The Feminine Mystique (1963): Betty Friedan's Second Wave

The Feminine Mystique is a book by the American writer Betty Friedan, published by W. W. Norton on 19 February 1963. It argued that many educated American housewives suffered from “the problem that has no name”, a deep dissatisfaction caused by a culture that told women they could find fulfilment only as wives and mothers. A bestseller that reached millions of readers, it is widely credited with helping to spark the second wave of the feminist movement in the United States.

Background: women in post-war America

After the Second World War, many women who had taken jobs in wartime industry, like the workers celebrated as Rosie the Riveter, left paid work or were pushed out of it. The 1950s brought a baby boom, rapid suburban growth and a powerful cultural ideal of the full-time housewife.

Women were marrying younger: by the mid-1950s the median age at first marriage for American women had fallen to about 20. Many women went to college but left without finishing, or graduated and then devoted themselves to home and family. Women’s magazines, advertising and popular psychology presented domestic life as women’s natural destiny.

Betty Friedan, born Bettye Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, in 1921, had graduated from Smith College in 1942. In the 1940s she worked as a journalist for left-wing and labour union publications, then, after marrying Carl Friedan and having children, wrote freelance articles for women’s magazines while living in the New York suburbs.

How the book was written

In 1957 Friedan prepared a questionnaire for her Smith classmates ahead of their 15th reunion. Many of the replies described frustration and a sense of emptiness despite outwardly comfortable lives. When women’s magazines declined to publish an article based on her findings, Friedan expanded the research into a book.

She spent about five years on it, interviewing women, reading women’s magazines from the 1930s to the 1950s, and studying the work of psychologists, sociologists and educators. She also drew on the ideas of the psychologist Abraham Maslow about human growth and self-fulfilment.

What the book argued

The first chapter, “The Problem That Has No Name”, described suburban housewives who did everything expected of them yet felt their lives were incomplete. Friedan argued that this was not an individual neurosis but a social problem.

She traced how the “feminine mystique”, the belief that women’s highest value lay in femininity, marriage and motherhood, had been spread after the war. She criticised women’s magazines, which she said had replaced the independent heroines of earlier decades with happy housewives; advertisers, who saw the housewife as the ideal consumer; and the popular influence of Sigmund Freud’s theories about women. She also attacked educators who steered women away from serious study.

Friedan’s study of magazine fiction was one of the book’s most striking parts. She contrasted the confident, career-minded heroines of women’s magazine stories in the late 1930s with the stories of the late 1950s, in which heroines found happiness by giving up work for marriage and motherhood. She argued that the change reflected not women’s real wishes but the needs of editors, advertisers and a post-war culture eager to return to traditional roles.

In one notorious chapter Friedan compared the suburban home to a “comfortable concentration camp”, an analogy many readers then and since have found overstated. Her solution was for women to pursue education and meaningful work alongside family life, which she called a “new life plan”.

Reception

The book was an immediate success. Its hardback edition sold well, and the paperback edition of 1964 sold more than a million copies; total sales have since run into several millions, and it has been translated into many languages.

Friedan received a flood of letters from women who said the book described their own lives. Others reacted with hostility, and some housewives felt it belittled their work. Critics also noted that Friedan wrote almost entirely about white, middle-class, college-educated women. The writer bell hooks, in “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center” (1984), argued that the book ignored women of colour and working-class women, many of whom already worked outside the home out of necessity.

Later historians, notably Daniel Horowitz, showed that Friedan had presented herself as a typical suburban housewife while playing down her earlier career as a labour journalist involved in radical politics.

From book to movement

The book appeared at a moment of change. The President’s Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, issued its report later in 1963, and the Equal Pay Act was signed in June 1963. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned employment discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race, but the new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was slow to enforce the sex provision.

Frustrated, Friedan and other activists founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in June 1966 during a conference in Washington. Friedan wrote its statement of purpose and served as its first president until 1970. She helped found what is now NARAL in 1969 and the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971, and proposed the Women’s Strike for Equality of 26 August 1970.

Friedan sometimes clashed with younger, more radical feminists, notably over the place of lesbian rights in the movement, which she resisted in the late 1960s before later supporting it. She published “The Second Stage” in 1981 and “The Fountain of Age” in 1993, and died on her 85th birthday, 4 February 2006.

Myths and facts

Myth: The Feminine Mystique started American feminism. Organised feminism in the United States goes back at least to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, and women won the national vote in 1920. Friedan herself drew on earlier thinkers; Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”, published in France in 1949 and in English in 1953, had already analysed women’s position in depth. The book’s achievement was to reach a mass audience at a moment when many women were ready to act.

Myth: Friedan was an ordinary housewife who stumbled on the problem. She was an experienced professional journalist with a background in labour and left-wing politics, which shaped her analysis even though she said little about it in the book.

Myth: American women in the 1950s did not work outside the home. By 1960 more than a third of American women were in the paid labour force, including many married women and a large share of Black women. The book’s portrait of the full-time suburban housewife described an important ideal and a large group, but not all women.

Timeline

• 1921, 4 February: Bettye Goldstein is born in Peoria, Illinois.
• 1957: Friedan surveys her Smith College classmates for their 15th reunion.
• 1963, 19 February: The Feminine Mystique is published by W. W. Norton.
• 1963, 10 June: The Equal Pay Act is signed into law.
• 1964, 2 July: The Civil Rights Act bans sex discrimination in employment.
• 1966, 30 June: NOW is founded, with Friedan as its first president.
• 1970, 26 August: The Women’s Strike for Equality, proposed by Friedan, takes place.
• 2006, 4 February: Friedan dies in Washington, D.C.

Why it matters

The Feminine Mystique gave a name and a public voice to the frustrations of many American women and helped turn private discontent into a political movement. Its limits, especially its narrow focus on white middle-class women, became part of later debates within feminism, but it remains one of the most influential American non-fiction books of the 20th century.