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The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning.... Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this All?”
—Page 1, The Feminine Mystique
THE OPENING PARAGRAPH OF FRIEDAN’S BOOK IS ONE OF THE TWO OR THREE passages that women who read the book in the first years after its publication still remember most vividly.
“Everything just clicked,” said Sally A., who read it as a thirty-two-year-old housewife in Kansas. She told me she had often wondered whether she should see a psychiatrist because of her tendency to cry “for no reason” in the middle of the afternoon. “But I couldn’t afford it, and I was too much the daughter of my working-class folks to imagine doing something as self-indulgent as paying someone good money to talk about myself. Reading that book, though, it was like reading what I would have said to her if we’d been able to sit down for a cup of coffee.”
Friedan “called it perfectly,” said Lillian Rubin, looking back to her life long before she ever imagined she would become a nationally renowned psychologist and author. “The feeling didn’t have a name. It didn’t have a reason. So you turned it inward and assumed you were the problem. And so did everyone around you.”
Ruth Nemzoff ’s life was changed when a teenage girl who babysat for her made her aware that she was walking through her life in a fog. “‘Mrs. B,’ she said to me, ‘I think you need to read this book.’”
A husband in a small town in eastern Washington gave his wife the book because he had been worried about her moodiness. “I never even realized what I was feeling until I read that first chapter,” said Stella J. “I felt like she’d looked into my heart and put into words the feelings I’d been afraid to admit.”
Long before a slightly younger generation of women coined the phrase “the personal is political,” Betty Friedan used that concept, wrapped in the language of the emerging human-potential and self-help movements, to convince women who were hurting that they could and should do something about it. In fact, sociologist Wendy Simonds considers The Feminine Mystique the first modern self-help book for women, noting the similarities in the letters Friedan received and those sent more than twenty years later to Robin Norwood, author of Women Who Love Too Much. In both cases, readers experienced a shock of recognition and an overwhelming sense of relief to learn that they were not alone in their feelings. But one crucial difference speaks to the unique impact Friedan had on women who read her book.
In researching her own book, Women and Self-Help Culture, Simonds found that many readers of modern self-help books were repeat customers, buying many such books and constantly seeking out new articles on related topics. But they valued the books more for the feelings they elicited than for any particular information they imparted. Often the readers could not articulate exactly what they got from a self-help book they had liked, or even remember its central points. “When I don’t need it, why do I want to remember it?” asked one woman rhetorically. By contrast, women who read Friedan’s book back in 1963 or 1964 could still say, nearly fifty years later, precisely what they learned from it. The Feminine Mystique may have been the first self-help book they ever read, but it was also the last many of them ever needed.
“I have a friend who reads those self-help books all the time,” Janet M. told me, “and they affect her just like people used to say about a meal in a Chinese restaurant: ‘It tastes good, but an hour later you’re hungry again.’ The Feminine Mystique was filling. It stayed with you for the rest of your life.”
The Feminine Mystique engaged its fans on both an intellectual and an emotional level. Somehow Friedan managed to write a book that was more than three hundred pages long, with chapters titled “The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud” and “The Functional Freeze, the Feminine Protest, and Margaret Mead,” and still evoke the kind of emotional response we now associate with chick flicks or confessional interviews on daytime talk shows. She took ideas and arguments that until then had been confined mainly to intellectual and political circles and she couched them in the language of the women’s magazines she had begun writing for in the 1950s.
There already was a name for the overt barriers women faced in American society: sex discrimination. Contrary to some of the myths that have grown up around Friedan’s book, plenty of people were already addressing this issue when The Feminine Mystique was published. But there was no name for the guilt, depression, and sense of hopelessness many housewives felt.
“Sometimes, a woman would say, ‘I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete,’” Friedan wrote. “Or she would say, ‘I feel as if I don’t exist.’ Sometimes she blotted out the feeling with a tranquilizer. Sometimes she thought the problem was with her husband, or her children, or that what she really needed was to redecorate her house, or move to a better neighborhood, or have an affair, or another baby. Sometimes she went to a doctor with symptoms she could hardly describe: ‘A tired feeling . . . I get so angry with the children it scares me. . . . I feel like crying with no reason.’”
