it again for
Redbook
. Each time I was interviewing more women, psychologists, sociologists, marriage counselors, and the like and getting more and more sure I was on the track of something. But what? I needed a name for whatever it was that kept us from using our rights, that made us feel guilty about anything we did
not
as our husbands’ wives, our children’s mothers, but as people ourselves. I needed a name to describe that guilt. Unlike the guilt women used to feel about sexual needs, the guilt they felt now was about needs that didn’t fit the sexual definition of women, the mystique of feminine fulfillment—the feminine mystique.

The editor of
Redbook
told my agent, “Betty has gone off her rocker. She has always done a good job for us, but this time only the most neurotic housewife could identify.” I opened my agent’s letter on the subway as I was taking the kids to the pediatrician. I got off the subway to call my agent and told her, “I’ll have to write a book to get this into print.” What I was writing threatened the very foundations of the women’s magazine world—the feminine mystique.

When Norton contracted for the book, I thought it would take a year to finish it; it took five. I wouldn’t have even started it if the New York Public Library had not, at just the right time, opened the Frederick Lewis Allen Room, where writers working on a book could get a desk, six months at a time, rent free. I got a baby-sitter three days a week and took the bus from Rockland County to the city and somehow managed to prolong the six months to two years in the Allen Room, enduring much joking from other writers at lunch when it came out that I was writing a book about women. Then, somehow, the book took me over, obsessed me, wanted to write itself, and I took my papers home and wrote on the dining-room table, the living-room couch, on a neighbor’s dock on the river, and kept on writing it in my mind when I stopped to take the kids somewhere or make dinner, and went back to it after they were in bed.

I have never experienced anything as powerful, truly mystical, as the forces that seemed to take me over when I was writing
The Feminine Mystique
. The book came from somewhere deep within me and all my experience came together in it: my mother’s discontent, my own training in Gestalt and Freudian psychology, the fellowship I felt guilty about giving up, the stint as a reporter which taught me how to follow clues to the hidden economic underside of reality, my exodus to the suburbs and all the hours with other mothers shopping at supermarkets, taking the children swimming, coffee klatches. Even the years of writing for women’s magazines when it was unquestioned gospel that women could identify with
nothing
beyond the home—not politics, not art, not science, not events large or small, war or peace, in the United States or the world, unless it could be approached through female experience as a wife or mother or translated into domestic detail! I could no longer write within that framework. The book I was now writing challenged the very definition of that universe—what I chose to call the feminine mystique. Giving it a name, I knew that it was not the only possible universe for women at all but an unnatural confining of our energies and vision. But as I began following leads and clues from women’s words and my own feelings, across psychology, sociology, and recent history, tracing back—through the pages of the magazines for which I’d written—why and how it happened, what it was really doing to women, to their children, even to sex, the implications became apparent and they were fantastic. I was surprised myself at what I was writing, where it was leading. After I finished each chapter, a part of me would wonder, Am I crazy? But there was also a growing feeling of calm, strong, gut-sureness as the clues fitted together, which must be the same kind of feeling a scientist has when he or she zeroes in on a discovery in one of those true-science detective stories.

Only this was not just abstract and conceptual. It meant that I and every other woman I knew had been living a lie, and all the doctors who treated us and the experts who studied us were perpetuating that lie, and our homes and schools and churches and politics and professions were built around that lie. If women were really
people
—no more, no less—then all the things that kept them from being full people in our society would have to be changed. And women, once they broke through the feminine mystique and took themselves seriously as people, would see their place on a false pedestal, even their glorification as sexual objects, for the putdown it was.

Yet if I had realized how fantastically fast that would really happen—already in less than ten years’ time—maybe I would have been so scared I might have stopped writing. It’s frightening when you’re starting on a new road that no one has been on before. You don’t know how far it’s going to take you until you look back and realize how far, how very far you’ve gone. When the first woman asked me, in 1963, to autograph
The Feminine Mystique
, saying what by now hundreds—thousands, I guess—of women have said to me, “It changed my whole life,” I wrote, “Courage to us all on the new road.” Because there is no turning back on that road. It has to change your whole life; it certainly changed mine.

B
ETTY
F
RIEDAN

New York, 1973