The Feminine Mystique

by Betty Friedan

Her mother was a social scientist, her grandmother a teacher; she had private images of women who were fully human, she had education equal to any man’s.

And she was able to say with conviction: it’s good to be a woman, you don’t need to copy man, you can respect yourself as a woman.

And it was a step forward when she influenced emancipated modern women to choose, with free intelligence, to have babies, bear them with a proud awareness that denied pain, nurse them at...

She was often quoted out of context by the lesser functionalists and the women’s magazines. Those who found in her work confirmation of their own unadmitted prejudices

and fears ignored not only the complexity of her total work,

Margaret Mead, in the 1960’s, began to voice alarm at the “return of the cavewoman”—the retreat of American women to narrow domesticity, while the world trembled on the brink of technological holocaust.

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question “who am I” except the voice inside herself.

To face the problem is not to solve it. But once a woman faces it, as women are doing today all over America without much help from the experts, once she asks herself “What do I want to do?” she begins to find her own answers. 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.

She told me that when she stopped conforming to the conventional

picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.

I can’t think what I was trying to do with my life before, trying to fit some picture of an oldtime woman pioneer. I don’t have to prove I’m a woman by sewing my own clothes.

I am a woman, and I am myself, and I buy clothes and love them. I’m not such a darned patient, loving, perfect mother anymore. I don’t change the kids’ clothes top to bottom every day, and no more ruffles.

Somehow, once I began to have the sense of myself, I became aware of my husband.

It would be quite wrong for me to offer any woman easy how-to answers to this problem.

There are no easy answers, in America today; it is difficult, painful, and takes perhaps a long time for each woman to find her own answer.

She can say “no” to those mass daydreams of the women’s magazines and television, “no” to the depth researchers and manipulators who are trying to run her life.

to see marriage as it really is,

felt strangely discontented with their husbands, continually irritated with their children, when they saw marriage and motherhood as the final fulfillment of their lives.

when they began to use their various abilities with a purpose of their own in society, they not only spoke of a new feeling of “aliveness” or “completeness” in themselves,

Maybe a woman has to be by herself to be really with her children.

An hour a day, a weekend, or even a week off from motherhood is not the answer to the problem that has no name. That “mother’s hour off,”1 as advised by child-and-family experts or puzzled doctors as the antidote

Society hasn’t caught up with women yet, hasn’t found a way yet to use the skills and energies of women except to bear children.

The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way. But a job, any job, is not the answer—in fact, it can be part of the trap.

If a job is to be the way out of the trap for a woman, it must be a job that she can take seriously as part of a life plan, work in which she can grow as part of society.

But such work is not necessarily a “job.” In Westchester, on Long Island, in the Philadelphia suburbs,

women have started mental-health clinics, art centers, day camps. In big cities and small towns, women all the way from New England to California have pioneered new movements in politics and education.

As a beginning step, each woman was asked to come to the second meeting with a résumé. The résumé took some thought, and, as the researcher put it, “sincerity of purpose.” Only one woman was serious enough to write the résumé.

But music or art or politics offered no magic solution for the women who did not, or could not, commit themselves seriously.

or when her desire for “something more” is only phantasy, and she is unwilling to make the necessary effort.

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

A panel of three or four married couples, after rehearsal by a “priest-moderator,” are instructed to raise the question: “Can a working wife be a challenge to the authority of the husband?”

She may be subtly undermining her husband’s sense of vocation as the bread-winner and head of the house. The competitive business world can inculcate in the working bride attitudes and habits which may make it difficult for her to adjust to her husband’s leadership. . . . c. At the end of a working day, she presents her husband with a tired mind and body at a time when he looks forward to the cheerful encouragement and fresh enthusiasm of his spouse. . . . d. For some brides, the tension of doubling as business woman and part-time housewife may be one of several factors contributing to sterility . . .

One woman told me that she gave up her job in television to become “just a housewife” because her husband suddenly decided his troubles in his own profession were caused by her failure to “play the feminine role”; she was trying to “compete” with him; she wanted “to wear the pants.” She,

women told me that the violent objections of their husbands disappeared when they finally made up their own minds and went to work.

Had they magnified their husband’s objections to evade decision themselves? Husbands I have interviewed in this same context were sometimes surprised

to find it “a relief” to be no longer the only sun and moon in...

they no longer had to feel guilt over their wi...

“Not only is the financial burden lighter—and frankly, that is a relief—but the whole burden of living seems easi...

In fact, some happy ambitious women make the people around them happy—their husbands, children, their

colleagues. . . . A very ambitious woman is not happy, either, leaving her prestige entirely to her husband’s success. . . . To the active, ambitious woman, ambition is the thread that runs through her life from beginning to end, holding it together and enabling her to think of her life as a work of art instead of a collection of fragments . . .