The Feminine Mystique - published on February
19, 1963 -"catalyzed the modern feminist movement, helped forever change
Americans' attitudes about women's role in society and catapulted its
author into becoming an influential and controversial public figure."
Betty Friedan's book,
The Feminine Mystique, identified the
"problem that has no name" - which feminists later labeled "sexism."
Three years after its publication - 50 years ago this month - Friedan
was instrumental in organizing the National Organization for Women (NOW)
and other key groups that helped build the movement for women's
equality.
The Feminine Mystique was not only a best-selling book, but also a manifesto for change.
Most Americans now accept as normal the once-radical ideas that
Friedan and others espoused. Today, most Americans, including men,
believe that women should earn the same pay as men if they do the same
job. Corporations, law firms, the media, universities, advertising, the
military, sports and other core institutions can no longer exercise
blatant sex discrimination without facing scrutiny and the risk of
protest and lawsuits. The Obama administration just lifted the ban on
women in combat. Women are now running corporations, newspapers and TV
stations, universities and major labor unions. In 1960, only about six
percent of medical students were women. Today women comprise about half
of all medical students and have a stronger foothold in other formerly
all-male professions and occupations. More men in couples share
housework and child rearing than was the case two or three decades ago.
Giving girls an equal opportunity to play competitive sports is now
taken for granted. Employers now recognize the reality of sexual
harassment, which did not even have a name until the 1970s. The right to
have an abortion, legalized in the US Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade
ruling in 1973, is still under attack but remains the law. In 1963,
there were few college courses or books on women's history, literature
or politics, and no women's studies programs.
When
The Feminine Mystique was published, men's turnout at
the polls exceeded that of women by five percent. Since 1980, women have
consistently voted at higher rates than men, according to the Center on
American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. The number of women
elected to office at every level of government has spiraled. In 1963,
there were two women in the US Senate and only 12 women in the House of
Representatives. Today, 20 women serve in the Senate and 77 serve in the
House. Similar shifts have occurred at the local and state levels.
Although a rise in women's turnout has spurred these gains, men are now
more willing to vote for women candidates than ever before.
Ironically, because many "feminist" ideas are now taken for granted,
few women today think of themselves as "feminists." According to a 2009
poll conducted by CBS News, only 24 percent of American women identify
themselves as feminists. But once the word was defined as someone who
believes in social, political and economic equality of the sexes, the
figure jumped to 65 percent.
Friedan - who died in 2006 at age 85 - would no doubt be proud of the
progressive changes that her book and activism inspired, but she'd be
the first to note that full women's equality has still not been
achieved. For example, women represent only 3.6 percent of the CEOs of
Fortune 500 corporations. Like 50 years ago, women today are more likely
than men to be poor. The US is one of the few affluent countries that
does not require paid maternity leave or provide universal child care.
The Feminine Mystique began as a simple questionnaire. In
1957 Friedan and two friends prepared a survey of their Smith College
classmates prior to their 15th reunion. It included open-ended questions
"that we had not asked ourselves out loud before," Friedan recalled.
They asked about such topics as decision-making in the family, hours of
housework, feelings about being a mother, number of books read in a
year, interests outside the home and agreement, or not, with a husband's
politics.
Two hundred women responded. Friedan found that the classmates who
seemed most happy and fulfilled were those who did not conform to the
"role of women" and that those who were most dispirited were traditional
housewives. She drew on the survey to write an article for McCall's -
"Are Women Wasting Their Time in College?" - but the magazine rejected
it. When her agent sent it to another women's magazine, Redbook, a male
editor sent it back saying that Friedan "must be going off her rocker.
Only the most neurotic housewife will identify with this." No magazine
would touch it.
Frustrated - but convinced she was on to something important -
Friedan expanded the article into a book and worked for five years to
complete
The Feminine Mystique.
Friedan had struck a nerve and the book quickly became a best-seller.
It became a manifesto for a movement - a new wave of women's rights
activism that built on the women's suffrage activism of the early 1900s
that won the right to vote. Friedan became a spokeswoman for this
"second wave" feminism.
