The Feminine Mystique in Our Shared Shelf

Apr 15, 2013 Lacey Louwagie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, non-fiction, feminism

Reading this book made it perfectly clear to me why it made such a sensation when it was published. It's one of the most smart, incisive, and cogent feminist critiques of the culture that I've ever read. I was really amazed by how Betty Friedan pulled together threads from so many different areas -- psychology, pop culture, academia, advertising, personal experience, countless interviews -- to weave the story of how dangerous it is for a woman to invest her whole self into her role as wife/mothe Reading this book made it perfectly clear to me why it made such a sensation when it was published. It's one of the most smart, incisive, and cogent feminist critiques of the culture that I've ever read. I was really amazed by how Betty Friedan pulled together threads from so many different areas -- psychology, pop culture, academia, advertising, personal experience, countless interviews -- to weave the story of how dangerous it is for a woman to invest her whole self into her role as wife/mother/woman.

The book is especially compelling because it was written at a time before my own, a time that I didn't experience, but that I "think" I understand based on history and the other feminist reflections I've read about it. But there really is no replacement for listening to the voices that were there. And one thing that struck me was that, in many ways, the 1950s suburban life was a bit of a dystopia, in which many disciplines were complicit--not so far off the mark from Stepford Wives after all. It also struck me that, while so much has changed, the women who still place all their worth in whether they have a boyfriend/husband/children still fall prey to many of the maladies that plagued "housewives" of the 50s and 60s -- trying to live vicariously through their husbands and children, having their growth "arrested" at whatever age they left school, and essentially never having to ask the hard questions about who they really are. One of the statistics that will most stick with me from this book was from a study in which women who were planning to pursue a career after college or go onto higher education were rated as having lower "adjustment scores" than women who planned to get married right away. For a long time this was touted as "proof" that women were really suited for a domestic role -- but then the follow-up research emerged. It turned out that, when they surveyed the same women in middle age, those who had pursued careers or higher education were far more adjusted than their counterparts who had decided to "just get married" -- essentially, the former group avoided the midlife crisis their counterparts experienced because they did the hard work of defining their identities early on, and had less of a sense that something was "missing" later. I actually related to that, as I remember how jealous I felt of my classmates who were getting married after college, because they knew what was happening "next" and weren't going out into the world alone. Now, I wouldn't trade those years of being on my own for anything.

It was also eye-opening for me to realize that the 50s were a bit of a backlash against the more liberal 20s-40s; I think I tend to assume that things have just progressively gotten "better" for women, but it's not actually that straightforward. This book also gave me a big "aha!" in terms of my own ambivalence about homemaking and domestic work -- namely, that I sometimes find myself happier doing it than paid work; that I'm often tempted to invest more of my time in those arenas so that we could have better meals, a cleaner house, cleaner laundry, etc. I've often felt somewhat betrayed by these desires, as if all my feminist consciousness is for naught -- but reading this book made me realize that the difference lies in the fact that I've grown up in a time and had opportunities that have led to people always *assuming* I was more than someone who did the dishes and cooked. Thus, these domestic chores can sometimes serve as a nice break because my identity is not invested in them; I know that no one sees me primarily as the person who does the cooking, even though I do do most of the cooking, but that I have the luxury of people knowing me and respecting me on so many other levels -- as a writer, as an activist, as a friend, as a feminist, etc. The whole poison of the feminine mystique was in its reduction of women to a single role, and its insistence that they stay there.

Although there remains a lot that is relevant here, there are still some moments when this book shows its age. Betty Friedan's take on homosexuality is misguided at best, and she also falls into the trap of "mother-blaming" for kids growing up a certain way -- it's just that she's prone to blaming the "housewife, live vicariously" mothers rather than the "career women" that were the target of scorn at the time.

I acknowledge that this book is limited in its scope, that it doesn't speak to all women's experience of the 1950s, and especially that it ignores the perspective of working class women and the many who didn't have the luxury of choice when it came to whether they would work inside or outside of the home. I'm glad that feminist critique has started exploring those issues now as well. Although the seminal feminist text of the time, it couldn't address every feminist issue. But what it did, it did well.

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