The Feminine Mystique

by Betty Friedan

In The Feminine Mystique Friedan attempted to portray herself as the typical middle-class suburban housewife of the early ’60s. But really, a Smith graduate who went to work for a series of left-wing and union newspapers in Manhattan before settling into matrimony and motherhood was no such thing.

in the end, a woman, as a man, has the power to choose, and to make her own heaven or hell.

The problem is always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife and never being myself.

new neuroses are being seen among women—and problems as yet unnamed as neuroses—which Freud and his followers did not predict, with physical symptoms, anxieties, and defense mechanisms equal to those caused by sexual repression. And strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework—an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.

Behind the new mystique were concepts and theories deceptive in their sophistication and their assumption of accepted truth. These theories were supposedly so complex that they were inaccessible to all but a few initiates, and therefore irrefutable.

In 1956, at the peak of togetherness, the bored editors of McCall’s ran a little article called “The Mother Who Ran Away.” To their amazement, it brought the highest readership of any article they had ever run.

The few women who still sit in editorial conferences do not bow to the feminine mystique in their own lives. But such is the power of the image they have helped create that many of them feel guilty. And if they have missed out somewhere on love or children, they wonder if their careers were to blame.

When a mystique is strong, it makes its own fiction of fact. It feeds on the very facts which might contradict it, and seeps into every corner of the culture, bemusing even the social critics.

The image of woman in another era required increasing prudishness to keep denying sex. This new image seems to require increasing mindlessness, increasing emphasis on things: two cars, two TV’s, two fireplaces.

We don’t like to be asked what we want to do. None of us know. None of us even like to think about it. The ones who are going to be married right away are the lucky ones. They don’t have to think about it.”

It is my thesis that the core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity—a stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique. It is my thesis that as the Victorian culture did not permit women to accept or gratify their basic sexual needs, our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role.

if the new psychological religion—which made a virtue of sex, removed all sin from private vice, and cast suspicion on high aspirations of the mind and spirit—had a more devastating personal effect on women than men, nobody planned it that way.

If an old-fashioned grandfather frowned at Nora, who is studying calculus because she wants to be a physicist, and muttered, “Woman’s place is in the home,” Nora would laugh impatiently, “Grandpa, this is 1963.” But she does not laugh at the urbane pipe-smoking professor of sociology, or the book by Margaret Mead, or the definitive two-volume reference on female sexuality, when they tell her the same thing.

If a woman can find adequate self-expression through a career rather than through marriage, well and good. Many young women, however, overlook the fact that there are numerous careers that do not furnish any medium or offer any opportunity for self-expression. Besides they do not realize that only the minority of women, as the minority of men, have anything particularly worthwhile to express.

You, me, we’re furniture in our own homes. But if we go next door, ahh! Next door, we’re heroes! They’re all looking for romance because they’ve learned it from books and movies.

a certain postponement of sexual activity seemed to accompany the growth in mental activity required and resulting from higher education, and the achievement of the professions of highest value to society.

Sex and early marriage are the easiest way out; playing house at nineteen evades the responsibility of growing up alone.

A bright boy who had dropped out of college told me it was a waste of his time; “intuition” was what counted, and they didn’t teach that at college. He worked a few weeks at a gas station, a month at a bookstore. Then he stopped work and spent his time literally doing nothing—getting up, eating, going to bed, not even reading.

Normality is considered to be the “highest excellence of which we are capable.” The premise is that man is happy, self-accepting, healthy, without guilt, only when he is fulfilling himself and becoming what he can be.

the higher the dominance, or strength of self in a woman, the less she was self-centered and the more her concern was directed outward to other people and to problems of the world. On the other hand, the main preoccupation of the more conventionally feminine low-dominance women was themselves and their own inferiorities.

the low-dominance women did not “have ‘nerve’ enough to say what they think and courage enough to show anger when it is necessary.” Thus, their “feminine” quietness was a concomitant of “shyness, inferiority feelings, and a general feeling that anything they could say would be stupid and would be laughed at.”

among the public figures included in his study, Professor Maslow was able to find only two women who had actually fulfilled themselves—Eleanor Roosevelt and Jane Addams.

self-actualizing people, who live in a larger world, somehow thereby never stale in their enjoyment of the day-to-day living, the trivialities which can become unbearably chafing to those for whom they are the only world. They “. . . have the wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may have become to others.”

The picture of the happy housewife doing creative work at home—painting, sculpting, writing—is one of the semi-delusions of the feminine mystique.

The problem that has no name—which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities—is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.

The rearguard argument offered by the oracles who are, in some cases, right on college campuses themselves, is that since the primary road to identity for a woman is marriage and motherhood, serious educational interests or commitments which may cause conflicts in her role as wife and mother should be postponed until the childbearing years are over. Such a warning was made in 1962 by a psychiatric consultant to Yale University—which had been considering admitting women as undergraduates for the same serious education it gives men.

A whole new world - Rory Gilmore graduates from Yale in 2006

Liberal education, as it is given at the best of colleges and universities, not only trains the mind but provides an ineradicable core of human values.

Women do not need courses in “marriage and the family” to marry and raise families; they do not need courses in homemaking to make homes. But they must study science—to discover in science; study the thought of the past—to create new thought; study society—to pioneer in society.

I would suggest first of all an intensive concentrated re-immersion in, quite simply, the humanities—not abridgments and selections like the usual freshman or sophomore survey, but an intensive study

The identity crisis in men and women cannot be solved by one generation for the next; in our rapidly changing society, it must be faced continually, solved only to be faced again in the span of a single lifetime. A life plan must be open to change, as new possibilities open, in society and in oneself.

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.

Sexual politics, we remind ourselves, started out as a reaction against the feminine mystique. It was an explosion of women’s pent-up anger and rage against the put-downs they had to accept when they were completely dependent on men, the rage they took out on their own bodies and covertly on husbands and kids. That rage fueled the first battles of the women’s movement, and subsided with each advance woman made toward her own empowerment, her full personhood, freedom. But sexual politics now feeds the politics of hate and the growing polarization of America.

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 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.

Maslow found that his self-actualizing people “have in unusual measure the rare ability to be pleased rather than threatened by the partner’s triumphs. . . . A most impressive example of this respect is the ungrudging pride of such a man in his wife’s achievements even where they outshine his.”

The women who had grown with the men in the frontier days were banished almost overnight to anomie—which is a very expressive sociological name for that sense of non-existence or non-identity suffered by one who has no real place in society—when the important work left the home, where they stayed.