US History Since 1945!
Andrew Meyers
The Fieldston School
Daniel Horowitz, “Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union
Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America”
American Quarterly 48.1 (1996) 1-42
In a certain sense it was almost accidental--coincidental--that I wrote The Feminine Mystique,
and in another sense my whole life had prepared me to write that book; all the pieces of my own
life came together for the first time in the writing of it.
--Betty Friedan, "It Changed My Life," 1976
In 1951, a labor journalist with a decade's experience in protest movements described a trade
union meeting where rank-and-file women talked and men listened. Out of these conversations,
she reported, emerged the realization that the women were "fighters--that they refuse any longer
to be paid or treated as some inferior species by their bosses, or by any male workers who have
swallowed the bosses' thinking." 1 The union was the UE, the United Electrical, Radio and
Machine Workers of America, the most radical American union in the postwar period and in the
1940s what historian Ronald Schatz, appreciative of the UE's place in history, has called "the
largest communist-led institution of any kind in the United States." In 1952 that same journalist
wrote a pamphlet, UE Fights for Women Workers, that the historian Lisa Kannenberg, unaware of
the identity of its author, has called "a remarkable manual for fighting wage discrimination that
is, ironically, as relevant today as it was in 1952." At the time, the pamphlet helped raise the
consciousness of Eleanor Flexner, who in 1959 would publish Century of Struggle, the first
scholarly history of American women. In 1953-54, Flexner relied extensively on the pamphlet
when she taught a course at the Jefferson School of Social Science in New York on "The Woman
Question." Flexner's participation in courses at the school, she later said, "marked the beginning
of my real involvement in the issues of women's rights, my realization that leftist organizations-parties, unions--were also riddled with male supremacist prejudice and discrimination." The
labor journalist and pamphlet writer was Betty Friedan.
In 1973 Friedan remarked that until she started writing The Feminine Mystique (1963), "I wasn't
even conscious of the woman problem." In 1976 she commented that in the early 1950s she was
"still in the embrace of the feminine mystique." Although in 1974 she revealed some potentially
controversial elements of her past, even then she left the impression that her landmark book
emerged only from her own captivity by the very forces she described. Friedan's portrayal of
herself as so totally trapped by the feminine mystique was part of a reinvention of herself as she
wrote and promoted The Feminine Mystique. Her story made it possible for readers to identify
with its author and its author to enhance the book's appeal. However, it hid from view the
connection between the union activity in which Friedan participated in the 1940s and early 1950s
and the feminism she inspired in the 1960s. In the short term, her misery in the suburbs may have
prompted her to write The Feminine Mystique; a longer term perspective makes clear that the
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Andrew Meyers
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book's origins lie much earlier--in her college education and in her experiences with labor unions
in the 1940s and early 1950s.
The establishment of an accurate narrative of Betty Friedan's life, especially what she wrote in
the 1940s and early 1950s, sheds light on the origins of 1960s feminism. Most historians believe
that 1960s feminism emerged from events particular to that decade, but some have argued for a
connection between the protest movements of the 1940s and the 1960s. Friedan's life provides
evidence of such continuity by suggesting a specific and important connection between the
struggle for justice for working women in the 1940s and the feminism of the 1960s. This
connection gives feminism and Friedan, both long under attack for a lack of interest in working
class and African American women, a past of which they should be proud.
More generally, understanding The Feminine Mystique in light of new information illuminates
major aspects of American intellectual and political life in the postwar period. Friedan offered a
feminist reworking of important themes in a genre of social criticism, including the notion of a
faltering masculine identity. The story of Friedan's life provides additional evidence of the
artificiality of the separation of a turbulent 1960s from the supposedly complacent preceding
years. Recognition of continuity in Friedan's life gives added weight to the picture that is
emerging of ways in which World War II, unions, and those influenced by American radicalism
of the 1940s provided some of the seeds of protest movements of the 1960s. At the same time,
the continuities between Friedan's labor union activity and her feminism underscore the
importance of what George Lipsitz has called "collective memory," the way the experiences of
the immediate postwar period later reemerged in unexpected places. 8 Moreover, a new reading
of The Feminine Mystique sheds light on the remaking of progressive forces in America, the
process by which a focus on women and the professional middle and upper middle classes
supplemented, in some ways replaced a focus on unions. Finally, an examination of The
Feminine Mystique reminds us of important shifts in the ideology of the left: from an earlier
economic analysis based on Marxism to one developed in the 1950s that also rested on
humanistic psychology, and from a focus on the impact of conditions of production on the
working class to an emphasis on the effect of consumption on the middle class.
