The Feminine Mystique

by Friedan, Betty

  Properly manipulated (“if you are not afraid of that word,” he said), American housewives can be given the sense of identity, purpose, creativity, the self-realization, even the sexual joy they lack—by the buying of things. I suddenly realized the significance of the boast that women wield seventy-five per cent of the purchasing power in America. I suddenly saw American women as victims of that ghastly gift, that power at the point of purchase. The insights he shared with me so liberally revealed many things….

  The dilemma of business was spelled out in a survey made in 1945 for the publisher of a leading women’s magazine on the attitudes of women toward electrical appliances. The message was considered of interest to all the companies that, with the war about to end, were going to have to make consumer sales take the place of war contracts. It was a study of “the psychology of housekeeping” “a woman’s attitude toward housekeeping appliances cannot be separated from her attitude toward homemaking in general,” it warned.

  On the basis of a national sample of 4,500 wives (middle-class, high-school or college-educated), American women were divided into three categories: “The True Housewife Type,” “The Career Woman,” and “The Balanced Homemaker.” While 51 per cent of the women then fitted “The True Housewife Type” (“From the psychological point of view, housekeeping is this woman’s dominating interest. She takes the utmost pride and satisfaction in maintaining a comfortable and well-run home for her family. Consciously or subconsciously, she feels that she is indispensable and that no one else can take over her job. She has little, if any, desire for a position outside the home, and if she has one it is through force or circumstances or necessity”), it was apparent that this group was diminishing, and probably would continue to do so as new fields, interests, education were now open to women.

  The largest market for appliances, however, was this “True Housewife”—though she had a certain “reluctance” to accept new devices that had to be recognized and overcome. (“She may even fear that they [appliances] will render unnecessary the old-fashioned way of doing things that has always suited her.”) After all, housework was the justification for her whole existence. (“I don’t think there is any way to make housework easier for myself,” one True Housewife said, “because I don’t believe that a machine can take the place of hard work.”)

  The second type—The Career Woman or Would-Be Career Woman—was a minority, but an extremely “unhealthy” one from the sellers’ standpoint; advertisers were warned that it would be to their advantage not to let this group get any larger. For such women, though not necessarily job-holders, “do not believe that a woman’s place is primarily in the home.” (“Many in this group have never actually worked, but their attitude is: ‘I think housekeeping is a horrible waste of time. If my youngsters were old enough and I were free to leave the house, I would use my time to better advantage. If my family’s meals and laundry could be taken care of, I would be delighted to go out and get a job.’”) The point to bear in mind regarding career women, the study said, is that, while they buy modern appliances, they are not the ideal type of customer. They are too critical.

  The third type—“The Balanced Homemaker”—is “from the market standpoint, the ideal type.” She has some outside interests, or has held a job before turning exclusively to homemaking; she “readily accepts” the help mechanical appliances can give—but “does not expect them to do the impossible” because she needs to use her own executive ability “in managing a well-run household.”

  The moral of the study was explicit: “Since the Balanced Homemaker represents the market with the greatest future potential, it would be to the advantage of the appliance manufacturer to make more and more women aware of the desirability of belonging to this group. Educate them through advertising that it is possible to have outside interests and become alert to wider intellectual influences (without becoming a Career Woman). The art of good homemaking should be the goal of every normal woman.”

  The problem—which, if recognized at that time by one hidden persuader for the home-appliance industry, was surely recognized by others with products for the home—was that “a whole new generation of women is being educated to do work outside the home. Furthermore, an increased desire for emancipation is evident.” The solution, quite simply, was to encourage them to be “modern” housewives. The Career or Would-Be Career Woman who frankly dislikes cleaning, dusting, ironing, washing clothes, is less interested in a new wax, a new soap powder. Unlike “The True Housewife” and “The Balanced Homemaker” who prefer to have sufficient appliances and do the housework themselves, the Career Woman would “prefer servants—housework takes too much time and energy.” She buys appliances, however, whether or not she has servants, but she is “more likely to complain about the service they give,” and to be “harder to sell.”

  It was too late—impossible—to turn these modern could-or-would-be career women back into True Housewives, but the study pointed out, in 1945, the potential for Balanced Housewifery—the home career. Let them “want to have their cake and eat it too…save time, have more comfort, avoid dirt and disorder, have mechanized supervision, yet not want to give up the feeling of personal achievement and pride in a well-run household, which comes from ‘doing it yourself.’ As one young housewife said: ‘It’s nice to be modern—it’s like running a factory in which you have all the latest machinery.’”

  But it was not an easy job, either for business or advertisers. New gadgets that were able to do almost all the housework crowded the market; increased ingenuity was needed to give American women that “feeling of achievement,” and yet keep housework their main purpose in life. Education, independence, growing individuality, everything that made them ready for other purposes had constantly to be countered, channeled back to the home.

