The Feminine Mystique

by Friedan, Betty

  While some media, ads, and movies may still try to define women only or mainly as sex objects, it’s no longer considered chic or even acceptable by much of America. Far from being unspeakable and invisible, sexual abuse of women and less overt forms of sexual harassment are now considered serious enough crimes to bring down a senator or Supreme Court justice or even a president. In fact, the media’s, political muckrakers’, and even feminists’ obsession with such charges, which originated as an expression of women’s new empowerment, now begins to seem almost diversionary. In the focus on sexual harassment, sexual politics has become obsessed with what may in fact be a dangerous symptom of increasing male rage and frustration over economic anxieties, job downsizing, stagnant wages, and career impasse or decline. Sexual politics, we remind ourselves, started out as a reaction against the feminine mystique. It was an explosion of women’s pent-up anger and rage against the put-downs they had to accept when they were completely dependent on men, the rage they took out on their own bodies and covertly on husbands and kids. That rage fueled the first battles of the women’s movement, and subsided with each advance woman made toward her own empowerment, her full personhood, freedom.

  But sexual politics now feeds the politics of hate and the growing polarization of America. It also masks the real threats now to women’s empowerment and men’s—the culture of corporate greed, the downsizing of jobs hitting even college-educated white males, with nearly a 20 percent loss of income in the last five years, to say nothing of minority, blue-collar, and those with less education.1 A backlash from the men, egged on by media and political hatemongers, can make scapegoats of women again. But women are no longer the passive victims they once felt themselves to be. They cannot be pushed back easily into the feminine mystique, though some very shrewd women like Martha Stewart are making mega-millions on elaborate do-it-yourself decor and cuisine, selling pretend feminine mystique pursuits as chic new choices.

  The fact is women are now carrying some 50 percent of the income-earning burden in some 50 percent of households.2 Women are now nearly 50 percent of the labor force.3 Fifty-nine percent of women work at jobs outside the home, including the mothers of young children.4 And women’s wages are now about 72 percent of men’s.5 They are not equal at the top; most of the CEOs, law partners, hospital heads, full professors, cabinet members, judges, and police chiefs are still men. But women are now represented in all levels below the very top. And more Americans now work for companies owned or run by women than by the Fortune 500.

  But it’s troubling to learn that the closing of the earnings gender gap has come only one-third (34 percent) from increases in women’s earnings; most of it (66 percent) is accounted for by a drop in men’s earnings.6 And while more and more women have entered the labor force in these years, more and more men have dropped out or been forced out.

  It is men, first minority men, now white men, first blue-collar, now middle management, who have been the main victims of corporate downsizing. Because it’s the blue-collar and middle management jobs held mainly by men that have been eliminated, not just by technology but in the short-term interests of increasing the stock-market price by getting rid of men’s higher wages and benefits. Women’s service jobs, in areas such as the health professions, are the part of the economy that is growing, but those jobs are increasingly being “contracted out,” put on a temporary or contingent basis without benefits.

  Many women’s jobs, especially those contingency jobs, are not brilliant careers, but poll after poll shows women today feeling pretty good about their complex lives of job, profession, and their various choices of marriage and motherhood. Women feel that zest still, with so many more choices than their mothers had, since they broke out of the feminine mystique. But the sexual politics that helped us break through the feminine mystique is not relevant or adequate, is even diversionary, in confronting the serious and growing economic imbalance, the mounting income inequality of wealth, now threatening both women and men.

  Men, whose very masculine identity has been defined in terms of their score in the rat race, knocking the other guy down, can no longer count on that lifetime climb in job or profession. If they themselves are not yet downsized out, brothers, cousins, friends, co-workers have been. And they are more dependent now on wives’ earnings. The real and growing discrepancy affecting both women and men is the sharply increased income inequality between the very rich—the top 10 percent, who now control two-thirds of America’s wealth—and the rest of us, women and men. In the last decade, 80 percent of Americans have seen their incomes stagnate or decline.7 The only reason more families are not pushed into poverty is that both women and men are working. But in the present culture of greed, where all of us are told we can get rich in the stock market, it’s easier to deflect the anxiety and insecurity that is growing among Americans, women and men, according to the polls—despite the booming stock market and corporate profits and the Dow Jones Index going through the roof—into sexual politics, and racial and intergenerational warfare. Easier to deflect the rage by turning women and men, black and white, young and old, against each other than to openly confront the excessive power of corporate greed.