Herstory
In print and in interviews, Friedan has offered a narrative of her life that she popularized after
she became famous in 1963. A full biography might begin in Peoria, where Bettye Naomi
Goldstein was born February 4, 1921 and grew up with her siblings and their parents: a father
who owned a jewelry store and a mother who had given up her position as a society editor of the
local paper to raise a family. 10 My analysis of Friedan's political journey starts with her years at
Smith College, although it is important to recognize Friedan's earlier sense of herself as someone
whose identity as a Jew, a reader, and a brainy girl made her feel freakish and lonely…
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The Fieldston School
After leaving Berkeley, the copy on the dust jacket of The Feminine Mystique noted, Friedan did
some "applied social-science research" and free-lance writing for magazines. Friedan's biography
in a standard reference book quotes her as saying that in the 1940s, "for conscious or
unconscious reasons," she worked at "the usual kinds of boring jobs that lead nowhere." This
story continues in 1947 with her marriage to Carl Friedan, a returning vet who would eventually
switch careers from theater to advertising and public relations. She has told of how she gave
birth to three children between 1948 and 1956 and the family moved to the suburbs, with these
experiences making her feel trapped. Friedan's picture of her years in the suburbs is not one of
contentment and conformity. Though she acknowledged her role in creating and directing a
program that brought together teenagers and adult professionals, Friedan portrayed herself as
someone who felt "freakish having a career, worried that she was neglecting her children." In an
oft-repeated story whose punch line varied, Friedan recounted her response to the census form.
In the space where it asked for her occupation, she put down "housewife" but remained guilty,
hesitant, and conflicted about such a designation, sometimes pausing and then adding "writer."
Friedan laced The Feminine Mystique with suggestions of how much she shared with her
suburban sisters. In the opening paragraph, she said that she realized something was wrong in
women's lives when she "sensed it first as a question mark in my own life, as a wife and mother
of three small children, half-guiltily, and therefore half-heartedly, almost in spite of myself, using
my abilities and education in work that took me away from home." Toward the end of the
paragraph, when she referred to "a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women
and the image to which we were trying to conform," she suggested that she experienced the
feminine mystique as keenly and in the same way as her readers. Using the second person plural,
she wrote that "all of us went back into the warm brightness of home" and "lowered our eyes
from the horizon, and steadily contemplated our own navels." Her work on newspapers, she
wrote in The Feminine Mystique, proceeded "with no particular plan." Indeed, she claimed that
she had participated as a writer in the creation of the image of the happy housewife.
Friedan asserted she embarked on a path that would lead to The Feminine Mystique only when,
as she read over the responses of her college classmates to a questionnaire in anticipation of their
fifteenth reunion in 1957, she discovered what she called "The Problem That Has No Name," the
dissatisfaction her suburban peers felt but could not fully articulate. When she submitted articles
to women's magazines, Friedan said, editors changed the meaning of what she had written or
rejected outright her suggestions for pieces on controversial subjects. Then at a meeting of the
Society of Magazine Writers, she heard Vance Packard recount how he had written The Hidden
Persuaders (1957) after Reader's Digest turned down an article critical of advertising. Friedan
decided to write her book…
Betty Goldstein: Labor Journalist
Friedan's experiences at Smith cast a different light on her decision to leave Berkeley after a year
of graduate school. The editorials she and her peers had written immediately after Pearl Harbor
revealed an impatience to be near the action. A 1943 article in the Peoria paper reported that
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Friedan turned down the fellowship because "she decided she wanted to work in the labor
movement--on the labor press." Another issue doubtlessly affected her decision to leave
Berkeley. When her father accused her of immorality while she was home at Christmas vacation,
she was so upset that she returned to Berkeley without saying goodbye to him. A few days later,
on January 11, 1943, he died at age 61.
The period which Friedan has treated most summarily in her narrative covers the years from
1943 to 1952, when she worked as a labor journalist. Off and on from October 1943 until July
1946 she was a staff writer for the Federated Press, a left-wing news service that provided stories
for newspapers, especially union ones, across the nation. Here Friedan wrote articles that
supported the aspirations of African Americans and union members. She also criticized
reactionary forces that, she believed, were working secretly to undermine progressive social
advances. As early as 1943, she pictured efforts by businesses, coordinated by the National
Association of Manufacturers (NAM), to develop plans that would enhance profits, diminish the
power of unions, reverse the New Deal, and allow businesses to operate as they pleased.
At Federated Press, Friedan also paid attention to women's problems. Right after she began to
work there, she interviewed UE official Ruth Young, one of the clearest voices in the labor
movement articulating women's issues. In the resulting article, Friedan noted that the
government could not solve the problem of turnover "merely by pinning up thousands of
glamorous posters designed to lure more women into industry." Neither women, unions, nor
management, she quoted Young as saying, could solve problems of escalating prices or
inadequate child care that were made even more difficult by the fact that "women still have two
jobs to do." Action of the federal government, Friedan reported, was needed to solve the
problems working women faced. In the immediate postwar period, she pictured the wife in a
union family as more savvy than her husband in figuring out how large corporations took
advantage of the consumer. She paid special attention to stories about protecting the jobs and
improving the situation of working women, including married ones with children.