  The manipulator’s services became increasingly valuable. In later surveys, he no longer interviewed professional women; they were not at home during the day. The women in his samples were deliberately True or Balanced Housewives, the new suburban housewives. Household and consumer products are, after all, geared to women; seventy-five per cent of all consumer advertising budgets is spent to appeal to women; that is, to housewives, the women who are available during the day to be interviewed, the women with the time for shopping. Naturally, his depth interviews, projective tests, “living laboratories,” were designed to impress his clients, but more often than not they contained the shrewd insights of a skilled social scientist, insights that could be used with profit.

  His clients were told they had to do something about this growing need of American women to do creative work—“the major unfulfilled need of the modern housewife.” He wrote in one report, for example:

  Every effort must be made to sell X Mix, as a base upon which the woman’s creative effort is used.

  The appeal should emphasize the fact that X Mix aids the woman in expressing her creativity because it takes the drudgery away. At the same time, stress should be laid upon the cooking manipulations, the fun that goes with them, permitting you to feel that X Mix baking is real baking.

  But the dilemma again: how to make her spend money on the mix that takes some of the drudgery out of baking by telling her “she can utilize her energy where it really counts”—and yet keep her from being “too busy to bake”? (“I don’t use the mix because I don’t do any baking at all. It’s too much trouble. I live in a sprawled-out apartment and what with keeping it clean and looking after my child and my part-time job, I don’t have time for baking.”) What to do about their “feeling of disappointment” when the biscuits come out of the oven, and they’re really only bread and there is no feeling of creative achievement? (“Why should I bake my own biscuits when there are so many good things on the market that just need to be heated up? It just doesn’t make any sense at all to go through all the trouble of mixing your own and then greasing the tin and baking them.”) What to do when the woman doesn’t get the feeling her mother got, when the cake had to be ma
de from scratch? (“The way my mother made them, you had to sift the flour yourself and add the eggs and the butter and you knew you’d really made something you could be proud of.”)

  The problem can be handled, the report assured:

  By using X Mix the woman can prove herself as a wife and mother, not only by baking, but by spending more time with her family…. Of course, it must also be made clear that home-baked foods are in every way preferable to bakery-shop foods…

  Above all, give X Mix “a therapeutic value” by downplaying the easy recipes, emphasizing instead “the stimulating effort of baking.” From an advertising viewpoint, this means stressing that “with X Mix in the home, you will be a different woman…a happier woman.”

  Further, the client was told that a phrase in his ad “and you make that cake the easiest, laziest way there is” evoked a “negative response” in American housewives—it hit too close to their “underlying guilt.” (“Since they never feel that they are really exerting sufficient effort, it is certainly wrong to tell them that baking with X Mix is the lazy way.”) Supposing, he suggested, that this devoted wife and mother behind the kitchen stove, anxiously preparing a cake or pie for her husband or children “is simply indulging her own hunger for sweets.” The very fact that baking is work for the housewife helps her dispel any doubts that she might have about her real motivations.

  But there are even ways to manipulate the housewives’ guilt, the report said:

  It might be possible to suggest through advertising that not to take advantage of all 12 uses of X Mix is to limit your efforts to give pleasure to your family. A transfer of guilt might be achieved. Rather than feeling guilty about using X Mix for dessert food, the woman would be made to feel guilty if she doesn’t take advantage of this opportunity to give her family 12 different and delicious treats. “Don’t waste your skill; don’t limit yourself.”

  By the mid-fifties, the surveys reported with pleasure that the Career Woman (“the woman who clamored for equality—almost for identity in every sphere of life, the woman who reacted to ‘domestic slavery’ with indignation and vehemence”) was gone, replaced by the “less worldly, less sophisticated” woman whose activity in PTA gives her “broad contacts with the world outside her home,” but who “finds in housework a medium of expression for her femininity and individuality.” She’s not like the old-fashioned self-sacrificing housewife; she considers herself the equal of man. But she still feels “lazy, neglectful, haunted by guilt feelings” because she doesn’t have enough work to do. The advertiser must manipulate her need for a “feeling of creativeness” into the buying of his product.

  After an initial resistance, she now tends to accept instant coffee, frozen foods, precooked foods, and labor-saving items as part of her routine. But she needs a justification and she finds it in the thought that “by using frozen foods I’m freeing myself to accomplish other important tasks as a modern mother and wife.”

  Creativeness is the modern woman’s dialectical answer to the problem of her changed position in the household. Thesis: I’m a housewife. Antithesis: I hate drudgery. Synthesis: I’m creative!

  This means essentially that even though the housewife may buy canned food, for instance, and thus save time and effort, she doesn’t let it go at that. She has a great need for “doctoring up” the can and thus prove her personal participation and her concern with giving satisfaction to her family.

  The feeling of creativeness also serves another purpose: it is an outlet for the liberated talents, the better taste, the freer imagination, the greater initiative of the modern woman. It permits her to use at home all the faculties that she would display in an outside career.

  The yearning for creative opportunities and moments is a major aspect of buying motivations.

