The Feminine Mystique

by Betty Friedan

Feminism was not a dirty joke. The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a stage of evolution far short of their human capacity.

When they decided to petition for married women’s rights to own property, half the time even the women slammed doors in their faces with the smug remark that they had husbands, they needed no laws to protect them.

“If the patient doesn’t fit the book, throw away the book, and listen to the patient.”

Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women;

At the present historical moment, the best adjusted girl is probably one who is intelligent enough to do well in school but not so brilliant as to get all A’s . . . capable but not in areas relatively new to women; able to stand on her own two feet and to earn a living, but not so good a living as to compete with men; capable of doing some job well (in case she doesn’t marry, or otherwise has to work) but not so identified with a profession as to need it for her happiness.10

But by choosing femininity over the painful growth to full identity, by never achieving the hard core of self that comes not from fantasy but from mastering reality, these girls are doomed to suffer ultimately that bored, diffuse feeling of purposelessness, non-existence, non-involvement with the world that can be called anomie, or lack of identity, or merely felt as the problem that has no name.

The lonely years when husbands or husbands-to-be were away at war—or could be sent away at a bomb’s fall—made women particularly vulnerable to the feminine mystique. They were told that the cold dimension of loneliness which the war had added to their lives was the necessary price they had to pay for a career, for any interest outside the home. The mystique spelled out a choice—love, home, children, or other goals and purposes in life. Given such a choice, was it any wonder that so many American women chose love as their whole purpose?

“I live through my husband and children,” a frank member of my own generation told me. “It’s easier that way. In this world now, it’s easier to be a woman, if you take advantage of it.”

In this sense, what happened to women is part of what happened to all of us in the years after the war. We found excuses for not facing the problems we once had the courage to face.

Not long ago Dr. Spock confessed, a bit uneasily, that Russian children, whose mothers usually have some purpose in their lives besides motherhood—they work in medicine, science, education, industry, government, art—seemed somehow more stable, adjusted, mature, than American children, whose full-time mothers do nothing but worry about them.

Many saw the tragic waste of American sons who were made incapable of achievement, individual values, independent action; but they did not see as tragic the waste of the daughters, or of the mothers to whom it happened generations earlier.

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.

Even women themselves, who felt the misery, the helplessness of their lack of self, did not understand the feeling; it became the problem that has no name. And in their shame and guilt they turned again to their children to escape the problem.

When a culture has erected barrier after barrier against women as separate selves; when a culture has erected legal, political, social, economic and educational barriers to women’s own acceptance of maturity—even after most of those barriers are down it is still easier for a woman to seek the sanctuary of the home.

In all the talk of femininity and woman’s role, one forgets that the real business of America is business. But the perpetuation of housewifery, the growth of the feminine mystique, makes sense (and dollars) when one realizes that women are the chief customers of American business. Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives.

The point to bear in mind regarding career women, the study said, is that, while they buy modern appliances, they are not the ideal type of customer. They are too critical.

The difficulty is to give her the “sense of achievement” of “ego enhancement” she has been persuaded to seek in the housewife “profession,” when, in actuality, “her time-consuming task, housekeeping, is not only endless, it is a task for which society hires the lowliest, least-trained, most trod-upon individuals and groups. . . . Anyone with a strong enough back (and a small enough brain) can do these menial chores.”

As one housewife remarked, “As for some magical push-button cleaning system, well, what would happen to my exercise, my feeling of accomplishment, and what would I do with my mornings?”

If he tells her that all she can be is a wife and mother, she will spit in his face. But we show him how to tell her that it’s creative to be in the kitchen. We liberate her need to be creative in the kitchen. If we tell her to be an astronomer, she might go too far from the kitchen.

But a new stove or a softer toilet paper do not make a woman a better wife or mother, even if she thinks that’s what she needs to be. Dyeing her hair cannot stop time; buying a Plymouth will not give her a new identity; smoking a Marlboro will not get her an invitation to bed, even if that’s what she thinks she wants. But those unfulfilled promises can keep her endlessly hungry for things, keep her from ever knowing what she really needs or wants.

The real crime, no matter how profitable for the American economy, is the callous and growing acceptance of the manipulator’s advice “to get them young”—the television commercials that children sing or recite even before they learn to read, the big beautiful ads almost as easy as “Look, Sally, Look,” the magazines deliberately designed to turn teenage girls into housewife buyers of things before they grow up to be women:

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.

My husband says, find something to occupy yourself that you’ll enjoy, why should you work? So now I play golf, nearly every day, just myself. When you walk three, four hours a day, at least you can sleep at night.

I also discovered that many frantically busy full-time housewives were amazed to find that they could polish off in one hour the housework that used to take them six—or was still undone at dinnertime—as soon as they started studying, or working, or had some other serious interest outside the home.

Women who worked many hours a week outside the home—either in paid jobs or community work—did the housekeeping, on which the full-time housewife still spent sixty hours a week, in half the time. They still seemed to do all the homemaking activities of the housewife—meals, shopping, cleaning, the children—but even with a thirty-five-hour work week on the job, their work week was only an hour and a half a day longer than the housewife’s.

The more your intelligence exceeds your job requirements, the greater your boredom.

The true satisfaction of “creating a home,” the personal relationship with husband and children, the atmosphere of hospitality, serenity, culture, warmth, or security a woman gives to the home comes by way of her personality, not her broom, stove, or dishpan.

A woman’s work—housework—cannot give her status; it has the lowliest status of almost any work in society. A woman must acquire her status vicariously through her husband’s work. The husband himself, and even the children, become symbols of status, for when a woman defines herself as a housewife, the house and the things in it are, in a sense, her identity;

There is no doubt that male outrage against women—and inevitably, against sex—has increased enormously in the era of the feminine mystique.

Being available to one’s children has nothing to do with the amount of time—being able to be there for each child in terms of what he needs can happen in a split second. And a mother can be there all day, and not be there for the child, because of her preoccupation with herself.

It is urgent to understand how the very condition of being a housewife can create a sense of emptiness, non-existence, nothingness, in women. There are aspects of the housewife role that make it almost impossible for a woman of adult intelligence to retain a sense of human identity, the firm core of self or “I” without which a human being, man or woman, is not truly alive.

The guns of the SS were not powerful enough to keep all those prisoners subdued. They were manipulated to trap themselves; they imprisoned themselves by making the concentration camp the whole world, by blinding themselves to the larger world of the past, their responsibility for the present, and their possibilities for the future. The ones who survived, who neither died nor were exterminated, were the ones who retained in some essential degree the adult values and interests which had been the essence of their past identity.

But no matter how often she tries to tell herself that this giving up of personal identity is a necessary sacrifice for her children and husband, it serves no real purpose. So the aggressive energy she should be using in the world becomes instead the terrible anger that she dare not turn against her husband, is ashamed of turning against her children, and finally turns against herself, until she feels as if she does not exist.

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.

These high-dominance women were not “feminine” in the conventional sense, partly because they felt free to choose rather than be bound by convention, and partly because they were stronger as individuals than most women.

Professor Maslow found that 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.

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.”

The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers 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.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women’s intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love? Who knows of the possibilities of love when men and women share not only children, home, and garden, not only the fulfillment of their biological roles, but the responsibilities and passions of the work that creates the human future and the full human knowledge of who they are?