For about six years beginning in July, 1946, precisely at the moment when the wartime Popular
Front came under intense attack, Friedan was a reporter for the union's paper UE News. At least
as early as 1943, when she quoted Young, Friedan was well aware of the UE's commitments to
equity for women. Friedan's years on UE News, which made her familiar with radicalism in the
1940s and early 1950s, provided a seed bed of her feminism. Her writings in the 1940s and early
1950s reveal that although she did not focus on the Soviet Union or on American-Soviet
relations, Popular Front ideology shaped the way Friedan viewed American society and politics.
As Flexner said of her own work for justice for working-class and African American women
from the 1930s to the 1950s, left-wing movements welcomed "an enormous latitude of opinions
under a very broad umbrella." Specific political affiliation was not important; what was critical
was commitment to a broad range of issues within the framework of a fight for social justice.
The end of the cold war makes it possible to look at the left in the 1940s without the baggage of
redbaiting. Indeed, the world in which Friedan moved in the 1940s and early 1950s was varied,
containing as it did Party members, pacificists, socialists, union activists, fighters for justice for
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African Americans--and at UE News, Katherine Beecher, the grandniece of the nineteenthcentury feminist Catharine Beecher…
Beginning in 1946, Friedan witnessed the efforts by federal agencies, congressional committees,
major corporations, the Roman Catholic Church, and the CIO to break the hold of what they saw
as the domination of the UE by communists. The inclusion of a clause in the Taft-Hartley Act of
1947, requiring union officers to sign an anti-communist affidavit if they wished to do business
with the National Labor Relations Board, helped encourage other unions to challenge the UE,
whose leaders refused to sign. Internecine fights took place within the UE, part of a longer term
fight between radicals and anti-communists in its ranks. One anti-communist long active in the
union spoke of how a communist minority "seized control of the national office, the executive
board, the paid staff, the union newspaper and some district councils and locals." The division in
union ranks had reverberations in national politics as well: in 1948 the anti-communists
supported President Harry S. Truman, while their opponents campaigned for Henry Wallace. In
the short term the attack on the UE intensified its commitment to equity for working women,
something that grew out of both ideological commitments and practicalconsiderations. Before
long, however, the UE was greatly weakened: in 1949, its connection with the CIO was severed
and the newly-formed and CIO-backed IUE recruited many of its members. Membership in UE,
numbering more than 600,000 in 1946, fell to 203,000 in 1953 and to 71,000 four years later…
Throughout her years at UE News, Friedan participated in discussions on women's issues,
including the issue of corporations' systematic discrimination against women. Going to factories
to interview those whose stories she was covering, she also wrote about working women,
including African Americans and Latinas. In the worlds Friedan inhabited in the decade
beginning in 1943, as the historian Kathleen Weigand has shown, people often discussed the
cultural and economic sources of women's oppression, the nature of discrimination based on sex,
the special difficulties African American women faced, and the dynamics of discrimination
against women in a variety of institutions, including the family. Moreover, for the people around
Friedan and doubtlessly for Friedan herself, the fight for justice for women was inseparable from
the more general struggle to secure rights for African Americans and workers. As she had done at
the Federated Press, at UE News in the late 1940s and early 1950s she reported on how working
women struggled as producers and consumers to make sure their families had enough to live on.
Friedan's focus on working women's issues resulted in her writing the pamphlet, UE Fights for
Women Workers, published by the UE in June of 1952. She began by suggesting the
contradiction in industry's treatment of women as consumers and as producers. "In
advertisements across the land," Friedan remarked, "industry glorifies the American woman--in
her gleaming GE kitchen, at her Westinghouse laundromat, before her Sylvania television set.
Nothing," she announced as she insightfully explored a central contradiction women faced in the
postwar world, "is too good for her--unless" she worked for corporations, including GE, or
Westinghouse, or Sylvania.
