Daze of Our Wives
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
by Beth Impson
When I first encountered Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, at the height of its influence in the 1970s, I kept thinking, “Who are these women?” My mother and her friends were not “desperate housewives”: secret alcoholics and adulterers, trying to escape the boredom of their non-wage-earning lives. They did not spend all day cleaning house, nor did they smother us because they needed to live vicariously through our lives. Their own lives were rich and interesting and useful, and I wanted more than anything to be like them.
Later I wondered even more about the Friedan gospel: “Equality and human dignity are not possible for women if they are not able to earn,” she says in the epilogue to Mystique. Forced by circumstances to be the sole wage-earner for our six-, then seven-member family, all I knew was exhaustion, frustration, and guilt—despite the fact that my professional position made perfect use of my abilities. I wanted to use those abilities to teach my own children, not other people’s. Friedan seemed to be living in some parallel universe.
Revisiting The Feminine Mystique a few years ago for a book project, I was thunderstruck to realize, about chapter eight, that Friedan was—and is—precisely right in much of her assessment of the lives of many middle- and upper-middle-class women, especially those with higher education.
Comfortable Concentration Camp
Betty Friedan began writing The Feminine Mystique in 1958, and it finally appeared in 1963. We baby-boomers were in grade school and high school, the economy was booming, Vietnam was not yet a quagmire, and the civil rights movement was finally becoming a national preoccupation, though seemingly not for the housewives Friedan interviewed from among Smith College alumnae and in suburbs across the country.
She had become perplexed about the lack of women in the professions. Why, she wondered, when women had complete freedom to pursue post-high-school degrees and faced no legal discrimination against pursuit of any career, did so many stay home as full-time wives and mothers? As she began interviewing these housewives, she found them to be depressed, bored, generally miserable, and out of sorts.
Yet none of them seemed able to define any particular problem with their lives. “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered. . . . Each suburban wife struggled with it alone . . . afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’”
So Friedan began to delve into this “problem that has no name,” and discovered what she called “the feminine mystique.” Psychology, anthropology, the media, women’s magazines and their fiction writers, and advertisers had all conspired in various ways and for various reasons to create this mystique that women were meant solely for child-bearing and housekeeping, “that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity.” Women’s nature “can find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.”
One begins right away to notice contradictions, distortions, and inaccuracies. If the women’s magazines were so influential, why were so many going out of circulation? In her muddled chronology, mothers of World War II soldiers both pursued satisfying careers and smothered their sons into neurotic dependency. As she sneers at “unscientific” books on the complementarity of the sexes, she offers a vast social experiment based on her private perceptions. The sheer volume of her evidence, however, begins tempting even the skeptical reader to accept it.
Beth Impson is Professor of English at Bryan College (named for William Jennings Bryan) in Dayton, Tennessee, and the author of Called to Womanhood (Crossway). She and her husband have five children and eleven grandchildren and attend Grace Bible Church.
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33.3—May/June 2020
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