The Feminine Mystique

by Betty Friedan

mind—“Kinder, Kuche, Kirche,” the slogan by which the Nazis decreed that women must once again be confined to their biological role. But this was not Nazi Germany. This was America.

it simply makes certain concrete, finite, domestic aspects of feminine existence—as it was lived by women whose lives were confined, by necessity, to cooking, cleaning, washing, bearing children—into a religion, a pattern by which all women must now live or deny their femininity.

where the woman has no independent self to hide even in guilt; she exists only for and through her husband and children.

Freud was accepted so quickly and completely at the end of the forties that for over a decade no one even questioned the race of the educated American woman back to the home. When questions finally had to be asked because something was obviously going wrong, they were asked so completely within the Freudian framework that only one answer was possible: education, freedom, rights are wrong for women.

The feminine mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, overprotective, life-restricting, future-denying note for women. Girls who grew up playing baseball, baby-sitting, mastering geometry—almost independent enough, almost resourceful enough, to meet the problems of the fission-fusion era—were told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll’s house by Victorian prejudice. And their own respect and awe for the authority of science—anthropology, sociology, psychology share that authority now—kept them from questioning the feminine mystique.

The whole point of functional education often seems to be: what 51 per cent of the population does today, 100 per cent should do tomorrow.

They must decide between adjustment, conformity, avoidance of conflict, therapy—or individuality, human identity, education in the truest sense, with all its pains of growth.

graduation, such women were, however, only at a “halfway point” in their growth to autonomy. Their fate depended on “whether they now enter a situation in which they can continue to grow or whether they find some quick but regressive means for relieving the stress.” The flight into marriage is the easiest, quickest way to relieve that stress. To the educator, bent on women’s growth to autonomy, such a marriage is “regressive.” To the sex-directed educator, it is femininity fulfilled.

the girl who suffers almost to the point of breakdown in the senior year, and who faces a personal decision about her own future—faces even an irreconcilable conflict between the values and interests and abilities her education has given her, and the conventional role of housewife—is still “healthier” than the adjusted, calm, stable girl in whom education did not “take” at all and who steps smoothly from her role as parents’ child to husband’s wife, conventionally feminine, without ever waking up to painful individual identity.

there was one group of students who in senior year neither suffered conflict to the point of near-breakdown nor stopped their own growth to flee into marriage. These were students who were preparing for a profession; they had gained, in college, interests deep enough to commit themselves to a career. The study revealed that virtually all such students with professional ambitions plan to marry, but marriage is for them an activity in which they will voluntarily choose to participate rather than something that is necessary for any sense of personal identity.

(The generation before mine, the women born between 1910 and 1919, showed the change most sharply. During their twenties, their low pregnancy rate led to warnings that education was going to wipe out the human race; in their thirties, they suddenly showed a sharp increase in pregnancies, despite the lowered biological capacity that makes the pregnancy rate decline with age.)

The American spirit fell into a strange sleep; men as well as women, scared liberals, disillusioned radicals, conservatives bewildered and frustrated by change—the whole nation stopped growing up. All of us went back into the warm brightness of home, the way it was when we were children and slept peacefully upstairs while our parents read, or played bridge in the living room, or rocked on the front porch in the summer evening in our home towns.

It was easier to look for Freudian sexual roots in man’s behavior, his ideas, and his wars than to look critically at his society and act constructively to right its wrongs. There was a kind of personal retreat, even on the part of the most far-sighted, the most spirited; we lowered our eyes from the horizon, and steadily contemplated our own navels.

And singled out for special attention was the “mother.” It was suddenly discovered that the mother could be blamed for almost everything. In every case history of troubled child; alcoholic, suicidal, schizophrenic, psychopathic, neurotic adult; impotent, homosexual male; frigid, promiscuous female; ulcerous, asthmatic, and otherwise disturbed American, could be found a mother. A frustrated, repressed, disturbed, martyred, never satisfied, unhappy woman. A demanding, nagging, shrewish wife. A rejecting, overprotecting, dominating mother. World War II revealed that millions of American men were psychologically incapable of facing the shock of war, of facing life away from their “moms.” Clearly something was “wrong” with American women.

She discovered that at the present time, one can say anything—good or bad—about children of employed mothers and support the statement by some research findings.

The insult, the real reflection on our culture’s definition of the role of women, is that as a nation we only noticed that something was wrong with women when we saw its effects on their sons.

Capitalize, the report continued, on housewives’ “guilt over the hidden dirt” so she will rip her house to shreds in a “deep cleaning” operation, which will give her a “sense of completeness” for a few weeks. (“The times of thorough cleaning are the points at which she is most willing to try new products and ‘deep clean’ advertising holds out the promise of completion.”)