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The central theme of the piece was how, in an effort to improve the pay and conditions of
working women, the UE fought valiantly against greedy corporations that sought to increase
their profits by exploiting women. Friedan discussed a landmark 1945 National War Labor Board
decision on sex-based wage discrimination in favor of the UE. Remarking that "fighting the
exploitation of women is men's business too," she emphasized how discriminatory practices
corporations used against women hurt men as well by exerting downward pressure on wages of
all workers. To back up the call for equal pay for equal work and to fight against segregation and
discrimination of women, she countered stereotypes justifying lower pay for women: they were
physically weaker, entered the work force only temporarily, had no families to support, and
worked only for pin money. She highlighted the "even more shocking" situation African
American women faced, having to deal as they did with the "double bars" of being female and
African American. Friedan set forth a program that was, Lisa Kannenberg has noted, "a
prescription for a gender-blind workplace." …
Friedan's association with the labor movement gave her a sustained education in issues of sexual
discrimination and shaped her emergence as a feminist. However, the precise impact of the
influence is not clear. If, as some historians have suggested, the UE remained committed to
gender equality, then Friedan's years as a labor journalist may well have provided a positive
inspiration. In contrast, the historian Nancy Palmer has argued that women in the UE persistently
faced difficulties when they articulated their grievances but, in the name of solidarity, were told
not to rock the boat. Such a situation might mean that her experience with radical organizations
that could not live up to their vision of a just and egalitarian society served more as a negative
spur than a positive inspiration. At both the Federated Press and UE News, she lost her jobs to
men who had more seniority, a general policy issue that had concerned the UE at least since the
early 1940s….
The reason Friedan left out these years in her life story is now clear. Her stint at the UE News
took place at the height of the anti-communist crusade, which she experienced at close quarters.
When she emerged into the limelight in 1963, the issue of affiliation with communists was
wracking SANE, SDS, and the civil rights movement. In the same years, HUAC was still
holding hearings, the United States was pursuing an anti-communist war in Vietnam, and J.
Edgar Hoover's FBI was wiretapping Martin Luther King, Jr., ostensibly to protect the nation
against communist influence. Had Friedan revealed all in the mid-1960s, she would have
undercut her book's impact, subjected herself to palpable dangers, and jeopardized the feminist
movement, including the National Organization for Women (NOW), an institution she was
instrumental in launching. Perhaps instead of emphasizing continuities in her life, she told the
story of her conversion in order to heighten the impact of her book and appeal to white middleclass women. Or maybe, having participated in social movements that did not live up to her
dreams, in The Feminine Mystique, whether consciously or not, she was trying to mobilize
middle-class readers and thus prove something to the men on the left. When constructing a
narrative, she may have adopted a convention that made it difficult to discuss anger, ambition,
excitement, and power. Why she did not tell her full story between the early 1970s and the
present raises other issues. Some of the explanation lies with her ongoing commitment to
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accomplishing urgent tasks as a writer and political figure. Perhaps she hoped to write a memoir
that would have the impact of her 1963 book. The way a participant remembers events is bound
to differ from the way a historian recovers them, largely from written records. Friedan may have
come to believe a narrative that outlived the needs it originally fulfilled.
Betty Friedan: Free-Lance Writer and Housewife
Until 1952, almost everything Friedan published as a labor journalist appeared under the name
Betty Goldstein, though she had married in 1947. When she emerged as a writer for women's
magazines in 1955, it was as Betty Friedan. Aside from indicating her marital status, the change
in name was significant. It signaled a shift from an employee for a union paper who wrote highly
political articles on the working class to a free-lance writer for mass circulation magazines who
concentrated on the suburban middle class in more muted tones.
Around 1950, the Friedans moved from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Parkway Village in
Queens. Developed to house United Nations personnel from around the world and the families of
returning veterans, this apartment complex contained a cosmopolitan mix of people, including
diplomats, American Jews, and African Americans. For two years beginning in February of 1952,
Friedan edited The Parkway Villager, transforming it from a chatty source of community news
into an activist publication. Beginning in the spring of 1952, she led an extended protest and rent
strike, actions she couched in terms of protecting an authentic community from greedy bankers.
Something else enriched Friedan's perspective in the years after she stopped working for the UE.
Shortly after its 1953 publication in English, Friedan appreciatively read Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex. Yet when she mentioned this later, she did not point to the book's Marxism or to
the author's politics. Instead in The Feminine Mystique she hailed its "insights into French
women," and in 1975 she stated that from it she learned "my own existentialism." …
In one particularly revealing piece, Friedan prefigured some of the issues she later claimed she
only began to discover when she started to work on The Feminine Mystique. In "I Went Back to
Work," published in Charm in April 1955, she wrote that initially she did not think highly of
housework or of housewives and was guilty about what she was doing. Eventually she decided
that her commitment to being a good mother was not "going to interfere with what I regarded as
my 'real' life." Finding it necessary to be away from home for nine hours a day in order to work,
she solved the problem of child care by hiring "a really good mother-substitute--a housekeepernurse." In the end, Friedan had no regrets about her decision or apparently about her privileged
position. She believed her work outside the home improved her family's situation and
acknowledged that her "whole life had always been geared around creative, intellectual work"
and "a professional career." A revealing bridge between Friedan's community activity in the
1940s and The Feminine Mystique was a 1957 article in Parents' Magazine. Here Friedan told
the story of a group of women who lived in a housing project an hour from Manhattan and
organized a day camp for their children. In the process, the mothers demonstrated their ability to
work cooperatively without replicating hierarchical organizations and developed a model for a
cross-class summer camp for urban children.