For more than fifteen years, Friedan told her readers, America’s psychiatrists, sociologists, women’s magazines, and television shows had portrayed the postwar housewife as the happiest person on the planet. To the extent that women believed this to accurately describe “everyone else,” they felt alone and inadequate. So when a housewife failed to attain the blissful contentment that all her counterparts supposedly enjoyed, Friedan said, she blamed herself—or perhaps her husband: “If a woman had a problem in the 1950’s and 1960’s, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself.... She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never knew how many other women shared it. If she tried to tell her husband, he didn’t understand what she was talking about. She did not really understand it herself.”
When American families settled down to their favorite television shows each evening, contented homemakers such as June Cleaver, Harriet Nelson, and Donna Reed reigned supreme. True, there was the hyperactive title character of I Love Lucy, whose unrealistic fantasies about becoming an entertainer like her husband or developing a moneymaking business of her own provided an endless source of screwball comedy. But at the end of each episode Lucy always recognized that her efforts to escape being “just a housewife” had once more backfired and that her exasperated but loving husband had been right again. In 1962, the Saturday Evening Post was still assuring readers that few housewives even day-dreamed about any life other than that of a full-time homemaker, and that their occasional “blue” moods could easily be assuaged by a few words of praise for their cooking or their new hairdo.
Yet for those who cared to look, Friedan pointed out, signs of trouble had been clear for some time. Some doctors had begun to refer to women’s persistent complaints of fatigue and depression as “the housewife’s syndrome.” Women’s magazines were publishing articles with such titles as “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped” or “The Mother Who Ran Away.” Social commentators, revisiting Freud’s famous question “What does a woman want?” had fretted about why the American woman was “dissatisfied with a lot that women of other lands can only dream of,” as one journalist mused in the March 7, 1960, issue of Newsweek.
Most so-called experts, Friedan charged, never questioned the idea that all life’s meaning could be found in the role of wife and mother. Rather, they sought to identify what had led women to wrongly devalue these roles. Many blamed higher education for distracting women with lofty academic studies they would never use instead of properly preparing them for marriage and motherhood.
Some commentators noted that modern appliances were not yet efficient enough to compensate for the decline of household help since World War II, so young mothers were overwhelmed with work. Others expressed the opposite view, that mass production had taken over many of women’s more challenging household tasks, so that wives needed to try harder to find creativity and novelty in their work as homemakers.
Cultural critics claimed the American gospel of success made too many women desire careers and lose their femininity in the process. Psychiatrists and marriage counselors suggested that women’s dissatisfaction originated in sexual maladjustment.
All these explanations, Friedan argued, simply perpetuated the mystique that surrounded the roles of housewife and mother, denying women’s need for any other source of personal identity or meaning in their lives. Friedan assured her readers that their pain stemmed from a basic, unquenchable human drive to fully utilize one’s own abilities and talents for something larger than darning socks, producing tasty casseroles, and “just being there” for their husbands and children.
The Feminine Mystique introduced its readers to theories such as that of Abraham Maslow, who believed human beings had a hierarchy of needs that must be satisfied in order: first, physiological needs such as hunger and thirst; second, safety and security needs; and then social needs such as love, intimacy, and belonging. But once those needs were met, he said, other needs became equally important—the need for self-esteem and respect, and the impulse to maximize one’s creative, intellectual, and moral possibilities. Having moved beyond the hardships of the Depression and World War II, said Maslow and his followers, Americans inevitably yearned for something more than a roof over their heads and a full stomach.
But, explained Friedan, when researchers in this field defined “the mentally healthy man” as “one who has reached the ‘highest excellence of which he is capable,’” they meant the male noun literally. They believed that women had no need to search for meaning in their lives beyond their roles as wives and mothers. Indeed, many warned women that if they did desire other avenues of personal growth, it was because they were inadequate sexual partners to their husbands or unnatural mothers to their children. Such ideas were wrong, said Friedan. Women, too, had an inner drive to live up to their intellectual and creative potential.
Friedan reminded her readers that in America’s new “affluent society,” commentators of many political stripes were expressing concern that the spread of mindless conformity and consumerism was turning men into drones incapable of taking risks, achieving greatness, or contributing to society’s progress. Yet the same people were telling women that mindless conformity and consumerism in the service of the family were the deepest fulfillment they would ever find and the greatest contribution they could make to society.