  I would like to see women and men mounting a new nationwide campaign for a shorter work week, as over half a century ago, labor fought for the 40-hour week, now perhaps a 30-hour week, meeting the needs of women and men in the childrearing years who shouldn’t be working 80-hour weeks as some do now. A six-hour day, parents at work while kids are at school, also fitting the needs of men and women who from youth on will have to combine work with education and further training, and people over sixty who we know now need new ways to continue contributing their experience to society rather than draining it as candidates for nursing homes. More jobs for everybody, and new definitions of success for women and men.

  The old wars still divide us. In the Mitsubishi plant in Normal, Illinois, ten miles from Peoria where I grew up, a group of women have filed the largest lawsuit in sexual harassment history, against men alleged to have subjected them to mauling of buttocks and breasts and obscene name-calling, “slut” and “whore,” as well as refusing to give them the training and support they needed in their nontraditional jobs. In that part of Illinois, with the Caterpillar strike lost, those Mitsubishi jobs were the only good jobs left. The men were clearly threatened as women began to take those jobs. I was proud of NOW, the National Organization for Women (which I helped start when I saw we needed a movement to get beyond the feminine mystique and participate as equals in the mainstream of society), when it went to Japan to be joined by forty-five Japanese women’s organizations to take on Mitsubishi in its own base. But women’s victory over male abuse can’t last, isn’t solid, until the causes of that insecurity and rage are addressed by and for women and men.

  Still, the new power of women is being felt all over the world now as was made clear in 1995 at the Beijing conference. When the authoritarian Chinese government could not get the Olympics, it welcomed the UN World’s Women’s Conference, expecting the women to shop and pose in pretty pictures against picturesque Chinese backdrops. When 40,000 women from women’s organizations, in movement all over the world, demanded visas, and protested at Chinese embassies when they were denied, the Chinese government tried to wall off the nongovernment conference into an isolated suburb. But they could not stop the women of the world. Told they could demonstrate only at a children’s playground, women from Tibet who had been denied visas brought CNN to that playground and, shrouded in black, took their story to the whole world. Hillary Rodham Clinton asserted “women’s rights are human rights” to the whole world. The official delegates to that UN conference were, of course, women now, empowered women, where twenty years ago they were men or wives and secretaries of male officials who took their government’s seats at the crucial votes. The women this time not only declared a woman’s right to control her own sexuality and her childbearing as a universal human right, but declared the genital mutila
tion of little girls a crime against humanity. Under the feminine mystique, men all over the world took for granted their right to beat or abuse their wives. Now, in the United States and, after Beijing, in the world, they no longer can assume that right. In the United States, the Department of Justice has set up an office to train police to deal with violence against women.

  Violence against women seems to be increasing in the United States, partly because women are reporting as abuse what they used to accept passively as private shame, but maybe also because men’s increasing frustration and desperation is being taken out on women. Studies and reports from California, Connecticut, and elsewhere show an increase in sexual abuse and violence against women, as well as suicide, child abuse, and divorce, in the face of corporate downsizing, and the lack of community, the dwindling of time and concern for larger purposes in the “me” decade. But women’s concerns now go beyond their own security. It was concern for their families, and not only their own families but those poorer or otherwise less fortunate, that motivated American women in 1996 to rise up against the Republican’s threats to cut Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, Social Security, student loans, child immunizations, and the protection of the environment. Co-opting feminist rhetoric did not get women’s votes for politicians who threatened the welfare of children, old people, the sick, and the poor. Abstractions of “balance the budget” did not mask for women the danger of gutting government programs that protect children and older people, the sick and the poor, to provide tax cuts for the rich. A decade after the women’s movement, a study by the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers University showed that the addition of even two women to a state legislature changes the political agenda, not just in the direction of women’s rights, but to basic concerns of life—the lives of children, older people, the poor, and the sick.

  And so, paradox or full circle, or transcendent thesis, in these thirty-odd years, women breaking through the feminine mystique to their own political and economic participation and empowerment in the mainstream of society are not becoming more like men but are expressing in the public sphere some of the values that used to be expressed or allowed only in the private nurture of the home. The mystique we had to rebel against when it was used to confine us to the home, to keep us from developing and using our full personhood in society, distorted those real values women are now embracing, with new power and zest, both in the privacy of the home and in the larger society. And in so doing, they are changing the political and personal dimensions of marriage and families, home and the society they share with men.

  Marriage, which used to be a woman’s only way to social function and economic support, is now a choice for most women as well as for men. It no longer defines a woman completely as it never did a man; she often keeps her own name now or husband and wife take each other’s hyphenated. In breaking through the feminine mystique, some early feminist radical rhetoric seemed to declare war on marriage, motherhood, family. The divorce rate of those 1950s feminine mystique marriages exploded from the 1960s to the 1980s. Before, no matter who went to court, it was only the man who had the economic and social independence to get a divorce. Since then, women in great numbers can and do get out of bad marriages. In some instances, women rebelled against that feminine mystique narrow role by getting out of the marriage altogether. But in others, the marriage moved to a new kind of equality, and stability, as women went back to school, went to law school, got promoted in serious jobs, and began to share the earning burden, which before had been the man’s sole inescapable responsibility. And men began to share the child care and the housework, which before had been her exclusive, defining domain, her responsibility—and her power.