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In what ways, then, was Friedan a captive of the feminine mystique? There is no question but
that she was miserable in the suburbs. Her emphasis on her captivity may have expressed one
part of her ambivalence. Yet, though she claimed that she shared so much with her suburban,
white, middle-class sisters in the postwar world, during much of the two decades beginning in
1943 Friedan was participating in left-wing union activity, writing articles that went against the
grain of cold war ideology, and living in a cosmopolitan, racially integrated community. During
most of the time between her marriage in 1947 and the publication of The Feminine Mystique,
Friedan combined career and family life. As a woman who worked with her at Federated Press
later noted, at the time Friedan and her female colleagues expected to have professional careers.
Caution about the predominantly suburban origins of her book is also in order because Friedan's
move to suburban Rockland County in 1956 preceded by only a few months her initial work on
the survey for her reunion that was so critical to The Feminine Mystique.
To be sure, in the postwar world Friedan experienced at first hand the trials of a woman who
fought against considerable odds to combine marriage, motherhood, and a career. Yet in critical
ways her difficulties did not stem from the dilemmas she described in her book: lack of career
and ambition, a securely affluent household, and absence of a political sensibility. Friedan
experienced psychological conflicts over issues of creativity in writing and motherhood.
Researching and writing her free-lance articles was a laborious process. She had three young
children, hardly felt comfortable in the suburbs, had no local institutions to provide a supportive
environment for an aspiring writer, and continually faced financial difficulties. Her income from
writing articles was unpredictable, a situation exacerbated by the pressure she was under to help
support the household and justify the expenses for child care. Tension persisted between the
Friedans over a wide range of issues, including who was responsible for earning and spending
the family's income. Moreover, she was in a marriage apparently marked by violence.
Rereading The Feminine Mystique
Friedan was largely right when she said "all the pieces of my own life came together for the first
time in the writing" of The Feminine Mystique. The skills as a journalist she had developed
beginning as a teenager stood her in good stead as she worked to make what she had to say
accessible to a wide audience. Her identity as a Jew and an outsider gave her a distinctive
perspective on American and suburban life. Her years at Smith boosted her confidence and
enhanced her political education. Her life as a wife and mother sensitized her to the conflicts
millions of others experienced but could not articulate. Her education as a psychologist led her to
understand the gestalt, the wholeness of a situation, and to advocate self-fulfillment based on
humanistic psychology. Above all, her work as a labor journalist and activist provided her with
the intellectual depth, ideological commitments, and practical experiences crucial to her
emergence as a leading feminist in the 1960s.
Why did a woman who had spent so much energy advocating political solutions focus in The
Feminine Mystique largely on adult education and self-realization and turn social problems into
psychological ones? How did a woman who had fought to improve the lives of African
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Americans, Latinas, and working-class women end up writing a book that saw the problems of
America in terms of the lives of affluent, suburban white women?
Even at the time, at least one observer, Gerda Lerner, raised questions about what Friedan
emphasized and neglected. Active in the trade union movement in the 1940s, present at the
founding meeting of NOW, and after the mid-1960s one of the nation's leading historians of
women, in February 1963 Lerner wrote Friedan. "I have just finished reading your splendid book
and want to tell you how excited and delighted I am with it. . . . You have done for women," she
remarked as she referred to the author who had warned about the destruction of the environment,
"what Rachel Carson did for birds and trees." Yet, Lerner continued:
I have one reservation about your treatment of your subject: you address yourself solely to the
problems of middle class, college-educated women. This approach was one of the shortcomings
of the suffrage movement for many years and has, I believe, retarded the general advance of
women. Working women, especially Negro women, labor not only under the disadvantages
imposed by the feminine mystique, but under the more pressing disadvantages of economic
discrimination. To leave them out of consideration of the problem or to ignore the contributions
they can make toward its solution, is something we simply cannot afford to do. By their
desperate need, by their numbers, by their organizational experience (if trade union members),
working women are most important in reaching institutional solutions to the problems of women.
The dynamics of Friedan's shifts in attention from working-class to middle-class women are not
entirely clear. At some point after May 1953, when she followed the proceedings at the UE
conference on the problems of women workers, Friedan turned away from working-class and
African American women, something that undercut the power of The Feminine Mystique. An
important question is whether the shift from her UE radicalism and focus on working-class
women was a rhetorical strategy designed for the specific situation of The Feminine Mystique or
part of a longer-term deradicalization. Until her personal papers are fully open and extensive
interviewing is carried out, and perhaps not even then, we may not know the dynamics of this
change. Among the things that call for examination is what role her distinctive and in some ways
privileged social position--Peoria, merchant's daughter, Smith College--played in the change in
her stance.