The first chapter of The Feminine Mystique lays out the theme Friedan returned to time and time again: Women, like men, have the need and desire to find larger meaning in their lives. The pain that women feel when this need goes unmet should be taken no less seriously just because many of them had satisfied the lower-order needs for safety, security, and physical comfort. “Part of the strange newness of the problem,” Friedan wrote, “is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old problems of . . . poverty, sickness, hunger, cold.... It is not caused by lack of material advantages; it may not even be felt by women preoccupied with desperate problems of hunger, poverty or illness. And women who think it will be solved by more money, a bigger house, a second car . . . often discover it gets worse.”
Friedan heaped scorn on the idea that women could solve the problem, as many psychiatrists suggested, by achieving a more satisfying sexual life. One hundred years earlier, when Victorian culture permitted men, but not women, to “gratify their basic sexual needs,” many of women’s problems may have been sexual in nature. But that was not the issue facing modern women. Indeed, Friedan argued that women had been encouraged to seek too much fulfillment in their sexual lives, leading some women to wrongly conclude that an affair or a new husband would assuage their pain.
The source of “the problem with no name,” she insisted, was that modern culture did not allow women, as it allowed men, to gratify a need that was just as important as sex—the “need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings.” Denied permission to pursue this goal, misled into thinking that service to their family was the highest and only aspiration women should have, many developed “a hunger” that neither food nor sex could fill.
The women most likely to feel this hunger, Friedan said, were those who had chosen not to work outside the home. She noted that “career women may have other problems,” but the women who suffered “this nameless aching dissatisfaction” were the very ones “whose greatest ambition has been marriage and children.” Having been told that achieving these goals should satisfy their every need and aspiration, these women were afraid to admit their secret doubts and discontents. “There may be no psychological terms for the harm” done when women suppressed their hunger for stimulation and knowledge, Friedan declared. But terrible things happened “when women try to live according to an image that makes them deny their minds.”
The response to these ideas was electric. Hundreds of women wrote letters to Friedan after reading a 1960 Good Housekeeping article that previewed her book, or the excerpts of The Feminine Mystique that appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s in early 1963, or the book itself, either in hardback in 1963 or in paperback in 1964.
The Good Housekeeping article was far more cautious than The Feminine Mystique. Its central argument was summed up in the title: “Women Are People Too,” a notion that hardly seems revolutionary today. Yet letters poured in, many of them laboriously written by hand, both to the journal and to Friedan herself. The same excited phrases tumbled off their pages: “I can’t say how grateful I am”; “thank you”; the article “struck at my heart.” “Hoorah for giving this ‘misfit’ courage for self-fulfillment!” “I am one of the people you wrote about.” “I felt that the article was written just for me.” It is such “a great comfort” to find out I am not “an incurable mental case,” to “realize others feel the same,” to “know I am not alone in my quest to find who I really am!”
The writers used words such as “desperate” and “overwhelming” to describe their lives. One woman wrote: “My husband cannot understand why I have suddenly turned miserable after 11 years of a good marriage.” Until reading the article, she continued, “I had been unhappily living in the belief that my feelings about marriage were all wrong, that no other woman feels as I do.... Now that I know I am not alone in feeling as I do the future seems quite a bit brighter.”
In a letter dated August 21, 1960, one woman wrote, “For the past year, I have been in a quandary, trying to find an answer to some of the questions you pose in your article. There were times when I felt that the only answer was to consult a psychiatrist and had I the money, probably would have! The times of anger, bitterness and general frustration are simply too numerous to mention, but if I’d had any idea that hundreds of other women were feeling the same way, I don’t believe I would have felt so completely alone.”
Another woman mentioned that the article had come too late for her: “If I had only had these words and thoughts brought to my attention 10 years ago, perhaps my life would not have taken on the somewhat tragic aspect that it did. Because from just such frustrations as not feeling like a human being, I divorced my husband.”
Three years later, the letters responding to The Feminine Mystique were filled with similar sentiments. The book, declared one woman, “perfectly” described the forces that had been “flinging me against a wall of self incrimination.” Another explained: “I thought these problems and situations were only mine, and mine alone . . . and the knowledge that my neighbor-housewifes [sic] also have problems” came as such a “relief.”
One suburban housewife wrote that she had “everything materially there is to have” but frequently fled into the bathroom “to cry in the towel.” She hoped husbands would read the book. “Mine wouldn’t. . . . But at least it has helped me understand my feelings and attitudes a little better. Even if I can’t change any part of my life now, I will feel better for knowing I’m no[t] an oddball after all.”
