The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique, a landmark book by feminist Betty Friedan published in 1963 that described the pervasive dissatisfaction among women in mainstream American society in the post-World War II period. She coined the term feminine mystique to describe the societal assumption that women could find fulfillment through housework, marriage, sexual passivity, and child rearing alone. Further, prevailing attitudes held that “truly feminine” women had no desire for higher education, careers, or a political voice; rather, they found complete fulfillment in the domestic sphere. Friedan, however, noted that many housewives were unsatisfied with their lives but had difficulty articulating their feelings. Friedan deemed that unhappiness and inability to live up to the feminine mystique the “problem that has no name.”

Friedan’s critique

Human-potential psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, popular during the late 1950s and early ’60s, influenced Friedan’s claim that the feminine mystique denied women their “basic human need to grow.” Because that basic need for development was stunted, Friedan maintained, women would remain unhappy, and children would grow up with unfulfilled and neurotic mothers. Friedan also argued that the feminine mystique hurt women both personally and professionally, and she held that, for women as well as for men, identity was largely cultivated through a sense of personal achievement, primarily through a career.

Situating her study of women in the post-World War II era, Friedan argued that when men returned home after the war, women—who had stepped in to fill the jobs men had left in order to fight in the war—were expected to return to the home and to perform more-suitable “feminine” activities. That expectation inspired the feminine mystique. Men returning from war looked to their wives for nurturing. Furthermore, largely because of the escalating Cold War during the 1950s, the cultivation of the American nuclear family and the idealized domestic space was part of an ideological battle against Soviet Russia. Middle-class white women in particular were considered warriors in that battle, because, in representing idealized femininity, they showed the superiority of the American capitalist consumer society.

Friedan used statistics and interviews to illustrate women’s desire to achieve the feminine mystique. For instance, by the end of the 1950s, 14 million girls were becoming engaged by age 17, and the average age of marriage had dropped to 20. The number of women in college dropped from 47 percent in 1920 to 35 percent in 1958. During the mid-1950s, 60 percent of female students dropped out of college to get married or to cease their higher education before they became “undesirable” on the marriage market. The media perpetuated the notion that women went to college only to land a husband—the “Mrs. Degree.” From touting women’s natural role as mothers and caregivers to advocating how to properly take care of one’s husband, the media and the education system helped perpetuate all aspects of the feminine mystique. The American housewife who properly performed her domestic duties was deemed by the American media to be the envy of women throughout the world.

When Friedan interviewed housewives, however, she found that behaviours suggested in magazines and home economics textbooks—such as having dinner on the table when her husband returned from work and making him comfortable by taking off his shoes and offering him a drink—did not always prove fulfilling for women and that most women could not live up to that idealized feminine behaviour. Unable to attain the feminine mystique, many women spent years with psychologists who tried to help them adjust to their “feminine role,” or they took tranquilizers or drank alcohol to ease their feelings of emptiness. By the early 1960s the media had recognized that suburban women were often unhappy with their roles. Some attributed that unhappiness to education; they contended that the more educated a woman was, the more likely she was to be unfulfilled as a housewife. Magazine articles further suggested better ways to find fulfillment through sex.

Friedan’s own solution to the problem differed greatly from those in mainstream American society. She rejected the feminine mystique and suggested that women develop a new “life plan.” Rather than being treated as a “career,” housework was to be finished as quickly as possible. Friedan further contended that a woman could have a successful career as well as a family. Education, in her estimation, had less to do with reinforcing the feminine mystique than with the outright emancipation of women.

Impact and criticism

The Feminine Mystique was one of many catalysts for the second-wave feminist movement (1960s–80s). By the end of the 1980s, however, its flaws had been clearly identified. Its arguments, broadly speaking, were less relevant, because twice as many women were in the workforce as had been during the 1950s. Furthermore, feminists of colour, notably bell hooks, found Friedan’s manifesto both racist and classist, not at all applicable to African Americans and other working-class women who joined the labour force from necessity. Social historian Daniel Horowitz, in Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique (1998), revealed that Friedan had been dishonest about her vantage point, which she claimed was that of a suburban mother and housewife. She had been a leftist radical activist from the time she was at Smith College. It was, he concluded, a necessary fiction if both she and her feminist ideas were to be given a chance to take root. Still other critics noted that she based some of her theories on studies that have since proved inaccurate.

Despite the ensuing criticism, the book undeniably galvanized many women to think about their roles and identities in society. Since its first publication, it has been reissued numerous times with additions—by Friedan and other feminist writers and scholars—that provide further context.