Given what Friedan wrote and observed for the UE as late as 1953, the obliteration from The
Feminine Mystique of the experiences of a wider range of women is quite striking. After the
mid-1950s, Friedan never returned to working-class women and labor unions as the primary or
even major objects of her attention. In the mid-1950s, Friedan may have undergone some
deradicalization, although unlike many contemporaries her departure from radical commitments
did not result in her becoming a conservative. Possibly, behind what she wrote in The Feminine
Mystique was a series of events that burned her out politically and made her skeptical about how
seriously American labor unions, even radical ones, took their commitment to advance the cause
of women.
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Whatever may yet be learned of Friedan's personal life and political journey, along with shifts in
her politics and the consequences of McCarthyism, issues of genre, audience, and persona go a
long way in explaining why The Feminine Mystique did not more accurately reflect her
experience. During much of her life, but especially for the ten years beginning in 1953, Friedan
thought of herself primarily as a writer, a professional journalist looking out for the story that
would increase her income and make her career. From her teenage years on, she had developed a
keen understanding of her readers and of a variety of genres. Three children and an upper
middle-class life to support, as well as conflicts with her husband over issues of breadwinning,
make understandable the change in the focus of her writing that resulted from the necessity to
use her skills as a writer to generate income. She cast The Feminine Mystique, and her situation
in the world it described, as part of an effort to enhance the book's popularity and impact.
With The Feminine Mystique, she was writing for a middle-class audience that had certain
expectations about social criticism. She and her publishers thought her book might have the same
kind of reverberations as William W. Whyte, Jr.'s The Organization Man (1955) and Vance
Packard's The Status Seekers (1959). To that list, she might have added David Riesman's The
Lonely Crowd (1950), on which she [End Page 23] drew extensively. What Friedan's book
shared with these best sellers accounts to some extent for her shift in focus from her earlier
political positions. Friedan adapted what they had written about suburban, middle-class men to
their female counterparts. Like them, Friedan held a mirror up to Americans, both frightening
and encouraging them to have a shock of recognition. With them, she assumed that the problem
resulted from the struggle to enhance identity amidst widely-experienced affluence, not from the
prevalence of poverty or discrimination.
Central to The Feminine Mystique was a series of issues about which her male counterparts had
also written but on which her history could have given her a different perspective. Like her
predecessors, she psychologized social problems and considered identity and mythology but not
social structure as the principal impediments to a coherent identity. Friedan followed others with
a book that was longer on analysis designed to shock readers than on public policies that
provided solutions. Consequently, in her last chapter, she offered "A New Life Plan for Women."
Having acknowledged the importance of some policy issues, she ended by emphasizing how
women should break the mental chains of the feminine mystique in order to achieve fuller selfrealization.
Nonetheless, Friedan's book contained themes that drew on what she had learned in the 1930s,
1940s, and 1950s. The Feminine Mystique had two autobiographical narratives. One, which
provided its spine and strengthened its appeal, suggested that Friedan herself experienced
uncertainty, blocked career mobility, and an identity crisis throughout her adult life. The second,
for which Friedan provided the evidence though she kept the plot line and its relevance to her life
obscure, involved a concerted effort by men and corporations to suppress the aspirations of
women. Throughout her book, although she had the evidence to do so, Friedan drew back from
declaring that men--as fathers, husbands, editors, psychologists, social scientists, educators,
corporate heads, and advertising executives--had coordinated the postwar counterrevolution
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against women. Friedan could not highlight this second story for several reasons. As a labor
journalist (and later as a nationally-known feminist), Friedan argued for building coalitions of
men and women to fight for social justice. Any process of deradicalization she had undergone
may have impelled her to hedge her discussion of a capitalist conspiracy. More immediately, she
may have felt that to have developed the idea of a conspiracy more fully would have undermined
the book's impact, given what middle-class women supposedly believed about their situations at
the time. Friedan had to hide her own radical past and create a believable persona. Perhaps
guessing at how far she might push an audience whose consciousness she wished to raise, she
decided that she had to temper her position.