Another wrote, “Only the other night, while talking to my husband of my discontent at being a housewife and mother only, I cried out in anguish, ‘What kind of women [sic] am I.’ Now it is a comfort to realize that I am a normal women [sic], entangled in the world of today. . . . My husband has up to now felt I could not combine being a mother with educating myself for a future role in the world. Since he has been reading your book too, I feel he will realize that these two roles are really one.... I’m determined now to make a start, perhaps earning money ironing or baby sitting to pay for each course.”
A thirty-one-year-old housewife with four children proclaimed: “You have freed me from such a mass of subconscious and conscious guilt feelings, that I feel, today, as though I had been filled with helium and turned loose!” And a nineteen-year-old college sophomore enthused, “I was so enthralled, my heart beating only for the next word—next fact—next idea—I had to stop and do something to express my fervor: I splashed out a big sign, ‘YEA BETTY FRIEDAN’ to tape on the wall in front of me.”
A few housewives sent Friedan poems they had written. “Time goes on,” was the first line of one poem. “I stay behind.” Another ended with: “She waits/ Listening/ In the dead dark/ To the sea beating itself to death on the beach . . . /She died waiting.”
Many women offered themselves as case studies of how the feminine mystique had deformed women’s psyches. “I am a classic example of arrested development,” wrote one woman, referring to Friedan’s description of how women had been infantalized by society’s expectations. “I would have been the class of 1953 had I not dropped out of college after two years.... But my internal demand for self-expression . . . has been eating away at me for about five years.” A Florida mother of four wrote that for years she had been trying in vain to explain to her husband her need “to have a purpose.” “All I’ve ever achieved was to feel guilty about wanting to be more than a housewife and a mother.”
Another woman, married eight years with two children, wrote that she had been “fighting a battle with the ‘feminine mystique’ for four years,” with a husband who “is very good as a husband but who believes women are inferior by the will of God, so it hasn’t been an easy struggle. Although I stood highest in my high school class and read constantly, none of my ideas were important.” She thanked Friedan for giving her “that extra boost I needed to know I am important to myself and my children and not just a diaper changer.”
In one letter, a woman described herself as “trapped, with no hope of freedom.... After twenty years of home, husband, and children, I finally got a chance to fulfill a dream. I went to college four evenings a week for two and a half semesters and then had to drop out. My husband gave me a choice—school or him. . . . I love my husband and so I gave up school. However, I will try to raise my sons to realize that women are people with the same dreams, hopes, and feelings as men. . . . I will also try to help my daughter realize you can be feminine, a woman, and a full person at the same time. It is too late for me, but not for them.”
Some women reported that they were reading the book with their husbands, and a few husbands wrote to say that they now understood their wives’ depression better and would try to help them pursue outside interests. One husband, a father to two girls, thanked Friedan for making him feel a little constructive guilt about women’s lack of options.
Other women complained that their husbands felt threatened, as one put it, by the idea “that I might have any interest other than him and the children.” In a January 1964 letter, a woman who had been “uprooted” by her husband to move “to the boondocks of Alaska” wrote: “All I can say Betty is your husband must be a gem. You should bow down to the East every night and give thanks to the proud, individualistic male who can allow his wife to find her identity without it dissolving their marriage. To work in your direction would cost me my second husband as it did my first, so I’ll be a coward and bake my pies and tend my cottage and dream of all the prose I could write and the conversations I could have with interesting people.” As it turned out, Friedan’s marriage was not as solid as this woman assumed, and it fell apart soon after The Feminine Mystiquebecame a best seller.
Some of Friedan’s readers were professionals who already opposed the prevailing cultural prescriptions for women and thanked Friedan for giving them ammunition and validation. Many more had gone to college but dropped out before graduation to marry, or had married immediately after graduation, giving up earlier aspirations of training for a professional career to raise children who had arrived in quick succession.
Still, many readers were women who had never been to college and clearly did not have a middle-class background. Their letters often contained spelling and grammar mistakes, or specifically mentioned their lack of money and resources, sometimes complaining that the book was too expensive. Lisa F. told me that she went through the 1950s without reading any books, and no periodicals except the women’s magazines next to the hair dryer on her weekly visits to the beauty parlor. But when she read the article in Good Housekeeping, she knew she had to get that book when it came out. When she finally heard that it was in the local bookstore, “I marched right down and bought it out of my weekly food budget. It was the first non-fiction book I ever read all the way through, and I had to look up several words in my husband’s dictionary.” Journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen remembers that when she was twelve years old, she was struck by the sight of her mother, who was not normally much of a reader, “hunched over this paperback, frowning, twin divots between her dark brows.”
