The Feminine Mystique

by Friedan, Betty

  And so most of the agenda of Stage 1 of the sex-role revolution—which is how I now see the women’s movement for equality—have been accomplished, or are in the process of being resolved. The Equal Rights Amendment was approved by Congress with hardly a murmur in either house after we organized the National Women’s Political Caucus. The amendment’s main opponent, Emanuel Celler, has been retired from Congress by one of the many new young women who, these days, are running for office instead of looking up Zip Codes. The Supreme Court has ruled that no state can deny a woman her right to choose childbirth or abortion. Over 1,000 lawsuits have been filed forcing universities and corporations to take affirmative action to end sex discrimination and the other conditions that keep women from getting top jobs. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company has been ordered to pay $15 million in reparations to women who didn’t even apply for jobs better than telephone operator before because such jobs weren’t open to women. Every professional association, newspaper office, television station, church, company, hospital, and school in almost every city has a women’s caucus or a group taking action on the concrete conditions that keep women down.

  Lately, I’ve been asked to lead consciousness-raising sessions for the men who plan the training of guidance counselors in New York and Minnesota, priests in Missouri, the Air Force Academy in Colorado, and even investment bankers. (I’ve also organized the First Women’s Bank & Trust Company to help women get control of their own money and use their economic power.) The State Department has said that women can’t be fired from the Foreign Service just because they are married and that secretaries can’t be told to go for coffee. Women are beginning to change the very practice of medicine by establishing self-help clinics that enable women to take active responsibility for their own bodies. Psychoanalytic conferences ask me, and other movement women, to help them change their definition of feminine and masculine. Women are being ordained as ministers and rabbis and deacons, though the Pope says they still can’t say Mass. And the nuns and priests whose ecumenical rebellion is on the front edge of the sex-role revolution are asking, “Is God He?”

  The women’s movement is no longer just an American possibility. I’ve been asked to help organize groups in Italy, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Sweden, France, Israel, Japan, India, and even in Czechoslovakia and other Socialist countries. I hope that by next year we’ll have our first world conference of feminists, perhaps in Sweden.

  The United States Census Bureau reports a drastic decline in the birth rate, which I credit as much to women’s new aspirations as to The Pill. The women’s movement is strong enough now to bring out into the open real differences in ideology: I think my view of the sex-role revolution will emerge as the belief of those in the mainstream, and the man-hating fringe will evaporate, having represented a temporary phase, or even a planned diversion. It would be unrealistic, of course, not to expect forces threatened by the women’s movement to try to organize or provoke a backlash—as they are doing now in many states to prevent ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. For example, women were given a week off by employers in Ohio, bused over the state line, and put up in motels in an attempt to pressure the Kentucky legislature to block the Equal Rights Amendment. But I remember that the liquor companies spent millions of dollars to prevent ratification of women’s right to vote in Tennessee fifty years ago. And today who is financing the campaign to stop the final act of the women’s movement for equality? Not a conspiracy of men to keep women down; rather, it is a conspiracy of those whose power, or profit, rests on the manipulation of the fears and impotent rage of passive women. Women—the last and largest group of people in this nation to demand control of their own destiny—will change the very nature of political power in this country.

  In the decade since the publication of The Feminine Mystique, the women’s movement has changed my whole life, too, no less powerfully or joyfully than the lives of other women who stop to tell me about themselves. I couldn’t keep living my schizophrenic life: leading other women out of the wilderness while holding on to a marriage that destroyed my self-respect. I finally found the courage to get a divorce in May, 1969. I am less alone now than I ever was holding on to the false security of my marriage. I think the next great issue for the women’s movement is basic reform of marriage and divorce.

  My life still keeps changing, with Emily off to Radcliffe this fall, Daniel getting his Ph.D. at Princeton, and Jonathan exploring new roads of his own. I’ve finished my first stint as a visiting professor of sociology at Temple University, and I’ve written my own uncensored column for McCall’s. I’ve moved high into an airy, magic New York tower, with open sky and river and bridges to the future all around. I’ve started a weekend commune of grownups for whom marriage hasn’t worked—an extended family of choice, whose members are now moving into new kinds of marriages.

  The more I’ve become myself—and the more strength, support, and love I’ve somehow managed to take from, and give to, other women in the movement—the more joyous and real I feel loving a man. I’ve seen great relief in women this year as I’ve spelled out my personal truth: that the assumption of your own identity, equality, and even political power does not mean you stop needing to love, and be loved by, a man, or that you stop caring for your kids. I would have lost my own feeling for the women’s movement if I had not been able, finally, to admit tenderness.

  One mystical footnote: I used to be terribly afraid of flying. After I wrote The Feminine Mystique, I suddenly stopped being afraid; now I fly on jets across the ocean and on one-engine air taxis in the hills of West Virginia. I guess that, existentially, once you start really living your life, and doing your work, and loving, you are not afraid to die. Sometimes, when I realize how much flying I do, I think there’s a possibility that I will die in an airplane crash. But not for quite a while, I hope, because the pieces of my own life as woman with man are coming together in a new pattern of human sex and human politics. I now can write that new book.

