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Confined to four walls, the lucky ones were kept busy in lockdown by learning to make bread, or used the time to redecorate. But for many women, this was a dark few months.
There were few logical reasons why the responsibility for home schooling children and keeping the household together while simultaneously trying to get your own paid work done should have fallen more heavily on women than men, and yet it did.
life. Three out of four British mothers with dependent children now work, and one in four is the major breadwinner in their household.
But the speed with which many couples slid back into traditionally gendered roles in lockdown was a warning sign, a reminder that progress can always be reversed.
The insidious guilt tugging at many working mothers even now, the fear that something nameless but important is slipping through our fingers, is arguably a hangover from the culture Friedan describes.
If they still couldn’t be happy, despite apparently living the dream, then there must be something wrong with them.
Suddenly it became clear to many women that the problem wasn’t with them after all. Women with ‘no goal, no purpose, no ambition’ in life beyond achieving motherhood were, Friedan argued, committing a kind of suicide, a death of the self. They needed meaningful work, autonomy, and an identity of their own, not one obtained by living vicariously through their husbands and children.
But what is striking, rereading the book in 2021, is that it’s also a cautionary tale about how easily things can slide backwards. Hidden inside it is the history of an earlier wave of feminists, who won the vote for women and seemed to have won the argument for equality, only for the clock to be turned back.
But it was the choices made by women for whom education should, in theory, have opened up the greatest possibilities that interested her. By the late 1950s a third of American women worked, yet she noted fewer women seemed to be entering the better-paid professions.
From the start, Friedan saw the fight to expand female horizons as potentially liberating for men too, and capable of changing their roles within the home. In that she was arguably visionary, given that half a century on women are still fighting for equality within the home as well as equality at work, via the fair division of childcare and chores.
Her determination not to be seen as ‘man-hating’ – a label constantly used by conservatives seeking to discredit feminists in the eyes of women who still loved their husbands – meant she could never be radical enough for some.
These days, intersectional feminists would almost certainly recognise that call, and plenty sympathised at the time.
Yet she felt it was crucial that the women’s liberation movement be seen as compatible with a happy marriage, so that its figureheads could not be dismissed as embittered, as the suffragettes had been.
We have come a long way since 1963, yet the backlash is never far behind. To this day women are still beaten by their partners, fired for getting pregnant, sexually harassed at work or driven off social media by tidal waves of abuse designed to shut them up – the modern equivalent of the hate mail Friedan received.
Yet astonishingly, almost half of young British men aged between 16 and 24 now agree that feminism has ‘gone too far and makes it harder for men to succeed’,
The fear of losing what was so hard-won runs deep, and this book serves as a timely reminder of exactly why it should. Then, as now, it represents a call to arms.
The problems and satisfaction of their lives, and mine, and the way our education had contributed to them, simply did not fit the image of the modern American woman as she was written about in women’s magazines, studied and analyzed in classrooms and clinics, praised and damned in a ceaseless barrage of words ever since the end of World War II. There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique. I wondered if other women faced this schizophrenic split, and what it meant.
high school and college girls facing or evading the question of who they were; young housewives and mothers for whom, if the mystique were right, there should be no such question and who thus had no name for the problem troubling them; and women who faced a jumping-off point at forty.
she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”
They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights—the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for.
A new degree was instituted for the wives—“Ph.T.” (Putting Husband Through).
Women who had once wanted careers were now making careers out of having babies. So rejoiced Life magazine in a 1956 paean to the movement of American women back to the home.
The suburban housewife—she was the dream image of the young American woman and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world.
In the fifteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture.
Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands.
Nobody argued whether women were inferior or superior to men; they were simply different. Words like “emancipation” and “career” sounded strange and embarrassing; no one had used them for years.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with women today,” a suburban psychiatrist said uneasily. “I only know something is wrong because most of my patients happen to be women. And their problem isn’t sexual.”
Like a two-headed schizophrenic… once she wrote a paper on the Graveyard poets; now she writes notes to the milkman.
What if she isn’t happy—does she think men are happy in this world? Does she really, secretly, still want to be a man? Doesn’t she know yet how lucky she is to be a woman?
“What do I do?” you hear her say. “Why nothing. I’m just a housewife.” A good education, it seems, has given this paragon among women an understanding of the value of everything except her own worth…
The problem is always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife and never being myself.
In the past sixty years we have come full circle and the American housewife is once again trapped in a squirrel cage.
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.
She can never spend more than 15 minutes on any one thing; she has no time to read books, only magazines; even if she had time, she has lost the power to concentrate.
But the chains that bind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit.
We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”
Why have so many American wives suffered this nameless aching dissatisfaction for so many years, each one thinking she was alone?
In the second half of the twentieth century in America, woman’s world was confined to her own body and beauty, the charming of man, the bearing of babies, and the physical care and serving of husband, children, and home.
when did women decide to give up the world and go back home?
Her passionate involvement with the world, her own sense of herself as an individual, her self-reliance, gave a different flavor to her relationship with the man.
masculinization of women with enormously dangerous consequences to the home, the children dependent on it and to the ability of the woman,
And so the feminine mystique began to spread through the land, grafted onto old prejudices and comfortable conventions which so easily give the past a stranglehold on the future.
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.
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 in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.
Well yes. We aren't men . But not passive
Like Peter Pan, they must remain young while their children grow up with the world.
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.
they may or may not overlook the housekeeper or maid who really makes the beds. But they implicitly deny the vision, and the satisfying hard work involved in their stories, poems, and plays. They deny the lives they lead, not as housewives, but as individuals.
No longer a psychological immigrant to man’s world, she works, rather casually, as a third of the U. S. labor force, less towards a “big career” than as a way of filling a hope chest or buying a new home freezer.
The thing is, whatever he has wanted is what I also want…. I don’t believe in fifty-fifty marriages.”
In my generation, many of us knew that we did not want to be like our mothers, even when we loved them.
