A new look at "The Feminine Mystique"

I’ve just been rereading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique again, on a whim, I guess. I read it in 1963, at the time of its first publication, and it was such a breath of fresh air. “Aha, I thought someone to explain to me that the blank wall of hostility that a rebel like me kept bumping up against.” And (true confessions being in order I wasn’t such a aware rebel really). I felt plenty of unease and even guilt when confronted with the “evil” of my non-conforming ways. Needless to say I didn’t “love Lucy.” Anyway that’s really not my point. I happened to read the book because I had picked up her more recent 1998 book, Fountain of Age, and I found her rejection of the stereotypical picture of how critters like me should be tasting the joys of our (ugh!) so-called “golden years", quite good. (Remember, in 1998 retirees did not have the same concerns about their declining nest eggs as the post-bubblers)! That led me to read her 2000 autobiography which I also found interesting, particularly her stories of the dynamics that were operative in the woman’s movement which she founded. (I will be writing more about that in a different context.) Anyway for the here and now, I was struck rereading the Mystique by how contemporary her description of the insidious way in which false values and goals were being imposed upon women—by family and friends, by educators, magazine editors and product MARKETERS. All of them were defining a false reality that the “well-adjusted” woman should accept—the life of a happy homemaker whose life is completely centered on her children, her husband, keeping her house “beautiful” and is a competent SHOPPER who knows how to buy the right products, the best electronic devices and who keeps on top of fashions and fads. Today Mom the shopper has been superceded by the credit-card wielding shopaholics who wander through the malls in their spare time. Well these days circumstances have changed somewhat. The majority of women now must work so that both parents can approximate an income, comparable in present terms, to what a husband was able to provide forty years ago. But by God, we have replaced Mom the family consumer-expert whose “career” is “housewife” with the citizen whose civic responsibility is to consume and consume and consume in order to keep the economy out of depression—forget about the credit cards priced to the limit with payments sky-rocketing and the term mortgage that will reset soon. If this sounds depressing familiar, well pop a pill. For God’s Sake don’t be depressed, its un-American. Anyway, I have copied some passages from her book because they are so NOT-dated. Many people wanted to harken back to the 1950’s as a period when the middle class-life was good. Well take it from me and Betty, that just wasn’t how it was. This was the period when the value of a “good” life began to be replaced by the valuation of the goods one accumulated throughout ones life. Well Veblen said it a century before, but Friedan put it in a contemporary context and showed the brutal effects of the value shift on the lives of women. Here below are some excerpts from her book—her analysis of the ideological props behind the effort 40 years ago, to transform the family into a consumption center and create the underpinnings of a present debt-ridden, consumer-oriented, morally eroded society of today. So here goes: In the ‘60’s Popping the pill—not The birth control pill—but tranquilizers was prevalent among women grappling with a feeling of dissatisfaction with her life. Doctors then freely dispensed them and also amphetamines as a cure for depression, much as they prescribe Prozac today. At the time Friedan wrote articles for women’s magazines and she was constantly frustrated by the strictures that prevented her from covering women scientists or artists, or writing about the civil rights movement. She quotes the following statement by a male editor of one of the large women’s magazines, who spoke at a meeting of magazine writers. His speech preceded an address to the meeting by Thurgood Marshall. He said:

Our readers are housewives, full time. They’re not interested in the broad public issues of the day. They are not interested in national or international affairs. They are only interested in the family and home. … You just can’t write about ideas or broad issues of the day for women.

She compares the evolution of the content of women’s magazines from 1945 to 1960, which reflected their dumbing down. In the 1930’s and 40’s, women’s magazines carried serious articles on the political and scientific issues of the day. In the ‘fifties this became unacceptable. How the girl meets guy and gets him to propose and they live happily ever after became was the story-line that sold. A look at women’s magazines today will provide a much raunchier content, and a more aggressive image of women who are getting cosmetic surgery and breast implants or control their lives by getting face lifts. The products have changed but the essential message has not. But hey, this is true for the media in general today. She writes:

In 1939, the heroines of women’s magazine stories were not always young, but in a certain sense they were younger than their fictional counterparts today … There was an aura about them of becoming, of moving into a future that was going to be different from the past. The majority of heroines in the four major women’s magazines, (then Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good housekeeping, Woman’s Home Companion) were career women. By 1949, occupation housewife was the norm. Checking back issues in the library, Friedan found that in the 1930’s and 40’s the women’s magazines carried articles by leading political and literary figures like Walter Lippma, Harold Stassen, Cark Sandburg, and William Faulkner about a wide range of subjects of contemporary interest.

The hegemonic position of Freudian analysis in the field of psychology also reinforced the idea of the proper role of women as nurturing and receptive. Thus Helen Deutch, a disciple of Freud, wrote a two-volume work The Psychology of Woman—A psychoanalytic Interpretation that appeared in 1944 and was considered definitive. Her view has been repudiated on one level but I believe an argument could be made that her argument that a healthy woman was by nature passive and receptive encouraged cultural conformity during the 1950s in the heyday of the witch hunt and still afflicts the susceptibility of people today to media propaganda, etc.

Remember these were the glory days when the middle class was secure. Friedan wrote of the effect of the categorical stance about woman’s proper role put forward by the Freudians and reflected by therapists and counselors, educators, magazines editors, and so on. This was the environment that produced controlling mothers who were completely immersed in every detail of their children’s lives.

The “masculinity complex,” [women who want to have careers outside the home] as Dr. Deutsch refines it, stems directly from the “female castration complex.” … “Normal” femininity is achieved, however, only insofar as women finally renounces all active goals of her own, all her own originality” to identify and fulfill herself through the activities and goals of husband, or son.

This is very definitely the ideology being promoted by the conservative, family-values crowd, but the lack of adequate social support for working mothers puts enormous pressure of a superficially different sort, on mothers to give up high-powered careers in order to care for their children. This is amplified by the extremely competitive environment for top spots. These days’ mothers feel pressure to provide coaching to their children at an early age to assure that they succeed in the competitive sweepstakes. And there is also home schooling. Friedan writes extensively on how marketing campaigns and advertisements deliberately tried to convince women that homemaking was a challenging career because of all the consumption choices that they needed to make in order to give their families the superior life style they deserved. A day window-shopping at the mall is still a popular activity for teens as wells as adults. Here is what she has to say in her chapter “The Sexual Sell:”

Some months ago, as I began to fit together the puzzle of women’s retreat to home, I had feeling I was missing something. I could trace the routes by which sophisticated thought circled back on itself to perpetuate an obsolete image of femininity; I could see how that image meshed with prejudice and misinterpreted frustrations to hide the emptiness of “Occupation: housewife”from women themselves.

But what powers it all? If, despite the nameless desperation of so many American housewives, despite the opportunities open to all women now, so few have any purpose in live other than to be a wife and mother, somebody, something pretty powerful must be at work. The energy behind the feminist movement was too dynamic merely to have trickled dry; it must have been turned off, diverted, by something more powerful than that underestimated power of women. There are certain facts of life so obvious and mundane that one never talks about them Only the child blurts out: ‘Why do people in books never go o the toilet? Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to to buy more things for the house. The mechanism that drives our consumer-driven society today is not the same as it was in Friedan’s time but the underlying forces are the same. Buy, buy, buy or the whole house of cards will collapse. Now that it seems to be collapsing willy-nilly is a good time to reflect on Betty Friedan’s really good book, which unfortunately has a lot to say about the times we are living in now. I want to thank Avahome and Roxy for this link to snopes.com who have posted advice on how How to Be a Good Wife supposedly taken from a 1950’s Home Economics Book. They do not take responsibility for the authenticity of the text.