Betty Friedan
The Feminine Mystique
“That is the distinction between human
and animal behavior, or between the
human being and the machine.”
• “We have to stop being so teacher-centered
and become student-centered. It’s not what
you think they need, but what they think they
need. That’s the functional approach.” (251)
– Social “realities”
– Career training
– Lack of critical dimension
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Freedom of Choice
• Then-current goal of totalized motherhood
counterproductive
– Produced weak, dependent adults
• Women are not forced to choose the life of a
housewife, but how free is their choice to do so?
– Freudian theory & functionalist approach to gender
make homemaker mother central figure in child’s life
• Examples: Autism, neuroses
– Thwarted in efforts at education & career
– Manipulated by marketing, mass media
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Demographics
• Research Conclusions:
– “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 … (without becoming a
Career Woman). The art of good homemaking should
be the goal of every normal woman.”
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“She’ll want them. She’s a real girl.”
• Marketing should target very young teenage girls
– “The young ones will want what the others want, even if
their mothers don’t.”
• Older, more independent women should be made to
feel guilt
– The product will enable you to give your husband and
children the things you should, but aren’t.
• “Suggest that it becomes truly a part of you, reflecting
you.” (317)
– Housework should be not a chore, but a joy. A chance for
self-expression (by women. Men have better things to do.)
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“You can be the woman you yearn to
be with a Plymouth all your own”
• “With increasing skill, the ads glorify [a
woman’s] ‘role’ as an American housewife—
knowing that her very lack of identity in that
role will make her fall for whatever they are
selling.” (327)
– Abstracted, restrictive image of femininity and
pressure to achieve it
– Impossibility of this results in unhappiness,
desperation
– Products will help to close the gap!
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False Consciousness
• These qualities create a demand in the market for
products that will help to achieve the feminine ideal
– Ad for Ultima: “Dedicated to the woman who spends a
lifetime living up to her potential!”
– “The only totally integrated program of nutrient make-up
and skin care—designed to lift a woman’s good looks to
their absolute peak. The woman who uses Ultima feels a
deep sense of fulfillment. A new kind of pride. For this
luxurious Cosmetic Collection is the ultimate... Beyond it
there is nothing.” (quoted on 328)
• As in Marcuse, sincere desires may be tools of your own
oppression
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Totalized Housewifery
• The glorification of “woman’s role,” then, seems to be in proportion
to society’s reluctance to treat women as complete human beings;
for the less real that function is, the more it is decorated with
meaningless details to conceal its emptiness. (340)
• Housewifery “had to become the very end of life [for women] to
conceal the obvious fact that it is barely the beginning.”
– Work expands to fill time: “labor saving” devices mean only that more
unnecessary tasks have to be performed
– Self-identification only as “wife and mother” leads to need for children
in order to give life meaning
• Constant worry, micromanaging child’s life due to mother’s identification with
it
• “In order to be a woman, I have to have children.” (375)
– Constantly staying busy so as not to face crisis of meaning
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Architecture of Power
• Open layout of suburban ranch-style homes
reinforces feminine mystique (348)
– No doors, no privacy
– Open space means that messes are continually
visible, need cleaning
– Never separated from children
– Husband leaves, wife never does
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Manipulation of the Narrative
• In late 1950’s, depression & exhaustion among
housewives widespread enough to be recognized
by women’s magazines as ‘domestic boredom’
– ‘Always has been, always will be woman’s lot’
• Capturing history
– Solution: “Honest enjoyment of some part of the job
such as cooking or an incentive such as a party in the
offing and, above all, male praise are good antidotes
for domestic boredom”
• Maintains dependence on household & husband for sense of
meaning
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• Surely there are many women in America who are
happy at the moment as housewives, and some whose
abilities are fully used in the housewife role. But
happiness is not the same thing as the aliveness of
being fully used. Nor is human intelligence, human
ability as static thing.
– Grow or die
• Among housewives, “the adjusted, or cured ones
without conflict or anxiety in the confined world of the
home have forfeited their own being; the others, the
miserable, frustrated ones, still have some hope.” (423)
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Dehumanization
• Among prisoners at Dachau, “those who ‘adjusted’ to
the conditions of the camps surrendered their human
identity and went almost indifferently to their deaths.”