Still, not very hidden in her book was a simplified, Marxist view of ideological domination. In
the pivotal chapter of her second and more radical narrative, titled "The Sexual Sell," the task she
set for herself was to explain the "powerful forces" served by the feminine mystique. What, she
asked, undermined the force of feminism and fueled the retreat of women into the privatism of
the suburban home? In seeking an answer, Friedan articulated arguments congruent with what
she learned from Douglas and as a labor journalist. Friedan thus provided a bridge between the
discussions in radical circles of the 1940s about the problems women faced and the feminism
that many women would articulate in the late 1960s. Because of the importance of business in
America, she said at the beginning of the chapter, making purchases for the home was the
housewives' crucial function. Since women were "the chief customers of American business,"
she argued, "somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that" they would purchase
more "if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being
housewives." Having hinted at the possibility of a conspiracy in which the heads of major
corporations decided to mount a campaign to keep women home so they would consume
household products, Friedan then ducked the logic of her argument and evidence. "Conspiratorial
theories of history," she wrote in a way that differed from her 1940s and early 1950s attacks on
the postwar plans of the NAM, were not adequate to explain what she had observed.
Having examined a range of strategies adopted by corporations, Friedan concluded her
consideration of the sexual sell by using rhetorical strategies that offered vague hints of larger
issues. She suggested that America was a "sick society," one not willing to confront its problems
or see its purposes in terms commensurate with the ambitions of its citizens, including women.
116 Like the young radicals who wrote the Port Huron Statement for SDS in 1962, Friedan
seemed unable to utter the word "capitalism." Though C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite (1956)
went farther in exploring how elites operated undemocratically, Friedan provided the evidence
for such an analysis and then hinted at what it would mean for a male power elite to suppress
women systematically.
This second narrative emerged elsewhere. Without mentioning her version of her own
experience, Friedan talked of the transformative power of women's experience in World War II.
She wrote at one point that "women were often driven embittered" from their jobs by returning
veterans. Ever since the end of World War II, she asserted, "a propaganda campaign, as
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unanimous in this democratic nation as in the most efficient of dictatorships," had exalted the
prestige of housework. Although others would date the counterrevolution against women in the
1920s or 1930s, Friedan focused on the late 1940s, a period linked in her own experience with a
time when cold warriors undermined the left and, more specifically, the UE's fight for justice for
women. She explored the alienating nature of women's work, not in factories but in suburban
homes. She talked about the "devastating" effects of discrimination against women. At one
moment, also without mentioning herself, she spoke of women of her generation, who, though
not focusing on women's rights, were "still concerned with human rights and freedom--for
Negroes, for oppressed workers, for victims of Franco's Spain and Hitler's Germany." …
Conclusion
A more complete story of Friedan's past illuminates a wide range of issues in recent America
history. Moreover, this fuller story reveals information that enhances our sense of the importance
of Friedan's contribution to American feminism. Recognizing the origins of Friedan's 1963 book
reminds us of the way that journalists of the 1950s emerged as social critics who helped shape
the consciousness of the next decade. The recovery of her past suggests the importance of
thinking of her in comparison with New York intellectuals who, although they did much to shape
postwar ideology, generally neglected issues of gender. The Feminine Mystique sheds light on
important dimensions of gender issues. If Riesman, Whyte, and Packard suggested the
troublesome nature of male identity in the 1950s, then we can understand how Friedan gave this
theme a twist. "Male outrage," she remarked as she pointed to "the homosexuality that is
spreading like a murky smog over" America, "is the result, surely, of an implacable hatred for the
parasitic women who keep their husbands and sons from growing up." 124 The homophobia of
such a comment is standard for the period. What is also of note is Friedan's promise that the
liberation of women would strengthen a male identity that she and others found fragile. From
writers such as Whyte and Riesman, Friedan took an analysis that blamed life in the suburbs,
jobs in large organizations, and consumer culture for their inability to promote healthy
masculinity and then turned this analysis into an argument for women's liberation.
The Feminine Mystique played a critical role in reshaping the ideology and social composition of
the American left. Along with other others, such as Herbert Marcuse, Friedan was exploring how
to ground a cultural and social critique by rethinking the contributions of Freud and Marx. What
Marcuse did in Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955), Friedan did
almost a decade later: respond to the cold war by attempting to minimize her debt to Marx even
as she relied on him. For her solutions, if not her analysis, she relied on psychology. In the
process, she recovered the lessons of the discipline in which she majored at college, joining
others such as Paul Goodman, [David Riesman, Margaret Mead, Erik Erikson, and Erich Fromm
in using humanistic psychology and neo-Freudianism to ground a powerful cultural critique at a
time when other formulations were politically discredited. In her 1963 book, Friedan was
reshaping American social criticism by focusing not on the working class and the processes of
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production but on the way changes in consumer culture were reshaping the lives of the middle
class.