Friedan was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois in 1921,
and was raised in a prosperous family with a nursemaid, cook and
butler-chauffeur. Her father, Harry Goldstein, had emigrated from Russia
to Peoria in his teens. He began selling buttons from a street-corner
stand, which he gradually grew into a successful jewelry store. Her
mother Miriam was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Hungary. After
graduating from Bradley College in Peoria, Bettye's mother starting
working as a reporter for the local newspaper. After she married, her
husband insisted that she quit working and focus on being a housewife
and mother. Miriam hosted bridge luncheons in their spacious home and
was active as a volunteer in a variety of community activities, but she
always resented having to give up her writing career.
Despite their affluence, the Goldsteins were never fully accepted
into Peoria society. A small industrial city in central Illinois, Peoria
was conservative, provincial, racially segregated and rife with both
subtle and overt forms of anti-Semitism. As part of its resurgence in
the Midwest, the Ku Klux Klan was active in Peoria in the 1920s and the
sting of racism and anti-Semitism was never far from the surface. Jews
were banned from joining the prestigious Peoria Country Club. Bettye's
father told her that Peoria's Christian business men and civic leaders
refused to talk or socialize with him after business hours, a widespread
phenomenon known as the "5 o'clock shadow." Although Bettye had both
Jewish and non-Jewish friends growing up, she was turned down for
membership in a high school sorority because she was a Jew.
Reflecting on these experiences, Friedan noted, "I hated being
different, an outsider." She recalled that her "passion against
injustice ... originated from my feelings of the injustice of
anti-Semitism."
Bettye's later views about bigotry toward women were shaped at a
young age. At dinner, Bettye's father peppered her with questions about
current events and literature. But her parents also worried that
Bettye's intense interest in reading - her friends called her "Bookworm"
- would be a social handicap, making her seem too intellectual and
unfeminine. When she came home from the library loaded down with books,
her father told her, "Five books at a time are enough. It doesn't look
nice for a girl to be so bookish." After reading about Marie Curie, the
French researcher who won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry,
Bettye considered pursuing a career in science, but a teacher warned her
to lower her ambitions and to consider being a lab technician,
receptionist or nurse.
In high school, fueled by her brilliance, her ambition, her desire to
fit in, as well as her sense of being a misfit, Bettye was both a rebel
and a high achiever. She wrote for the school paper, composed poems and
founded the literary magazine (which published articles on strikes and
labor conflict occurring in the area), won a prize for an essay on the
Constitution, recited the Gettysburg Address at a Memorial Day
celebration, joined the debating society, acted in school plays, wrote
articles about the growing threat of fascism in Europe, and graduated as
one of the class valedictorians.
Her academic promise, leadership skills and rebellious spirit
blossomed when she arrived at Smith College in 1938, in the midst of the
political ferment catalyzed by the Depression and the growing turmoil
in Europe. Bettye was one of the few Jewish students at Smith, a college
that attracted many upper-class women from socially prominent families.
But some Smith professors challenged the students to confront society's
injustices, including their own economic and social advantages. Many
radical and progressive speakers, including Labor Secretary Frances
Perkins, pacifist A.J. Muste, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, theologian
Reinhold Niebuhr, upper-class leftist Corliss Lamont (head of Friends of
the Soviet Union) and folklorist Alan Lomax visited Smith while Bettye
was a student there.
Bettye majored in psychology, and as editor of the Smith College
Weekly, she revitalized the paper from a bland publication filled with
gossip and social news to a far more political outlet, the Smith College
Associate News (SCAN). She embraced radical ideas and the labor
movement as an instrument for progressive change. When maids at the
college went on strike, Bettye sympathetically covered the struggle in
SCAN. Her editorials challenged her privileged classmates to wake up to
issues of social justice, workers' rights and fascism. The summer after
her junior year, she spent eight weeks at the Highlander Folk School in
Tennessee, a radical training center for activists, participating in a
writing workshop and taking classes about unions and economics.
In 1942, she went to graduate school at University of California,
Berkeley, and dropped the "e" at the end of her first name. She traveled
in left-wing circles and joined a Marxist study group. But she later
panicked at the implications of getting a PhD, imagining her future as a
lonely spinster in academia. She gave up her scholarship.