In a three-page handwritten letter dated October 20, 1963, one woman wrote in response to reading Friedan’s article in LIFE magazine, “Education, I have none of. But every single word you wrote was and always did go round and round in my mind till I absolutely had to stop thinking that way, so sure was I that I was some kind of nut.”
“My husband cannot understand,” she continued. “He needs only me. I need the whole world, in my mind that is.” Her children and grand-children are “a delicious big part” of that world, she wrote, but they “cannot be my whole world.”
Laura W. recalled that when she was about fifteen, in either 1963 or 1964, she had seen her mother, who had completed only two years of high school and was married to a brewery worker, hide the book in her closet when she thought no one was looking. Laura remembered sneaking in later to look at it, thinking it might be an “adult book about how to be mysterious and sexy.” Instead, it looked disappointingly boring. But she realized she had never before seen her mother read anything except magazines “and I felt somehow that it wouldn’t be good for anyone else in the family to find out.” Years later, Laura’s mother confided that she too had suffered from the problem with no name.
Not all readers felt a shock of recognition. Many disagreed vehemently with Friedan’s views. An editor at the Ladies’ Home Journal wrote to Friedan that she was sorry to report that the “huge” response to the book excerpt in the January 1963 issue contained “more cons than pros,” although, she noted, “the pros are extremely articulate.” In its next issue, the magazine reported that of the “hundreds” of letters they received, 80 percent were hostile. When McCall’s published a different excerpt the next month, historian Jessica Weiss reports, 87 percent of the people who wrote to the magazine criticized Friedan’s views.
Individuals also wrote directly to Friedan to express their disapproval. A few academics and the occasional businesswoman thought she exaggerated the prevalence of the mystique. But most of the critical letters Friedan received unwittingly confirmed the strength of the ideology she described. “It is reward enough for me to see my husband busy but happy, my children leaders in their own schools, because I am home each day making beds, cooking good meals, and ready to listen . . . to problems, sorrows, and joys,” wrote a New Jersey housewife, who thanked God for equipping women with the ability “to be all-loving, self-sacrificing, gentle, feminine.” Another letter declared: “Real women are wanted, needed, loved, and desired because we are happy, having learned the finest lesson of all: selflessness.”
Most of the angry letters were from people who had not read the entire book, having seen enough in an excerpt or a review to know that they disagreed. A woman responding to an excerpt in the Chicago Tribune gave Friedan some acerbic advice: “If you are married, Miss F. I pity your husband and family. If you are not married—DON’T EVER MARRY—until you can feel like and be A REAL WOMAN.” It was signed “from one who is.”
A letter dated February 18, 1963, from a woman who had read the excerpt in the Ladies’ Home Journal, fairly shouted with indignation: “Please! More emphasis on contented homemakers and less on frustrated lost identities. Leave the breadwinner to ‘hubby’—result—more inflated male egos.” This last result, apparently, was a good thing.
An April 28, 1963, letter from a man who had read a newspaper excerpt inadvertently bolstered Friedan’s contention that psychiatry was often used to dismiss women’s aspirations. “Any woman who asks herself, ‘Is this all?’ as in the first paragraph, is in need of psychiatric counseling. . . . Your book-article will only contribute to the further instability of the few neurotic women who take it seriously.” Another man had read “the main part” of a speech she gave at Southern Methodist University and was outraged at the idea of encouraging housewives to find jobs: “Do you advocate throwing another 30 million or so males out on the street so women can ‘find’ themselves?”
Ridgely Hunt, a writer for the Chicago Tribune, turned Friedan’s argument upside down, suggesting that men had become trapped in their basements because magazines like Popular Mechanics had persuaded them to fill their time building plywood commodes and motorized ice sleds. Mocking Friedan’s account of women’s desire to do something more meaningful with their lives, he described the contemporary man as asking: “Is there no worthier goal toward which I can direct my finely machined intelligence than this tawdry business of earning a living and supporting my family?” But “no one is listening to him,” declared Hunt. “His wife is off to a painting lesson so she can express her inner self.”
Such ridicule was by no means rare, but Hunt’s was intriguing given his personal evolution. A war correspondent who specialized in masculine stories about camping with the Green Berets, riding along in fire engines, and scuba diving to ocean wrecks, Hunt was well known for his hostile attitudes toward women and hippies. Yet by the end of the 1960s he had left his wife and three children and was dressing in women’s clothes and growing his hair long. In the mid-1970s, he had sex-reassignment surgery and became Nancy Hunt.
