Considered a wakeup call to women, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, resulted in a social revolution. Friedan's work introduced her readers to the nature versus nurture debate and helped some women identify what she referred to as "the problem that has no name," for which the only cure could be a source of paid employment. Friedan compared the life of a "happy housewife" living in suburbia, something that Friedan herself experienced in the 1950s, to life in a Nazi concentration camp. What is ironic, however, is that Friedan was hardly the average housewife. Due to her graduate work in psychology, Friedan's work is full of citations of academic resources, and Friedan herself was first and foremost an activist. Yet she presented The Feminine Mystique in a manner that suggested she was not an academic, but rather, an average American nonworking woman, writing about the miserable condition of women.
Friedan worked on The Feminine Mystique from the New York Public Library and her dining room table, a combination of the academic and domestic spheres. This was somewhat fitting for a work that describes the post–World War II mystique that defined women solely as wives, mothers, and housekeepers. Friedan argued that this definition would cripple wives and husbands and harm the national economy. Her book changed the face of American politics and family life for good, creating a whole generation of militant women who looked for scapegoats to denigrate. Beginning with their mothers, and then moving to the stereotype of the male obsessed with football and beer, these militant reformers challenged Friedan's original movement of "housewives" with middle class values, children, and modern conveniences.
These conveniences, however, were what made women so unhappy, Friedan argued. She compared suburban women to concentration camp inmates because the camps had promoted a loss of autonomy and forced the identification of individuals with their oppressors.
Friedan's work has been challenged by various historians and sociologists, including Daniel Horowitz, who called attention to the disparity between Friedan's role as a labor union activist and her portrayal of herself as a typical suburban housewife. However, Horowitz argued that Friedan's contributions were no less significant on account of her misrepresentation of her life. Some have questioned whether Friedan sacrificed the truth to advance her cause, and although The Feminine Mystique is a product of Friedan's studies and her involvement in the labor movement, the book also provides an explanation of women's dilemma in the post–World War II and Cold War environments. By giving credence to the concept that women lacked a sense of power, Friedan articulated the importance of gender in historical analysis.
Bibliography
Horowitz, Daniel. Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.
Selle, Robert. "Feminism's Matriarch." World and I 13.5 (1998): 50–52.
Wolfe, Alan. "The Mystique of Betty Friedan." The Atlantic Monthly 284 (September 1999): 98–103.
—Jennifer Harrison
