The Feminine Mystique

by Betty Friedan

together we could accomplish whatever we wanted to”

These New Women were almost never housewives; in fact, the stories usually ended before they had children. They were young because the future was open. But they seemed, in another sense, much older, more mature than the childlike, kittenish young housewife heroines today. One, for example, is a nurse (“Mother-in-Law,”

Often, there was a conflict between some commitment to her work and the man. But the moral, in 1939, was that if she kept her commitment to herself, she did not lose the man, if he was the right man.

The New Woman heroines were the ideal of yesterday’s housewives; they reflected the dreams, mirrored the yearning for identity and the sense of possibility that existed for women then. And if women could not have these dreams for themselves, they wanted their daughters to have them. They wanted their daughters to be more than housewives, to go out in the world that had been denied them.

career meant more than job. It seemed to mean doing something, being somebody yourself, not just existing in and through others.

There was a heady moment when everything she had learned left her, when she had to adjust herself to be alone, entirely alone in the familiar cabin. Then she drew a deep breath and suddenly a wonderful sense of competence made her sit erect and smiling. She was alone! She was answerable to herself alone, and she was sufficient.

She is not “afraid of discovering my own way of life.”

“But all this vicarious living—through others,” the housewife sighs. “As vicarious as Napoleon Bonaparte,” Miss Thompson scoffs, “or a Queen. I simply refuse to share your self-pity. You are one of the most successful women I know.”

“a world full of feminine genius, but poor in children, would come rapidly to an end. . . . Great men have great mothers.”

1942, with its warning that careers and higher education were leading to the “masculinization of women with enormously dangerous con-sequences to the home, the children dependent on it and to the ability of the woman, as well as her husband, to obtain sexual gratification.”

Behind the new mystique were concepts and theories deceptive in their sophistication and their assumption of accepted truth.

It will be necessary to break through this wall of mystery and look more closely at these complex concepts, these accepted truths, to understand fully what has happened to American women.

The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity. It says that the great mistake of Western culture, through most of its history, has been the undervaluation of this femininity. It says this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that man-made science may never be able to understand it.

it may even in certain respects be superior. The mistake, says the mystique, the root of women’s troubles in the past is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfillment only i...

Her solo flight to find her own identity was forgotten in the rush for the security of togetherness. Her limitless world shrunk to the cozy walls of home.

The split in the new image opens a different fissure—the feminine woman, whose goodness includes the desires of the flesh, and the career woman, whose evil includes every desire of the separate self.

Why, it was asked, should men with the capacities of statesmen, anthropologists, physicists, poets, have to wash dishes and diaper babies on weekday evenings or Saturday mornings when they might use those extra hours to fulfill larger commitments to their society? Significantly, critics resented only that men were being asked to share “woman’s world.” Few questioned the boundaries of this world for women. No one seemed to remember that women were once thought to have the capacity and vision of statesmen, poets, and physicists. Few saw the big lie of togetherness for women.

the new era of togetherness,

But what else could you do with togetherness but child care? We were pathetically grateful to find anything else where we could show father photographed with mother. Sometimes,

But we couldn’t show women getting out of the home and having a career. The irony is, what we meant to do was to stop editing for women as women, and edit for the men and women together. We wanted to edit for people, not women.”

passive dependence that they want men to make the decisions, even in the home.

Could making men share the housework compensate women for their loss of the world? Could vacuuming the living-room floor together give the housewife some mysterious new purpose in life?

By the time I started writing for women’s magazines, in the fifties, it was simply taken for granted by editors, and accepted as an immutable fact of life by writers, that women were not interested in politics, life outside the United States, national issues, art, science, ideas, adventure, education, or even their own communities, except where they could be sold through their emotions as wives and mothers.

Such a belief, of course, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ideas are not like instincts of the blood that spring into the mind intact. They are communicated by education, by the printed word.

Writing for these magazines, I was continually reminded by editors “that women have to identify.”

Once I wanted to write an article about an artist. So I wrote about her cooking and marketing and falling in love with her husband, and painting a crib for her baby. I had to leave out the hours she spent painting pictures, her serious work—and the way she

felt about it. You could sometimes get away with writing about a woman who was not really a housewife, if you made her sound like a housewife, if you left out her commitment to the world outside the home, o...

The one “career woman” who was always welcome in the pages of the women’s magazines was the actress.

The old image of the spirited career girl was largely created by writers and editors who were women, she told me. The new image of woman as housewife-mother has been largely created by writers and editors who are men.

“As the young men returned from the war, a great many women writers dropped out of the field. The young women started having a lot of children, and stopped writing. The new writers were all men, back from the war, who had been dreaming about home, and a cozy domestic life.” One by one, the creators of the gay “career girl” heroines of the thirties began to retire.

Judging from the women’s magazines today, it would seem that the concrete details of women’s lives are more interesting than their thoughts, their ideas, their dreams.

Or does the richness and realism of the detail, the careful description of small events, mask the lack of dreams, the vacuum of ideas, the terrible boredom that has settled over the American housewife?

When motherhood, a fulfillment held sacred down the ages, is defined as a total way of life,

must women themselves deny the world and the future open to them? Or does the denial of that world force them to make motherhood a total way of life? The

When a mystique is strong, it makes its own fiction of fact.

This assignment for you, as wives and mothers, you can do in the living room with a baby in your lap or in the kitchen with a can opener in your hand. If you’re clever,

maybe you can even practice your saving arts on that unsuspecting man while he’s watching television. I think there is much you can do about our crisis in the humble role of housewife. I could wish you no better vocation than that.

Thus the logic of the feminine mystique redefined the very nature of woman’s problem. When woman was seen as a human being of limitless human potential, equal to man, anything that kept her from realizing her full potential was a problem to be solved: barriers to higher education a...

“How America Lives” (Ladies’ Home Journal, June, 1959): “If he doesn’t want me to wear a certain color or a certain kind of dress, then I truly don’t want to, either. The thing is, whatever he has wanted is what I also want. . . . I don’t believe in fifty-fifty marriages.”

It is not a harmless image. There may be no psychological terms for the harm it is doing. But what happens when women try to live according to an image that makes them deny their minds? What happens when women grow up in an image that makes them deny the reality of the changing world?

Why, with the removal of all the legal, political, economic, and educational barriers that once kept woman from being man’s equal, a person in her own right, an individual free to develop her own potential, should she accept this new image which insists she is not a person but a “woman,” by definition barred from the freedom of human existence and a voice in human destiny?

The feminine mystique is so powerful that women grow up no longer knowing that they have the desires and capacities the mystique forbids. But such a mystique does not fasten itself on a whole nation in a few short years, reversing the trends of a century, without cause. What gives the mystique its power? Why did women go home again?

When we were growing up, many of us could not see ourselves beyond the age of twenty-one. We had no image of our own future, of ourselves as women.

“None of it was true,” she told me. “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 wasn’t until I got so lonely as the doctor’s wife and kept screaming at the kids because they didn’t fill my life that I realized I had to make my own life.

The feminine mystique permits, even encourages, women to ignore the question of their identity.

But I don’t think the mystique would have such power over American women if they did not fear to face this terrifying blank which makes them unable to see themselves after twenty-one.

Strangely, many mothers who loved their daughters—and mine was one—did not want their daughters to grow up like them either. They knew we needed something more.

Recently, interviewing high-school girls who had started out full of promise and talent, but suddenly stopped their education, I began to see new dimensions to the problem of feminine conformity. These girls, it seemed at first, were merely following the typical curve of feminine adjustment.