Contrary to many caricatures of the work, The Feminine Mystique never urged women to leave their families or even to pursue full-time careers. The final chapter, “A New Life Plan for Women,” advocated what social conservatives now suggest women should do as an alternative to working while their children are young. Assuming that most women would opt out of work, or at least cut back to part-time, for several years to raise children, Friedan suggested that during this time they take a few classes or engage in volunteer activities that would be compatible with their family duties, then later pursue or resume a career.
Friedan proposed a “GI Bill for Women” to reintegrate housewives and mothers into public life in the same way the GI Bill had helped the mostly male veterans obtain higher education and job training after their prolonged absence during the war. If women’s role in raising families was the valued public service that so many politicians claimed, she argued, why not develop a similar government program to subsidize tuition and books—“even, if necessary, some household help”—for women who had taken time away from work or education to raise children and then wanted to go back to school and prepare themselves for a profession?
“The whole concept of women’s education would be regeared from four-year college to a life plan under which a woman could continue her education, without conflict with her marriage, her husband and her children.” For women who had not been able to attend college before marriage and childbearing, she suggested that society subsidize a summer immersion program designed to make it possible for them to succeed in future studies.
The Feminine Mystique contained no call for women to band together to improve their legal and political rights. Instead, it urged women, as individuals, to reject the debilitating myth that their sole purpose and happiness in life came from being a wife and mother, and to develop a life plan that would give meaning to the years after their children left home. For all its differences with George Gallup’s description of housewives in the Saturday Evening Post, The Feminine Mystique ended with a similar recommendation, although Friedan encouraged women to develop their additional goals early in life and not put them aside entirely even when the children were young. And she rejected the prevailing view that women who did want to work or pursue education throughout their lives would be harming their marriage or their children.
Nowhere does the book advocate that most women pursue full-time careers or even suggest that women ask their husbands to help them with child care and housework if they went to school or took a job. In fact, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many feminists criticized the book for failing to confront male privilege in the home.
There is no male-bashing anywhere in The Feminine Mystique. Friedan actually placed more blame on women than on men for the prevalence of the mystique, which she called their “mistaken choice,” and she wrote repeatedly that women would become better wives and mothers if they developed interests beyond the home. Indeed, Friedan once suggested that her tombstone should read: “She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men.”
Friedan simply urged women to pursue an education and develop a life plan that would give meaning to the years after the children left home. That her book spurred such outrage in some quarters and such relief in others is testimony to how much many women still needed it, despite the changes already occurring in American society.
Toward its end, The Feminine Mystique does contain a few quotes that seem stunningly dismissive of the work of full-time housewives. In Chapter 10, Friedan comments that in decades past, “certain institutions concerned with the mentally retarded discovered that housework was peculiarly suited to the capacities of feeble-minded girls,” adding acerbically that in those days “housework was much more difficult” than it is now. And in Chapter 12 she describes the suburban home as “a comfortable concentration camp,” claiming that women who had grown up wanting only to be a housewife were as much in danger of losing their identity and humanity “as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps.”
Still, any serious reader would understand that these quotes are hyperbole, because Friedan says repeatedly that women were not coerced into their constricted lives, but rather chose them. And after these inflammatory statements, she quickly concedes that the suburban home “is not a concentration camp, nor are American housewives on their way to the gas chamber.” All she is really saying, she assures her readers, is that many housewives “are in a trap, and to escape they must . . . live their own lives again according to a self-chosen purpose. They must begin to grow.”
That message—that they could and should begin to grow—was what most of the women who read the book cover to cover took away. Nine of the women interviewed for this book still had their original copies of The Feminine Mystique and allowed me to go through their yellow, dog-eared pages. Not one had underlined any of the acerbic quotes in the book, and few even remembered her saying these things.
Friedan was not looking for an audience of militants. She wanted to reach beyond the academics, career women, feminists, and leftists who had already questioned the feminine mystique in the 1940s and 1950s, although without calling it by that name, to women who were not yet aware of the sources of their unhappiness. And she managed to strike a chord in the kind of woman who knew at some level that her aspirations for life went beyond the recipes and homemaking hints in women’s magazines but who hesitated, out of guilt or self-doubt, to acknowledge those other needs and desires. The question is, why were so many women in that position in an era when so many social changes were already under way?