The Feminine Mystique
Women's Liberation and Betty Friedan
Mar 31, 2008 Jennifer Harrison-Konz
The Feminine Mystique
Considered a wake-up call to women, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, resulted in a social revolution. Friedan helped some women identify what she referred to as “the problem that has no name”, for which the only cure could be a source of paid employment.
Friedan compared the life of a “happy housewife" in suburbia, something which she herself experienced in the 1950s, to life in a concentration camp. What is ironic about this book, however, is that Friedan was hardly the average housewife. Due to her graduate work in psychology, Friedan’s work is full of citations of academic resources, and Friedan herself was first and foremost an activist.
Yet, she presented The Feminine Mystique in a manner that suggested she was not an academic, but rather, an average American non-working woman, writing about the miserable condition of women.
In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan introduced her readers to the nature versus nurture debate. Friedan worked on The Feminine Mystique from her home base of the New York Public Library and her dining room table, a combination of the academic and domestic spheres, somewhat fitting for a work that describes the post-World War II mystique that defined women solely as wives, mothers, and housekeepers.
This would result in crippled wives, husbands, and a national economy that experienced the same crippling effect. This work changed the face of American politics and family life for good, creating a whole generation of more militant women who looked for scapegoats to denigrate. Beginning with their mothers, and then moving to the stereotype of the male obsessed with football and beer, these militant reformers challenged Friedan’s original movement of “housewives” with middle class values, children, and modern conveniences.
These conveniences, however, were what made women so unhappy, Friedan argued. Friedan compared suburban women to the inmates of Nazi concentration camps, since the camps promoted a loss of autonomy and forced the identification of individuals with their oppressors.
However, her work has been discredited by various historians and sociologists, including Daniel Horowitz, who debunked Friedan’s depiction of herself as the typical suburban housewife. Some have questioned whether Friedan sacrificed the truth as a way of advancing her cause.
Although The Feminine Mystique is a product of the lessons Friedan had learned in the classroom and her involvement in the labor movement, the book also provides an explanation of women’s dilemma in the post WWII and Cold Warenvironments. By giving credence to the concept that women lacked a sense of power, Friedan articulated the importance of gender in historical analysis.
Bibliography
Horowitz, Daniel. Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The
American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Amherst: The
University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.
Selle, Robert. “Feminism’s matriarch.” World and I 13.5 (1998): 50-52.
Wolfe, Alan. “The Mystique of Betty Friedan.” The Atlantic Monthly 284
(September 1999): 98-103.
What do you think about this article?
More in History
Latest Articles