The Feminine Mystique

473 Pages·2013·1.89 MB·English

by  Friedan, Betty

Further praise for The Feminine
Mystique

“Written with a passionate drive…it will leave you with some
haunting facts as well as a few hair-raising stories. That The
Feminine Mystique is at the same time a scholarly work, appropriate
for serious study, only adds to its usefulness.”

—Lillian Smith, Saturday Review

“A highly readable, provocative book.”

—Lucy Freeman, New York Times Book Review

“The most important book of the twentieth century is The Feminine
Mystique. Betty Friedan is to women what Martin Luther King, Jr.,
was to blacks.”

—Barbara Seaman, author of Free and Female

“The Feminine Mystique stated the trouble with women so clearly
that every woman could recognize herself in the diagnosis…. Things
are different between men and women because we now have words
for the trouble. Betty gave them to us.”

—Caroline Bird, author of Lives of Our Own

The Feminine Mystique

Betty Friedan

The Feminine Mystique

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

New York London

Copyright © 1997, 1991, 1974, 1963 by Betty Friedan
Introduction by Anna Quindlen copyright © 2001 by Anna Quindlen
First published as a Norton paperback 2001

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this
book, write to
Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10110.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Friedan, Betty.

The feminine mystique/by Betty Friedan; with a new introduction.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-33932-1

1. Feminism—United States. 2. Women—United States—Social

conditions. 3.
Women—Psychology. I. Title.
HQ1426.F844 1997
305.42’0973—DC21

97–8877

CIP

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

For all the new women,
and the new men

Contents

Introduction by Anna Quindlen
Metamorphosis: Two Generations Later
Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary
Edition
Preface and Acknowledgments

1 The Problem That Has No Name
2 The Happy Housewife Heroine
3 The Crisis in Woman’s Identity
4 The Passionate Journey
5 The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud
6 The Functional Freeze, the Feminine

Protest, and Margaret Mead

7 The Sex-Directed Educators
8 The Mistaken Choice
9 The Sexual Sell
10 Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time

Available

11 The Sex-Seekers
12 Progressive Dehumanization: The

Comfortable Concentration Camp

13 The Forfeited Self
14 A New Life Plan for Women

Epilogue
Notes
Reading Group Guide

Introduction

Anna Quindlen

My 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.”

Metamorphosis

Two Generations Later

As we approach a new century—and a new millennium—it’s the
men who have to break through to a new way of thinking about
themselves and society. Too bad the women can’t do it for them, or
go much further without them. Because it’s awesome to consider how
women have changed the very possibilities of our lives and are
changing the values of every part of our society since we broke
through the feminine mystique only two generations ago. But it can’t
go on in terms of women alone. There’s a new urgency coming from
the changing situation of men, threatening to women unless men break
through. Will women be forced to retreat from their empowered
personhood, or will they join with men again in some new vision of
human possibility, changing the man’s world which they fought so
hard to enter?

Consider the terms of women’s new empowerment, the startling

changes since that time I wrote about, only three decades ago, when
women were defined only in sexual relation to men—man’s wife, sex
object, mother, housewife—and never as persons defining
themselves by their own actions in society. That image, which I
called “the feminine mystique,” was so pervasive, coming at us from
the women’s magazines, the movies, the television commercials, all
the mass media and the textbooks of psychology and sociology, that