  It has been fascinating to see all this changing, the new problems, and joys, working it out. Feminist rhetoric conceptualized “the politics of housework,” which most women began practicing in their daily lives. Men are not yet taking absolutely equal responsibility for children and home, just as women are not yet treated as equal in many offices. I was delighted at a front-page article in the New York Times some years ago proclaiming “American Men Not Doing 50% of the Housework.” How wonderful, I thought, that the Times would even consider it possible, desirable, front-page stuff that American men should do 50 percent of the housework—the sons of the feminine mystique, whose mothers made their sandwiches and picked their dirty underwear off the floor. It was progress, it seemed to me, that men who once “helped” (barbecuing the hamburgers while she cleaned the toilet bowl) were even doing 20 percent. Now, according to the latest figures, American men are doing 40 percent of the housework and child care.8 I doubt they’re doing much ironing, but neither are the women. I’ve seen reports that sales of all those soaps women were supposed to throw in those appliances to keep them running twenty-four hours a day went way down during those years. And families started buying 25-watt light bulbs to hide the dust, until Saturday when they all cleaned house together. But it didn’t make me happy to read recently that only 35 percent of American families have one meal a day together.

  The fact is, the divorce rate is no longer exploding. And most of the divorces now are among the very young, not those who have gone through these changes. In the second decade after the women’s movement, I came across statistics from a population institute in Princeton that more American couples were having sex more often and enjoying it than ever before.9 In my early research for The Feminine Mystique, I’d seen data from history that with every decade of women’s advance toward equality with men, measures of satisfying sexual intercourse between women and men increased. There’s a lot of data now that equality is strongly related to a good, lasting marriage—though there may also be more arguing between equals. At the American Sociological Association meetings in August 1995, I was asked to speak on the future of marriage. I saw that future in terms of new strengths of women and men, and new challenges for society. For instance, in all the arguments about men not doing enough of the housework and child care, I’ve heard women recently admit that they don’t like it when men take over so much of it that the kid comes to Daddy first with her report card or cut finger. “I wouldn’t consider letting Ben take him to the doctor,” my friend Sally said. “That’s my thing.” There was a lot of power in women’s role in the family that wasn’t visible even to the feminists according to the male measures. More studies need to be done to test what strengths are added to families when mothers and fathers share the nurturing power.

  All we hear about, all we talk about, are the problems: the stresses, for women, of combining work and family; the deficit for children, growing up in a single-parent family. We don’t hear about the studies at the Wellesley Center for Research on Women which show that combining work and family reduces stress for women, is better for women’s mental health than the old either-or single role, and that women’s mental health no longer declines sharply after menopause as it used to do. We don’t hear about the different kinds of strengths and support single-parent families need and could get from their communities. But there is a new awareness that something has to change now in the structure of society, because the hours and conditions of jobs and professional training are still based on the lives of the men of the past who had wives to take care of the details of life. Women don’t have such wives, but neither do most men now. So the “family friendly” workplace becomes a conscious political and collective bargaining issue—flextime, job sharing, parental leave. It turns out that companies on the cutting edge in terms of technology and the bottom line are also the ones adopting “family friendly” policies. The United States has been backward compared to other advanced industrial nations in this regard; 98 percent of three-to four-year-olds in France and Belgium are in a pre-school program.10 The United States was the last industrial nation except South Africa to adopt a national parental leave policy, only after Bill Clinton took office.

  There’s also a growing sense that it takes more than one mother-one father, much less a single mother, to raise a child. “It ta
kes a village to raise a child,” First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a best-selling book in 1996. There’s a new awareness of the values of diversity—and of the need of all families for a larger, stronger community. It’s a far cry from that single model of the isolated suburban feminine mystique family of the sixties, not only the many variations—some couples having babies in their forties, women and men, well established in careers; some juggling work, profession, training, and home with babies in their twenties and thirties; sometimes the woman taking a year or two off, or the man, if they can afford it, and single parents—all of them relying more than ever on support from grandparents, play groups with other parents, company, church, or community child care. And more and more women and men, living alone or together, young and older, in new patterns. The recent campaign to legalize same-sex marriage shows the powerful appeal of lasting emotional commitment even for men or women who depart from conventional sexual norms.