  The only trouble, the surveys warned, is that she “tries to use her own mind and her own judgment. She is fast getting away from judging by collective or majority standards. She is developing independent standards.” (“Never mind the neighbors. I don’t want to ‘live up’ to them or compare myself to them at every turn.”) She can’t always be reached now with “keep up with the Joneses”—the advertiser must appeal to her own need to live.

  Appeal to this thirst…. Tell her that you are adding more zest, more enjoyment to her life, that it is within her reach now to taste new experiences and that she is entitled to taste these experiences. Even more positively, you should convey that you are giving her “lessons in living.”

  “House cleaning should be fun,” the manufacturer of a certain cleaning device was advised. Even though his product was, perhaps, less efficient than the vacuum cleaner, it let the housewife use more of her own energy in the work. Further, it let the housewife have the illusion that she has become “a professional, an expert in determining which cleaning tools to use for specific jobs.”

  This professionalization is a psychological defense of the housewife against being a general “cleaner-upper” and menial servant for her family in a day and age of general work emancipation.

  The role of expert serves a two-fold emotional function: (1) it helps the housewife achieve status, and (2) she moves beyond the orbit of her home, into the world of modern science in her search for new and better ways of doing things.

  As a result, there has never been a more favorable psychological climate for household appliances and products. The modern housewife…is actually aggressive in her efforts to find those household products which, in her expert opinion, really meet her need. This trend accounts for the popularity of different waxes and polishes for different materials in the home, for the growing use of floor polishers, and for the variety of mops and cleaning implements for floors and walls.

  The difficulty is to give her the “sense of achievement” of “ego enhancement” she has been persuaded to seek in the housewife “profession,” when, in actuality, “her time-consuming task, housekeeping, is not only endless, it is a task for which society hires the lowliest, least-trained, most trod-upon individuals and groups…. Anyone with a strong enough back (and a small enough brain) can do these menial chores.” But even this difficulty can be manipulated to sell her more things:

  One of the ways that the housewife raises her own prestige as a cleaner of her home is through the use of specialized products for specialized tasks….

  When she uses one product for washing clothes, a second for dishes, a third for walls, a fourth for floors, a fifth for venetian blinds, etc., rather than an all-purpose cleaner, she feels less like an unskilled laborer, more like an engineer, an expert.

  A second way of raising her own stature is to “do things my way”—to establish an expert’s role for herself by creating her own “tricks of the trade.” For example, she may “always put a bit of bleach in all my washing—even colored, to make them really clean!”

  Help her to “justify her menial task by building up her role as the protector of her family—the killer of millions of microbes and germs,” this report advised. “Emphasize her kingpin role in the family…help her be an expert rather than a menial worker…make housework a matter of knowledge and skill, rather than a matter of brawn and dull, unremitting effort.” An effective way of doing this is to bring out a new product. For, it seems, there’s a growing wave of housewives “who look forward to new products which not only decrease their daily work load, but actually engage their emotional and intellectual interest in the world of scientific development outside the home.”

  One gasps in admiration at the ingenuity of it all—the housewife can participate in science itself just by buying something new—or something old that has been given a brand new personality.

  Besides increasing her professional status, a new cleaning appliance or product increases a woman’s feeling of economic security and luxury, just as a new automobile does for a man. This was reported by 28 per cent of the respondents, who agreed with this particular sentiment: “I like to try out new things. I’ve just started to use a new liquid detergen
t—and somehow it makes me feel like a queen.”

  The question of letting the woman use her mind and even participate in science through housework is, however, not without its drawbacks. Science should not relieve housewives of too much drudgery; it must concentrate instead on creating the illusion of that sense of achievement that housewives seem to need.

  To prove this point, 250 housewives were given a depth test: they were asked to choose among four imaginary methods of cleaning. The first was a completely automatic dust-and dirt-removal system which operated continuously like a home-heating system. The second, the housewife had to press a button to start. The third was portable; she had to carry it around and point it at an area to remove the dirt. The fourth was a brand new, modern object with which she could sweep the dirt away herself. The housewives spoke up in favor of this last appliance. If it “appears new, modern” she would rather have the one that lets her work herself, this report said. “One compelling reason is her desire to be a participant, not just a button-pusher.” As one housewife remarked, “As for some magical push-button cleaning system, well, what would happen to my exercise, my feeling of accomplishment, and what would I do with my mornings?”

  This fascinating study incidentally revealed that a certain electronic cleaning appliance—long considered one of our great labor-savers—actually made “housekeeping more difficult than it need be.” From the response of eighty per cent of those housewives, it seemed that once a woman got this appliance going, she “felt compelled to do cleaning that wasn’t really necessary.” The electronic appliance actually dictated the extent and type of cleaning to be done.

  Should the housewife then be encouraged to go back to that simple cheap sweeper that let her clean only as much as she felt necessary? No, said the report, of course not. Simply give that old-fashioned sweeper the “status” of the electronic appliance as a “labor-saving necessity” for the modern housewife “and then indicate that the modern homemaker would, naturally, own both.”