Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique
Background
The background for understanding Betty Friedan is the feminist movement.
Friedan is considered the founder of what has become known as the Second
Wave of the Feminist movement, which began in the 1960’s. But first we
will look at some history, the history of patriarchy and the history of the first
wave of feminism.
What is this thing we call patriarchy? Has it always been with us? Is it nature
or nurture? Can it really come to an end? And if patriarchy comes to an end,
what will take its place? To understand patriarchy we need to go back to the
beginning. And the problem is that we can’t! What do I mean by that? I
mean that there is only about four or five thousand years of recorded history
and what we call patriarchy has been around the whole time. So in some
ways there is no way to get to the time before patriarchy existed. But in
other ways we can do some educated speculation based on the work of
archeologists and anthropologists.
Betty Friedan (1921-2006)
Betty Naomi Goldstein was born in Peoria, Illinois. Her father ran a
jeweler’s shop. Her mother had been the women's page editor of the Peoria
paper. When people asked Friedan why she started the women's movement,
she replied that she could not remember any early instance of sexual
discrimination, but she was very aware of the waste of her mother's talents.
She called her mother's frustration an "impotent rage" — a woman with too
much power inside the house and not enough outside it. She graduated from
Smith College in 1942, and then worked as a journalist. She had a number of
jobs and in 1947 she married Carl Friedan. They had three children together.
Friedan became a leader in the feminist movement. In 1966 she co-founded
the National Organization for Women, a civil rights group dedicated to
achieving equal opportunity for women. It campaigned for childcare,
abortion rights and greater representation of women in government. One of
her last books was The Fountain of Age, which tackled society's attitudes to
aging. Friedan died of congestive heart failure in 2006 on her 85th birthday.
The Feminine Mystique
The Feminine Mystique was published 44 years ago in 1963. How much has
changed since then and how much of this change can be attributed to this
one book is unknown, but unquestioned. It is a book that changed millions
of lives. So what is the feminine mystique and what was Friedan writing
about? It is an image of women that Friedan said created the “the problem
that has no name.” What was this image? It was the image of women that
defined them in terms of only their sexual relationship to men, as daughters,
wives, and mothers. The world is different today. A woman can be anything
she chooses. One striking example of this is to watch something like the
Olympics on television. It was all about men in the past, but now you can
see women participating in all sorts of sports. This is a symbol of how
quickly things have changed. Just forty-four years ago none of this would
have seemed possible. Friedan saw a new emergence of the feminine
mystique in the equation of feminism with the loss of family values, the
higher divorce rate, and the number of single parent families. She said the
equation is a false one. The emergence of feminism may have played a role
in the loss of traditional family life, but that is not the fault of liberating
women, but of a system that sacrifices women’s needs for the sake of the
system.
Summary
Betty Friedan found that women during the 1950’s and the 1960’s were
living lives of quiet desperation, lives that lacked creativity and meaning.
Friedan gave women a new chance to see themselves as people rather than
simply in the light of their relationships to men. Her issue was not that the
traditional motherhood role is wrong; but that women should not be limited
to it. Friedan also made a strong case in her 1996 new introduction to The
Feminine Mystique that the issue should no longer be seen as men versus
women. That issue has become irrelevant. When men and women work
together as a team rather than against each other they will have the time and
energy to fight the forces that are really causing family trouble. Men and
women have too much at stake that they need to struggle with, a struggle
that can only be won when they work together.