Fleeing Berkeley, she moved to New York City's Greenwich Village in
1944. Her first job was as a reporter for the Federated Press, an agency
that fed news stories to progressive publications and union newspapers.
Her stories were popular and showed a talent for humanizing class, race
and women's issues. Her next job was with the UE News, the weekly paper
of the progressive United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of
America, a left-wing union. In 1947 she married Carl Friedan, an actor
and stage producer. The first of their three children was born the
following year.
There was no significant feminist movement at the time, but the
Communist Party and the unions in its orbit were among the few
organizations concerned about what they called the "woman question." In
1946, they started the Congress of American Women to address issues
facing working-class women. As a reporter for UE News, Friedan often
wrote about women's issues, including a popular pamphlet, UE Fights for
Women Workers, on corporate discrimination and on the special problems
faced by black women workers. In 1952, when she became pregnant with her
second son, Friedan left the UE News.
In some respects, Friedan's experience was similar to that of
millions of women who had worked during World War II and were then
encouraged - by employers, the media, advertising and government
propaganda - to return to "hearth and home" as mothers and housewives
after men came home. Like many women in postwar America, Friedan
volunteered for a variety of community activities, though some of hers
were unconventional, like participating in rent strikes. But frustrated
by the fact that she was not contributing financially to the family or
using her considerable professional talents, Friedan began a freelance
writing career, mostly for women's magazines like Cosmopolitan.
When Friedan was asked in 1957 to prepare an alumni questionnaire for
her 15th college reunion, she jumped at the opportunity. She felt
vaguely guilty as she worked on it, thinking of the academic star she
had been and feeling she had not realized her potential.
In 1947, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham published
Modern Women: The Lost Sex,
which argued that American women were overeducated and that this excess
of education caused discontent and prevented females from "adjusting to
their role as women." The book triggered considerable controversy in
the postwar era. Friedan hoped to use the Smith College alumni
questionnaire as a starting point to write a magazine article refuting
Modern Women's
thesis. Confident that she was on to something important, she
persevered despite the rejections from magazine editors, and eventually
completed the book that would, to her surprise, make her famous.
As Friedan described in
The Feminine Mystique, many women
were not aware that other women shared similar frustrations. They
experienced their unhappiness as a personal problem and blamed
themselves for their misery, which Friedan called "the problem that has
no name." Earlier books - including Elizabeth Hawes'
Why Women Cry (1943), Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex (published in English in 1953), Mirra Komarovsky's
Women in the Modern World (1953), and Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein's
Women's Two Roles
(1956) - had diagnosed women's oppression and second-class status, but
none of them tapped the vein of dissatisfaction in a way that
The Feminine Mystique did. The book touched millions of women, aided by Friedan's accessible writing style and the luck of good timing.
The publisher, W.W. Norton, initially printed only 2,000 copies, but the book's sales exploded.
The Feminine Mystique
spent six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The first
paperback printing sold 1.4 million copies. McCall's and Ladies' Home
Journal, magazines with a combined readership of 36 million, published
excerpts.
Though the analogy was certainly overwrought, Friedan argued that
women were trapped by their domestic lives, that their existence was
akin to a "comfortable concentration camp." Women became helpless,
almost childlike, with no privacy, cut off from the outside world, doing
soul-killing work. Friedan also exposed the myriad ways that
advertisers, psychiatrists, educators and newspapers patronized,
exploited and manipulated women.
Friedan's agenda for change in
The Feminine Mystique was
quite modest, especially for someone with her radical background. She
wrote about the problem of workplace discrimination, but she barely
mentioned the issues of childcare and maternity leave. The book had
little to say about the problems confronting poor and working-class
women or women of color - issues she had written about for Federated
News and the UE News. She mostly encouraged women to get an education
and to prepare themselves for a career beyond housework. It was not
until the late 1960s and early 1970s that Friedan and others embraced a
wider and more progressive agenda: the right to an abortion, protection
against sexual violence and domestic abuse, the criminalization of
sexual harassment and rape, the demand for childcare centers, equality
with men in terms of access to financial credit and other aspects of
economic life.
