The Feminine Mystique

by Betty Friedan

She’s put so much into her family that there’s nothing left, and she resents us because she doesn’t get enough in return. But sometimes it seems like there’s nothing there. My mother doesn’t serve any purpose except cleaning the house. She isn’t happy, and she doesn’t make my father happy. If she didn’t care about us children at all, it would have the same effect as caring too much. It makes you want to do the opposite. I don’t think it’s really love.

My mother wanted to be a newspaper reporter from the time she was twelve, and I’ve seen her frustration for twenty years. I don’t want to be interested in world affairs. I don’t want to be interested in anything beside my home and being a wonderful wife and mother.

Only sometimes I wonder how it would feel to be able to stretch and stretch and stretch, and learn all you want, and not have to hold yourself back.

I never knew a woman, when I was growing up, who used her mind, played her own part in the world, and also loved, and had children.

These images would not have such power, if women were not suffering a crisis of identity.

Today’s high rate of emotional distress and breakdown among women in their twenties and thirties is usually attributed to this “role crisis.” If girls were educated for their role as women, they would not suffer this crisis, the adjusters say.

What if the terror a girl faces at twenty-one, when she must decide who she will be, is simply the terror of growing up—growing up, as women were not permitted to grow before?

What if those who choose the path of “feminine adjustment”—evading this terror by marrying at eighteen, losing themselves in having babies and the details of housekeeping—are simply refusing to grow up, to face the question of their own identity?

They slid easily into their sexual role as women before they knew who they were themselves. It is these women who suffer most the problem that has no name. 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.

In this sense, the identity crisis of one man’s life may reflect, or set off, a rebirth, or new stage, in the growing up of mankind.

“In some periods of his history, and in some phases of his life cycle, man needs a new ideological orientation as surely and sorely as he must have air and food,” said Erikson, focusing new light on the crisis of the young Martin Luther, who left a Catholic monastery at the end of the Middle Ages to forge a new identity for himself and Western man.

In America, from the beginning, it has somehow been understood that men must thrust into the future; the pace has always been too rapid for man’s identity to stand still. In every generation, many men have suffered misery, unhappiness, and uncertainty because they could not take the image of the man they wanted to be from their fathers. The search for identity of the young man who can’t go home again has always been a major theme of American writers. And it has always been considered right in America, good, for men to suffer these agonies of growth, to search for and find their own identities.

But why have theorists not recognized this same identity crisis in women? In terms of the old conventions and the new feminine mystique women are not expected to grow up to find out who they are, to choose their human identity. Anatomy is woman’s destiny, say the theorists of femininity; the identity of woman is determined by her biology.

As if they were waking from a coma, they ask, “Where am I . . . what am I doing here?” For the first time in their history, women are becoming aware of an identity crisis in their own lives,

a crisis which began many generations ago, has grown worse with each succeeding generation, and will not end until they, or their daughters, turn an unknown corner and make of themselves and their lives the new image that so many women now so desperately need.

I think women had to suffer this crisis of identity, which began a hundred years ago, and have to suffer it still today, simply to become fully human.

It was the need for a new identity that led those passionate feminists to forge new trails for women. Some of those trails were unexpectedly rough, some were dead ends, and some may have been false, but the need for women to find new trails was real.

The feminists had only one model, one image, one vision, of a full and free human being: man.

Did women want these freedoms because they wanted to be men? Or did they want them because they also were human?

Whenever, wherever in the world there has been an upsurge of human freedom, women have won a share of it for themselves.

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. “The domestic function of woman does not exhaust her powers,” the Rev. Theodore Parker preached in Boston in 1853. “To make one half the human race consume its energies in the functions of housekeeper, wife and mother is a monstrous waste of the most precious material God ever made.”

At every step of the way, the feminists had to fight the conception that they were violating the God-given nature of woman.

The myth that these women were “unnatural monsters” was based on the belief that to destroy the God-given subservience of women would destroy the home and make slaves of men.

There were excesses, of course, as in any revolution, but the excesses of the feminists were in themselves a demonstration of the revolution’s necessity.

Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell joined hands to make, before their wedding vows: While we acknowledge our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife . . . we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority.7

From the first years to which my memory stretches, I have been a disappointed woman. When, with my brothers, I reached forth after sources of knowledge, I was reproved with “It isn’t fit for you; it doesn’t belong to women” . . . In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman’s heart until she bows down to it no longer.8

Her husband and her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, devoted their lives, after her death in 1893, to the unfinished battle for woman’s vote. By the end of her passionate journey, she could say she was glad to have been born a woman.

The emotional identification of American women with the battle to free the slaves may or may not testify to the unconscious foment of their own rebellion. But it is an undeniable fact that, in organizing, petitioning, and speaking out to free the slaves, American women learned how to free themselves.

She put only one notice in the newspapers, and housewives and daughters who had never known any other kind of life came in wagons from a radius of fifty miles to hear her speak.

But those women, who after a twelve- or thirteen-hour day in the factory still had household duties, could not take the lead in the passionate journey. Most of the leading feminists were women of the middle class, driven by a complex of motives to educate themselves and smash that empty image.

Women are one-half the world, but until a century ago . . . women lived a twilight life, a half life apart, and looked out and saw men as shadows walking. It was a man’s world. The laws were men’s laws, the government a man’s government, the country a man’s country. Now women have won the right to higher education and economic independence. The right to become citizens of the state is the next and inevitable consequence of education and work outside the home.

As the battle to free women was fired by the battle to free the slaves in the nineteenth century, it was fired in the twentieth by the battles of social reform,

the use of the union movement, and the great strikes against intolerable working conditions in the factories.

But no one was much concerned with rights for women: they had all been won. And yet the man-eating myth prevailed. Women who displayed any independence or initiative were called “Lucy Stoners.” “Feminist,” like “career woman,” became a dirty word. The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.

Insecure in their new freedom, some perhaps feared to be soft or gentle, love, have children, lest they lose their prized independence, lest they be trapped again as their mothers were.

But the daughters who grew up with the rights the feminists had won could not go back to that old image of genteel nothingness,

had come unknowing to the turning-point in woman’s identity.

they were finally free to be what they chose to be. But what choice were they offered?

In that corner, the fiery, man-eating feminist, the career woman—loveless, alone. In this corner, the gentle wife and mother—loved and protected by her husband, surrounded by her adoring children. Though many daughters continued on the passionate journey their grandmothe...

How did Chinese women, after having their feet bound for many generations, finally discover they could run? The first women whose feet were unbound must have felt such pain that some were afraid to stand, let alone to walk or

run. The more they walked, the less their feet hurt. But what would have happened if, before a single generation of Chinese girls had grown up with unbound feet, doctors, hoping to save them pain and distress, told them to bind their feet again?

It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother. Encouraged by the mystique to evade their identity crisis, permitted to escape identity altogether in the name of sexual fulfillment, women once again are living with their feet bound in the old image of glorified femininity. And it is the same old image, despite its shiny new clothes, that trapped women for centuries and made the feminists rebel.

The new mystique is much more difficult for the modern woman to question than the

old prejudices,

partly because the mystique is broadcast by the very agents of education and social science that are supposed to be the chief enemies of prejudice, partly because the very nature of Freudian ...

How can an educated American woman, who is not herself an analyst, presume to qu...

But I do question, from my own experience as a woman, and my reporter’s knowledge of other women, the application of the Freudian theory of femininity to women today. I question its use, not in therapy, but as it has filtered into the lives of American women through the popular magazines and the opinions and interpretations of so-called experts.

I think much of the Freudian theory about women is obsolescent, an obstacle to truth for women in America today, and a major cause of the pervasive problem that has no name.

Yet Freudian thought helped create a new superego that paralyzes educated modern American women—a new tyranny of the “shoulds,” which chains women to an old image, prohibits choice and growth, and denies them individual identity. Freudian psychology, with its emphasis on freedom from a repressive morality to achieve sexual fulfillment, was part of the ideology of women’s emancipation.

Without Freud’s definition of the sexual nature of woman to give the conventional image of femininity new authority, I do not think several generations of educated, spirited American women would have been so easily diverted from the dawning realization of who they were and what they could be.