  I think the energy locked up in those obsolete masculine and feminine roles is the social equivalent of the physical energy locked up in the realm of E = MC2—the force that unleashed the holocaust of Hiroshima. I believe the locked-up sexual energies have helped to fuel, more than anyone realizes, the terrible violence erupting in the nation and the world during these past ten years. If I am right, the sex-role revolution will liberate these energies from the service of death and will make it really possible for men and women to “make love, not war.”

  Notes

  Metamorphosis: TWO GENERATIONS LATER

  1. New York Times, February 11, 1994. U.S. Census Bureau data compiled by F. Levy (MIT) and R. Murnane (Harvard).

  2. “Women: The New Providers,” Whirlpool Foundation Study, by Families and Work Institute, May, 1995.

  3. “Employment and Earnings,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, January, 1996.

  4. U.S. Census Bureau data from current Population Reports, 1994.

  5. National Committee on Pay Equity, compiled U.S. Census Bureau data from CUrrent Population Reports, 1996.

  6. “The wage Gap: Women’s and Men’s earnings,” Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 1996.

  7. Washington Post, September 27, 1994. Data released from “Corporate Downsizing, Job Elimination, and Job Creation,” AMA Survey, 1994. Also The Downsizing of America: The New York Times Special Report. New York: Random House, 1996.

  8. “Women’s Voices: Solutions for a New Economy,” Center for Policy Alternatives, 1992.

  9. “Contraceptive Practice and Trends in Coital Frequency,” Princeton University Office of Population Research, Family Planning Perspectives, Vol. 12, No. 5, October, 1980.

  10. Starting Right: How America Neglects Its Youngest Children and What We We Can Do About It, Sheila B. Kamerman and Alfred J. Kahn. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

  Chapter 1. THE PROBLEM THAT HAS NO NAME

  1. See the Seventy-fifth Anniversary Issue of Good Housekeeping, May,
1960, “The Gift of Self,” a symposium by Margaret Mead, Jessamyn West, et al.

  2. Lee Rainwater, Richard P. Coleman, and Gerald Handel, Workingman’s Wife, New York, 1959.

  3. Betty Friedan, “If One Generation Can Ever Tell Another,” Smith Alumnae Quarterly, Northampton, Mass., Winter, 1961. I first became aware of “the problem that has no name” and its possible relationship to what I finally called “the feminine mystique” in 1957, when I prepared an intensive questionnaire and conducted a survey of my own Smith College classmates fifteen years after graduation. This questionnaire was later used by alumnae classes of Radcliffe and other women’s colleges with similar results.

  4. Jhan and June Robbins, “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped,” Redbook, September, 1960.

  5. Marian Freda Poverman, “Alumnae on Parade,” Barnard Alumnae Magazine, July, 1957.

  Chapter 2. THE HAPPY HOUSEWIFE HEROINE

  1. Betty Friedan, “Women Are People Too!” Good Housekeeping, September, 1960. The letters received from women all over the United States in response to this article were of such emotional intensity that I was convinced that “the problem that has no name” is by no means confined to the graduates of the women’s Ivy League colleges.

  2. In the 1960’s, an occasional heroine who was not a “happy housewife” began to appear in the women’s magazines. An editor of McCall’s explained it: “Sometimes we run an offbeat story for pure entertainment value.” One such novelette, which was written to order by Noel Clad for Good Housekeeping (January, 1960), is called “Men Against Women.” The heroine—a happy career woman—nearly loses child as well as husband.

  Chapter 3. THE CRISIS IN WOMAN’S IDENTITY

  1. Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther, A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, New York, 1958, pp. 15 ff. See also Erikson, Childhood and Society, New York, 1950, and Erikson, “The Problem of Ego Identity,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, Vol. 4, 1956, pp. 56—121.

  Chapter 4. THE PASSIONATE JOURNEY

  1. See Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States, Cambridge, Mass., 1959. This definitive history of the woman’s rights movement in the United States, published in 1959 at the height of the era of the feminine mystique, did not receive the attention it deserves, from either the intelligent reader or the scholar. In my opinion, it should be required reading for every girl admitted to a U.S. college. One reason the mystique prevails is that very few women under the age of forty know the facts of the woman’s rights movement. I am much indebted to Miss Flexner for many factual clues I might otherwise have missed in my attempt to get at the truth behind the feminine mystique and its monstrous image of the feminists.

  2. See Sidney Ditzion, Marriage, Morals and Sex in America—A History of Ideas, New York, 1953. This extensive bibliographical essay by the librarian of New York University documents the continuous interrelationship between movements for social and sexual reform in America, and, specifically, between man’s movement for greater self-realization and sexual fulfillment and the woman’s rights movement. The speeches and tracts assembled reveal that the movement to emancipate women was often seen by the men as well as the women who led it in terms of “creating an equitable balance of power between the sexes” for “a more satisfying expression of sexuality for both sexes.”