The Feminine Mystique made Friedan a public figure and a
person to be reckoned with. She was flooded with letters from women
reporting that the book had opened their eyes about their own lives and
had validated their dissatisfaction with the status quo. She was asked
to speak at colleges, before women's groups, and elsewhere across the
nation.
After the book came out, as Friedan was gaining a platform on TV and
radio shows and on the lecture circuit, she described herself as an
"educated housewife." As Daniel Horowitz noted in his 1998 biography,
Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique,
Friedan made no reference to her experience in the left-wing movements
of the late 1930s through the early 1950s. Indeed, many other women with
similar backgrounds (including Congresswoman Bella Abzug) - women who
played a key role in building the women's liberation movement and later
in creating the new academic field of women's studies - downplayed their
past left-wing affiliations. Friedan believed that she and the book
would have more credibility if she was seen as someone who shared the
frustrations of other middle-class suburban women. Of course in 1963 the
hysteria of McCarthyism and the Red Scare were still a lingering force
in American politics and culture, and Friedan understood that her past
associations with Communist and radical groups could undermine her
reputation and destroy her growing influence.
Moreover, Friedan wanted to do more than write about women's roles.
She wanted to instigate real change, and that meant renewing her
activist credentials. She quickly connected with a small network of
liberal, professional women who were involved with the Presidential
Commission on the Status of Women, which had been created in 1961 by
John F. Kennedy at the suggestion of Eleanor Roosevelt. They talked
about creating a women's version of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, and in 1966 they formed NOW to lobby and
organize for the civil rights of women. Friedan was elected president, a
position she held until 1970. She became the first media celebrity of
the women's liberation movement and its de facto spokeswoman.
Friedan could be difficult and antagonizing, and she clashed with
most radical feminists on the issue of overthrowing male-dominated power
structures. Instead she believed in sharing power equally. "Some people
think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite - you have nothing to lose
but your men,'" she told Life magazine in 1963. "It's not true. You have
nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners."
Two years before NOW's founding, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of
race, color, national origin, religion and sex. Most members of Congress
viewed the law primarily in terms of race and hardly noticed that "sex"
was included. For half a century, NOW and other feminist groups have
used the law - which established the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission - to fight for women's equality at work.
Some criticized NOW for being too focused on middle-class white
women's concerns. At the same time, Friedan also was concerned that the
women's movement would be identified as being dominated by so-called
man-hating lesbians, a stereotype that was widespread at the time and
that Friedan worried would undermine feminism's credibility. Although
she later tempered her views on homosexuality, she never fully embraced
gay rights as a key part of the feminist cause.
Friedan also cofounded the National Abortion Rights Action League
(originally the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) in
1969. The next year - the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment
guaranteeing women the vote - she helped organize the Women's Strike for
Equality. In 1971, a year after the defeat of the Equal Rights
Amendment, Friedan joined Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm and
others to form the National Women's Political Caucus to encourage more
women to participate in politics and run for office.
In 1972, Friedan ran unsuccessfully as a delegate to the Democratic
Party convention, but showed up with a large contingent of feminists to
support Chisholm's candidacy for President. Twelve years later she did
get elected as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, which
picked Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as its vice-presidential nominee.
Throughout her life, Friedan continued to write books, among them
The Second Stage (1981),
The Fountain of Age (1993),
Beyond Gender (1997), and
Life So Far (2000). In
Beyond Gender,
she worried that progressives had splintered into separate identity
movements. She outlined an agenda for change that, ironically, was
similar to the radical politics she had embraced in her younger years.
In a 1995 column in Newsweek, she wrote:
The problems in our fast-changing world require a new paradigm of
social policy, transcending all 'identity politics' - women, blacks,
gays, the disabled. Pursuing the separate interests of women isn't
adequate and is even diversionary. Instead, there has to be some new
vision of community. We need to reframe the concept of success. We need
to campaign - men and women, whites and blacks - for a shorter work
week, a higher minimum wage, an end to the war against social-welfare
programs. 'Women's issues' are symptoms of problems that affect
everyone.
Friedan - who died on February 4, 2006, her 85th birthday - may no longer be a household name, but thanks to
The Feminist Mystique
and the movement it spawned, her influence is evident in every American
household, regardless if any members call themselves feminists.
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