It was discovered that young wives, who had only been to high school and had never worked, were more “insecure,” less independent, easier to sell. These young people could be told that, by buying the right things, they could achieve middle-class status, without work or study.

The main point now was to convince the teenagers that “happiness through things” is no longer the prerogative of the rich or the talented; it can be enjoyed by all, if they learn “the right way,” the way the others do it, if they learn the embarrassment of being different.

Such guilt, the report maintained, can be used to make her see the product, silver, as a means of holding the family together; it gives “added psychological value.”

Thus, the only way that the young housewife was supposed to express herself, and not feel guilty about it, was in buying products for the home-and-family. Any creative urges she may have should also be home-and-family oriented, as still another survey reported to the home sewing industry.

For, of course, the manufacturer’s problem was not to satisfy woman’s need for individuality, for expression or creativity, but to sell more patterns—which is better done by building conformity.

Never underestimate the power of a woman, says another ad. But that power was and is underestimated in America. Or rather, it is only estimated in terms that can be manipulated at the point of purchase.

“Woman’s place is in the home” could no longer be said in tones of contempt. Housework, washing dishes, diaper-changing had to be dressed up by the new mystique to become equal to splitting atoms, penetrating outer space, creating art that illuminates human destiny, pioneering on the frontiers of society. It had to become the very end of life itself to conceal the obvious fact that it is barely the beginning.

The “absorption” of the child’s personality by the middle-class mother—already apparent to a perceptive sociologist in the 1940’s—has inevitably increased during these years. Without serious interests outside the home, and with housework routinized by appliances, women could devote themselves almost exclusively to the cult of the child from cradle to kindergarten.

is the child who supports life in the mother in that “symbiotic” relationship, and the child is virtually destroyed in the process.

Anxiety occurs at the point where some emerging potentiality or possibility faces the individual, some possibility of fulfilling his existence; but this very possibility involves the destroying of present security, which thereupon gives rise to the tendency to deny the new potentiality.

it is purpose which gives the human pattern to one’s days.

Capacities clamor to be used, and cease their clamor only when they are well used. That is, capacities are also needs. Not only is it fun to use our capacities, but it is also necessary. The unused capacity or organ can become a disease center or else atrophy, thus diminishing the person.

Thus Professor Maslow suggested that either you have to describe as “masculine” both high-dominance men and women or drop the terms “masculine” and “feminine” altogether because they are so “misleading.”

Love for self-actualizing people differed from the conventional definition of love in yet another way; it was not motivated by need, to make up a deficiency in the self; it was more purely “gift” love, a kind of “spontaneous admiration.”25

the higher the woman’s income at the time of her marriage, the more probable her married happiness.

One sees the human significance of work—not merely as the means of biological survival, but as the giver of self and the transcender of self, as the creator of human identity and human evolution.

It was not an American, but a South African woman, Mrs. Olive Schreiner, who warned at the turn of the century that the quality and quantity of women’s functions in the social universe were decreasing as fast as civilization was advancing; that if women did not win back their right to a full share of honored and useful work, woman’s mind and muscle would weaken in a parasitic state; her offspring, male and female, would weaken progressively, and civilization itself would deteriorate.35 The

When society asks so little of women, every woman has to listen to her own inner voice to find her identity in the changing world.

Once she begins to see through the delusions of the feminine mystique—and realizes that neither her husband nor her children, nor the things in her house, nor sex, nor being like all the other women, can give her a self—she often finds the solution much easier than she anticipated. Of the many women

the education a woman can get at forty is permeated, contaminated, diluted by the feminine mystique.

The fact remains that the girl who wastes—as waste she does—her college years without acquiring serious interests, and wastes her early job years marking time until she finds a man, gambles with the possibilities for an identity of her own, as well as the possibilities for sexual fulfillment and wholly affirmed motherhood.

It is not that easy for a woman who has defined herself wholly as wife and mother for ten or fifteen or twenty years to find new identity at thirty-five or forty or fifty.

A recent study of fifty women college graduates in an eastern suburb and city, the year after the oldest child had left home, showed that, with very few exceptions, the only women who had any interests to pursue—in work, in community activities, or in the arts—had acquired them in college. The ones who lacked such interests were not acquiring them now; they slept late, in their “empty nests,” and looked forward only to death.

If good full-time help was not available in the children’s early years, they gave up their jobs and took a part-time post that may not have paid handsomely, but kept them moving ahead in their profession.

the editors and writers started free-lancing. Even if the money they made was not needed for groceries or household help (and usually it was), they earned tangible proof of their ability to contribute. They did not consider themselves “lucky” to be housewives; they competed in society. They knew that marriage and motherhood are an essential part of life, but not the whole of it.