  3. Ibid., p. 107.

  4. Yuri Suhl, Ernestine L. Rose and the Battle for Human Rights, New York, 1959, p. 158. A vivid account of the battle for a married woman’s right to her own property and earnings.

  5. Flexner, op. cit., p. 30.

  6. Elinor Rice Hays, Morning Star, A Biography of Lucy Stone, New York, 1961, p. 83.

  7. Flexner, op. cit., p. 64.

  8. Hays, op. cit., p. 136.

  9. Ibid., p. 285.

  10. Flexner, op. cit., p. 46.

  11. Ibid., p. 73.

  12. Hays, op. cit., p. 221.

  13. Flexner, op. cit., p. 117.

  14. Ibid., p. 235.

  15. Ibid., p. 299.

  16. Ibid., p. 173.

  17. Ida Alexis Ross Wylie, “The Little Woman,” Harper’s, November, 1945.

  Chapter 5. THE SEXUAL SOLIPSISM OF SIGMUND FREUD

  1. Clara Thompson, Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Development, New York, 1950, pp. 131 ff:

  Freud not only emphasized the biological more than the cultural, but he also developed a cultural theory of his own based on his biological theory. There were two obstacles in the way of understanding the importance of the cultural phenomena he saw and recorded. He was too deeply involved in developing his biological theories to give much thought to other aspects of the data he collected. Thus he was interested chiefly in applying to human society his theory of instincts. Starting with the assumption of a death instinct, for example, he then developed an explanation of the cultural phenomena he observed in terms of the death instinct. Since he did not have the perspective to be gained from knowledge of comparative cultures, he could not evaluate cultural processes as such”. Much which Freud believed to be biological has been shown by modern research to be a reaction to a certain type of culture and not characteristic of universal human nature.

  2. Richard La Piere, The Freudian Ethic, New York, 1959, p. 62.

  3. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, New York, 1953, Vol. I, p. 384.

  4. Ibid., Vol. II (1955), p. 432.

  5. Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 7—14, 294; Vol. II, p. 483.

  6. Bruno Bettelheim, Love Is Not Enough: The Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children, Glencoe, III., 1950, pp. 7 ff.

  7. Ernest L. Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, New York, 1960, Letter 10, p. 27; Letter 26, p. 71; Letter 65, p. 145.

  8. Ibid., Letter 74, p. 60; Letter 76, pp. 161 ff.

  9. Jones, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 176 ff.

  10. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 422.

  11. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 271:

  His descriptions of sexual activities are so matter-of-fact that many readers have found them almost dry and totally lacking in warmth. From all I know of him, I should say that he displayed less than the average personal interest in what is often an absorbing topic. There was never any gusto or even savor in mentioning a sexual topic”. He always gave the impression of being an unusually chaste person” the word “puritanical” would not be out of place” and all we know of his early development confirms this conception.

  12. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 102.

  13. Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 110 ff.

  14. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 124.

  15. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 127.

  16. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 138.

  17. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 151.

  18. Helen Walker Puner, Freud, His Life and His Mind, New York, 1947, p. 152.

  19. Jones, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 121.

  20. Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 301 ff. During the years Freud was germinating his sexual theory, before his own heroic self-analysis freed him from a passionate dependence on a series of men, his emotions were focused on a flamboyant nose-and-throat doctor named Fliess. This is one coincidence of history that was quite fateful for women. For Fliess had proposed, and obtained Freud’s lifelong allegiance to, a fantastic “scientific theory” which reduced all phenomena of life and death to “bisexuality,” expressed in mathematical terms through a periodic table based on the number 28, the female menstrual cycle. Freud looked forward to meetings with Fliess “as for the satisfying of hunger and thirst.” He wrote him:” No one can replace the intercourse with a friend that a particular, perhaps feminine side of me, demands.” Even after his own self-analysis, Freud still expected to die on the day predicted by Fliess” periodic table, in which everything could be figured out in terms of the female number 28, or the male 23, which was derived from the end of one female menstrual period to the beginning of the next.

  21. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 320.

  22. Sigmund Freud, “Degradation in Erotic Life,” in The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud, Vol. IV.

  23. Thompson, op. cit., p. 133. />
  24. Sigmund Freud, “The Psychology of Women,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, tr. by W. J. H. Sprott, New York, 1933, pp. 170 ff.

  25. Ibid., p. 182.

  26. Ibid., p. 184.

  27. Thompson, op. cit., pp. 12 ff:

  The war of 1914—18 further focussed attention on ego drives…. Another idea came into analysis around this period…and that was that aggression as well as sex might be an important repressed impulse…. The puzzling problem was how to include it in the theory of instincts…. Eventually Freud solved this by his second instinct theory. Aggression found its place as part of the death instinct. It is interesting that normal self-assertion, i.e., the impulse to master, control or come to self-fulfilling terms with the environment, was not especially emphasized by Freud.

  28. Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 149.

  29. Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, New York and London, 1947, pp. 142 ff.