The Feminine Mystique at Fifty:
Time for a New Feminism
No one wants to return to the 1950s as Betty Friedan characterized them, where women felt blocked from pursuing interests outside the home.
At the same time, to insist that stay-at-home moms are trapped, desperate, and unhappy is naïve, insulting, and even damaging to the roots of society.
"I just don't feel alive." "I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete." "I feel as if I don't exist."
Such phrases, uttered by 1950s housewives, fill the pages of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, released fifty years ago last month. The book famously launched the second wave of feminism and changed the landscape of the American household.
Since 1963, it has sold over three million copies. Reprints are always in demand, and the book lands somewhere on most big-name college syllabi. Beyond its impact on those who have read it, though, the book's message has seeped into society's subconscious.Friedan's thesis was simple then, and it's simple now: Personal fulfillment requires pursuits outside the home--usually in the form of a career. Without a career outside the home, housewives lack self-actualization. Hence she described the busy homemaker: "chained to these pursuits, she is stunted at a lower level of living, blocked from the realization of her higher human needs."
This is not a screed against brassieres, men, or subpar female athletic programs. Many of the women Friedan interviewed were well-educated, yet--often by their own choice--out of the professional workforce.
The feminine mystique, as Friedan explained it, is the unnatural expectation placed on middle-class women to make marriage, children, and the maintenance of a home their only goal. Friedan argued that the life of the housewife was falsely presented as the epitome of femininity: "The new mystique makes the housewife-mothers, who never had a chance to be anything else, the model for all women; it presupposes that history has reached a final and glorious end in the here and now, as far as women are concerned."The unrest described by Friedan's interviewees isn't anything truly alarming. They didn't suffer from grave illnesses or sudden deaths, nor were they legally oppressed. The problem was a much more subtle form of oppression maintained by the 1950s culture.
How was this feminine mystique maintained? Friedan cited the pressure of families, communities, educators, and especially the images in magazines and television commercials. The commercial culture occupied a prime spot in the living room. By 1960, Americans were watching five hours of television a day. Commercials made money on the image of the happy wife pushing the right vacuum.
And the facts of the era support Friedan's vision of the world. In the 1950s, 75 percent of all women were married by age twenty-four. If they did have a job, it wasn't a job that led to a long-term career. During that decade, women aged sixteen to twenty-four represented the highest female participation in the labor force, at 43 percent. The majority of the white middle classes joined the flight to the suburbs after World War II and stayed there, running the suburban life with its Cub Scouts and PTA meetings.
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