Who Read “The Feminine Mystique”?
Origins of feminism of the “just”
The Feminine Mystique is widely regarded as the “click” that started the Second Wave of feminism. That’s how Betty Freidan described the collective moments around the country that launched a movement. The suburban housewife had a “click,” a moment of realization that maybe this — the husband, kids, house, garden, and community — wasn’t all there was in life.
A few years ago that book that launched the Second Wave — on Friedan’s not so novel insight (see the New Yorker link below) — had it’s 50th Anniversary. What struck me, in all the praise and retrospectives, it appeared that hardly anyone had read the book since its original run. And I’m not talking about regular women, but the women who ply feminism as a trade. They were reading the book for the first time…for its 50th anniversary.
The Guardian ran a reading blog, a “Pop Up Book Club,” because many of their writers hadn’t read it. Emily Bazelton and others at Slate posted some very revealing articles about how they hadn’t read it. I liked this passage in particular:
I mean, Friedan compares, at chapter length, the plight of women stuck at home with their kids to concentration camp victims. Sure, I’ve never had to sit alone with a mop and a crying baby and no Internet (side question: Was the problem that had no name possibly the lack of Wi-Fi?), but that seems more than a bit extreme to me. In fact, as much as I found myself cheering at the stirring introduction and conclusion, for much of the middle of the book, I was muttering and angrily underlining what I found to be particularly judgmental passages. “A baked potato is not as big as the world,” Friedan writes, “and vacuuming the living room floor — with or without makeup — is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman’s full capacity.” Sharp is right! Is it any wonder it occasionally feels like feminism has devolved into a spinning carousel of accusatory blog posts about how your choices aren’t the exact right choices (including your choice to blog about your choices), with this as one of our founding texts?
Stephanie Coontz didn’t read it until Basic Books asked her to publish a retrospective. From the intro of her book:
I jumped at the chance. I was certain that rereading this groundbreaking book would be an educational and inspiring experience…. After only a few pages I realized that in fact I had never read The Feminine Mystique, and after a few chapters I began to find much of it boring and dated…. It made claims about women’s history that I knew were oversimplified, exaggerating both the feminist victories of the 1920s and the antifeminist backlash of the 1940s and 1950s.
And the first review of Coontz’s A Strange Stirring:
I am a young professor of sociology teaching classes on gender, marriage and social change — and I have never read Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique. Like many women of my generation, I thought I had. I must have, I told myself. Perhaps in college? No. And it turns out that very few of my well-educated feminist-leaning friends have either.
Since the 50th, not much has changed. Having re-read it then myself, I refreshed my memory and find it easy to recognize a women who has read the book and who has not. I wonder if only conservatives have actually read it since about 1970 — which is how we know that feminism was never about choice, but certain choices. Bolstering my claim, the Network of Enlightened Women, or NeW the young college conservative answer to NOW, also ran a book study, but for 19 and 20 year old students, not degreed longtime feminist advocates. We practice “know thy oppositon.”
Regardless, considering TFM’s influence, anyone serious about participating in American intellectual discussion should have read the book. Alas.
As a practical matter, feminists’ failure to study their history means that they’ve spent 50 years telling us that feminism was whatever it meant to them, cherry picking the bits they liked, denying the bits they didn’t, and pretending that the ripple effects of the Second Wave are somebody else’s fault (usually the patriarchy’s). “Feminism is just about…” Oh please, do tell me about feminism of the “just”.
It’s a shame. If they had read just TFM, they might have recognized the foundations for some ills today. For instance, the common lament that society is too focused on economic activity, some of that blame belongs to Friedan’s insistence that women must seek paid employment. They also might have avoided the Mommy Wars, as Friedan foresaw that corporate jobs and early motherhood would not mix well.
For anyone who has not yet read The Feminine Mystique — I know moms are short on time to read 50 year old social commentary — just read the last chapter, “A New Life Plan for Women”. It will allow you to avoid most of the insulting rhetoric and see how much better the feminist movement might have been if Friedan had won the movement’s internal struggles in the 70s when she fought against trading the housewife mystique for the sex goddess mystique or the career woman mystique. She came to recognize her mistakes in launching the movement, and she was pushed out of power for it.
It’s been over 50 years, yet the feminine mystique hasn’t vanished. It has multiplied. And the solutions are still elusive. Why is a post for another day, but it does have to do with women not knowing modern feminist history.
