Lyndsey Burns

Professor Judy Barrett Litoff

HIS368-A
Paper #1
Essay #1: The Feminine Mystique
The 50th Anniversary edition of Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique teaches us about

the lives of women in the 1950s and the roles they were expected to fulfill. Now, decades later,

as Anna Quindlen points out in the books Afterword, there is still so much to learn from this

book about how sex and home and work and norms are used to twist the lives of women into

weird and unnatural shapes.1 While women have earned rights and progressed towards equality

since the book was written, reading the book today still presents an extremely relevant issue for

society; all people, including women, deserve to fulfill their human potential. As Friedan

describes, fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949 the

housewife-mother.2 This definition of fulfillment was exemplified in the media, namely

magazine articles, which show the heroine as a housewife-mother, as opposed to a career

women. The typical housewife-mother is limited to the pleasing her husband, bearing children,

completing the housework, and caring for her husband and children, and many females in the

1950s were taught that this was the only lifestyle to strive for.3

In the media, career women, and those receiving a higher education, were masculinized

by society, while the new heroines were young women who were lacking in independence.

Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which was published in 1942, stated that careers and higher

education were leading to the masculinization of women with enormously dangerous con-

sequences to the home, the children dependent on it and to the ability of the woman, as well as

her husband, to obtain sexual gratification.4 Not only was it considered unnatural for women to
pursue education and a career, but doing so was further connected to sexual dissatisfaction.

However, Friedan states that the problem of the 1950s is not sexual, but rather one of identity;

women used to grow up to believe that their identity was determined by their biology,5 but

Friedan sought to show that there was more to a womans identity, and that she has equal

potential to man.

Daniel Horowitz article, Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor

Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America, compares the experiences Betty

Friedan actually had prior to writing The Feminine Mystique with the account she provided in

her book. Friedans radical past provides evidence that she was not knowingly a victim of this

mystique, although her book implies otherwise. She needed to deny her radical past to

successfully portray herself as a victim of the feminine mystique, and to relate to the women who

actually fell victim to this mystique. As Horowitz points out, Friedans portrayal of herself as so

totally trapped by the feminine mystique was part of a reinvention of herself as she wrote and

promoted The Feminine Mystique.6 This reinvention made it possible for readers to identify

with Friedan and, ultimately, made the book more appealing. In 1973, years after her book was

published, Friedan shared that she wasnt even conscious of the women problem7 until she

started writing the book; however, those reading The Feminine Mystique were led to believe that

Friedan was struggling with the problem all housewives struggled with at the time. Friedans

denial of her radical past allowed her to play the role of the typical housewife-mother that all

women were expected to fulfill in the 1950s.

Throughout the 1940s and the 1950s, Friedan worked as a labor-journalist, publishing

works in which she fought for womens rights. Doing this provided her with extensive

knowledge and background information on the inequality and struggles faced by women that
enabled her to understand and fight to end these struggles. Friedan believed that at the center of

every issue was the struggle for democracy, freedom, and social justice, and the editorials she

published while working as the editor in chief for Smith Colleges campus newspaper reflected

those beliefs.8 She also worked for UE News, which was committed to womens equity;

witnessing their efforts to break away from Communist dominance and fight for justice of both

white and African-American women helped Friedan continue her work on progression, focusing

on working womens issues.9 Friedan wrote about the contradiction in the way women are

treated as producers and as consumers; as consumers, women are entitled to the very best

product but, as producers, they are not equipped to work outside of the home.10 Later

participating in one of the first national womens conferences of the 1950s, she learned of the

unions advocacy for sharing household duties and for establishing support programs for child

care, maternity benefits, and equal pay.11 When you consider all of the issues Betty Friedan was

exposed to during her involvement with radical politics in the 1940s and 1950s, she was able to

use the knowledge gained to write about the true potential of women outside of the home, the

importance of equality, and the need for democracy and the elimination of communism. Her

work helped females of all ages recognize that the popular definition of fulfillment was

incomplete, and that they were facing the same identity problem, which Friedan identifies and

attempts to dissect in The Feminine Mystique. The discontented, middle class, suburban

housewives found comfort in Friedans works and were able to apply her knowledge and lessons

to their own life to discover their full potential, making Friedan the champion of disaffected,

affluent, middle-class, suburban women in the 1960s.

 Notes

1. Betty Friedan, Gail Collins, and Anna Quindlen. The Feminine Mystique. (New York:

W.W Norton & Company, Inc., 2013), 482.

2. Ibid, 36.

3. Ibid, 27.

4. Ibid, 35.

5. Ibid, 80.

6. Daniel Horowitz. "Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union

Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America." American Quarterly 48.1 (1996): 1

7. Ibid, 1

8. Ibid, 10

9. Ibid, 13

10. Ibid, 15

11. Ibid, 16