Friedan was not alone in experiencing what it meant to have a radical past and eventually end up
living in the suburbs, cut off from the realities of urban industrial life that once gave radicalism
its palpability. The trajectory of her career provides another example of the transition in the
media from working-class, ethnically charged cultural representations to largely suburban,
middle-class, and deracinated ones. Moreover, the widening division between the working class
and the urban poor brought issues of race to the surface in ways that made some of Friedan's
analysis outdated. At a time when unions (although not the UE) accommodated themselves to the
cold war consensus and Mills was noting the key role for university students and intellectuals in
progressive politics, Friedan was arguing that middle- and upper middle-class white women
would replace workers in the vanguard of American social protest. Her image of herself as the
frustrated housewife came from a number of sources, including her recognition that the rhetoric
of the old left shed little light on the realities of millions of American women. The persona of the
suburban housewife enabled her to talk about alienation and discrimination in a new setting and
in less radical terms.
A reconsideration of Friedan's career deepens our understanding of the relationship of the 1930s,
1940s, and 1950s to the social protests of the 1960s. Her life underscores the difficulty of
separating history into neatly packaged decades. Friedan's experiences in the 1940s and 1950s
show us once again that life in the years before the 1960s was hardly calm. It reminds us of how
issues of Communism and anti-Communism shaped a generation. Friedan's life suggests
discontinuities as well as continuities between the old left and the protests of the 1960s. If
McCarthyism prompted her to hide elements of her past from view, it also made it difficult for
her to directly confront her debt to the old left, perhaps out of a sense that she may have betrayed
a problematic or martyred cause.
Yet her life makes clear how important were World War II, unions, issues of the 1940s, and the
fights by radicals for justice for women and African Americans in setting the stage for the
reemergence of protests in the 1960s. Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein have
demonstrated that in the 1940s union members and radicals created what E. P. Thompson called a
"window of opportunity" in the struggle for civil rights for African Americans. We may come to
see that the 1940s offered a somewhat parallel situation for millions of women. Among the
forces at work, the roughly similar consequences of which Korstad and Lichtenstein have
explored for African Americans, were the war-induced economic boom that created new types
and levels of economic opportunities, the wartime entry of millions of women into the work
force and a smaller but significant number into CIO unions, the commitment of agencies of the
federal government to women's advancement, the organizational and ideological leadership of
the Communist Party, the generation of a "rights consciousness," and the broadening of public
discourse. Following the war, the returning veterans and, more significantly, an employer-led
offensive closed that window by isolating communist-influenced leaders, curbing union
ambitions, and undermining the Popular Front coalition. The result, Korstad and Lichtenstein's
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model suggests, was that when feminism reemerged in the 1960s, "it would have a different
social character and an alternative political agenda," transformed by the consequences of the lost
opportunities of the 1940s.
This revision of Friedan's past sheds light on the history of women and second-wave feminism
by enriching our sense of the origins of what happened in the 1960s. It offers vivid proof of the
intertwined processes of containment and resistance of women in the 1940s and 1950s.
Moreover, it suggests that we think of Friedan, at some crucial points in her life, as a "left
feminist" and a crucial link between generations of advocates for women's advancement.
American feminism, most historians agree, emerged in the 1960s from two sources: white,
professional, and well educated liberals, including Friedan and a few acknowledged union
activists, who relied on a Washington-based approach as they called for national legislation; and
a diverse group of women, shaped by the civil rights movement, who worked from the grass
roots to shape a more adversarial insurgency. However, if Rosa Parks refused to take a seat at the
back of a segregated bus not simply because her feet hurt, then Friedan did not write The
Feminine Mystique simply because she was an unhappy housewife. Nor Friedan alone. Gerda
Lerner, Bella Abzug, Eleanor Flexner, and Milton Meltzer are among those active in the labor
movement in the 1940s who would emerge in the 1960s as people who helped shape post-1963
feminism. Once we recover the stories of their counterparts among middle-class activists across
the nation (perhaps, like those discussed above, predominantly Jews) and among working-class
and African American women, the importance of the 1940s in the history of American feminism
will be clearer.
Friedan's experiences happened in specific contexts, especially the cauldron of labor union
activism and even more particularly that provided by the UE. Whatever the accompanying
frustrations and however much her focus shifted, her work for the UE shaped her engagement
with the issues women faced. Friedan's story suggests that, at least as far as she and some others
are concerned, what we have seen as liberal feminism had radical origins. Consequently, it
underscores the importance of a reconsideration of the nature of the breach between the
proponents of women's rights in the early 1960s and the late 1960s advocates of women's
liberation, especially socialist feminists. For Friedan, labor union activity in the 1940s and early
1950s provided the bridge over which she moved from the working class to women as the
repository of her hopes as well as much of the material from which she would fashion her
feminism in The Feminine Mystique.
Daniel Horowitz is a professor of American studies and history at Smith College. His most recent
book is Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (1994).