– “Their capacity for self-determination, their ability to
predict the future and to prepare for it, was systematically
destroyed.” (423)
• The world for women functions similarly (though much
more safely and comfortably)
– Among housewives, “the adjusted, or cured ones without
conflict or anxiety in the confined world of the home have
forfeited their own being; the others, the miserable,
frustrated ones, still have some hope.”
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“The only thing that made her feel
alive”
• Sex brings a feeling of being wanted and needed, providing
this feeling when the household no longer does
– “Sex is the only frontier open to women who have always lived
within the confines of the feminine mystique.”
– Identification of the individual with the body
• She boasted of the intellectual prowess, the professional
distinction, of the man who, she hinted, wanted to sleep
with her. “It makes you feel proud, like an achievement.
You don’t want to hide it. You want everyone to know,
when it’s a man of his stature.” (364)
– In search of meaning & rebellion, still only a body
– Still defining identity through a man
– “Sex without self, sex for lack of self.” (387)
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What is it to be human?
• For an individual to “take his existence seriously
enough to make his own commitment to life, and
to the future; he forfeits his existence by failing to
fulfill his entire being. (430)
• The “unique mark of the human being” is “the
capacity to transcend the present and to act in
the light of the possible, the mysterious capacity
to shape the future.”
– This is a shared quality of nearly every author in this
course.
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• “It is precisely this unique human capacity to
transcend the present, to lives one’s life by
purposes stretching into the future—to live
not at the mercy of the world, but as a builder
and designer of that world—that is the
distinction between human and animal
behavior, or between the human being and
the machine.” (432)
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• “There is something less than fully human in
those who have never known commitment to an
idea, who have never risked an exploration of the
unknown, who have never attempted the kind of
creativity of which men and women are
potentially capable.” (437)
• But women are neither expected nor encouraged
to live to their full capacities. They are reduced
from human beings to creatures of pure biology.
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What will it take to end oppression
by the feminine mystique?
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Money
Organization
Legal efforts
Political action & protest
Personal resolve
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Money
• Not only for the women’s movement (though
that too) but for women themselves
– Employment
• Not just jobs, but work
– Independence
• No longer entirely reliant on husband for either identity
or funding
– Reproductive rights
• Contraception
• Abortion
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Organization
• Strong, hierarchical political organization to
deploy resources and organize efforts
– Vs. then-fashionable egalitarian model
– Engage at all levels of politics, from Senate to the
street
– Core group of highly committed individuals
around which to structure the greater
organization
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Political Action & Protest
• Lawsuits to compel the enforcement of existing
anti-discrimination laws
• Mobilize to elect feminist-friendly candidates,
create pressure for laws advancing cause of
women’s rights
• Mass demonstrations & protest
– Pressures individuals to change their own views
– Friedan sees women’s liberation as a part of same
struggle as civil rights, anti-war, other movements for
equality
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Personal Resolve
• High possible social cost
– Women who still embrace feminine mystique may
ostracize the woman who rejects it,
neighborhoods may exclude the family
• High possible personal cost
– Many husbands will be glad to no longer be the
only real person in their families, many others will
not
• What price is a woman willing to pay to be
free?
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Gender Issues
Q: Does having a liberated mother make you
gay?
A: No, having a needy housewife for a mom
makes you gay.
– “The love of men masks his forbidden excessive
love for his mother; his hatred and revulsion for all
women is a reaction to the one woman who kept
him from becoming a man.” (384)
• Freud here used uncritically. Why?
• Homosexuals for Friedan not-men
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• Friedan demonstrates same essentialism re:
homosexuals that she attacks when it is applied
to women
– “Male homosexuals… are Peter Pans, forever childlike,
afraid of age, grasping at youth in their continual
search for some reassurance in sexual magic.” (384)
– “The shallow unreality, immaturity, promiscuity, lack
of lasting human satisfaction that characterize the
homosexual’s sex life usually characterize all his life
and interests.” (385)
• If this was true of homosexuality in the 1960’s, why might
that be?
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Homosexuality: the Creeping Menace!
• “The homosexuality that is spreading like a murky
smog over the American scene is…ominous…”
(385)
– Though she attacks the imbalance of power between
genders, Friedan does not look to challenge basic
concepts of gender
– This is the space in which the Third Wave of feminism
launches its critique. Why can you not be gay and a
man? Does attributing essential nature to men &
women necessarily reflect an exercise of power?
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