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THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE “LEFT ME BREATHLESS,” RECALLED GLENDA SCHILT Edwards, who was twenty-eight when she read the book, shortly after it was published. “I felt as though Betty Friedan had looked into my heart, mind, and psyche and . . . put the unexplainable distress I was suffering into words. I was astonished that before [reading the book] I could not express why I felt so depressed, even though my distress drove me to see two therapists at different times. Both therapists seemed to feel that I was having trouble ‘accepting my role as a wife.’”
Janice K. was thirty-six and the mother of ten-year-old twins when a friend sent her The Feminine Mystique in 1963. The year before, she had seen a psychiatrist for eight months without ever getting to the bottom of her “troubles.” She became so indignant when she read the book that she sent a copy to her therapist “with a note saying he should read it before he ever again told a woman that all she needed was to come to terms with her ‘feminine nature.’”
Laura M., now a veteran journalist, read it in high school. “My most vivid memory is that I finally realized I wasn’t crazy. I was still part of a generation expected to embrace family life as the ‘end all and be all,’to subsume my ambitions to my husband’s goals. But I didn’t want to! What was wrong with me?” Reading Friedan’s book made Laura realize that having aspirations beyond being a housewife might actually be healthy, not sick.
“I had forgotten all about The Feminine Mystique,” wrote Mary Lee Fulkerson, whose husband was a career military officer in the 1960s. “Reading it now, more than 45 years after it was written and maybe 40 years after I first read it, it seems so superficial and mealy-mouthed. It took me a few days to remember how it was for me back then. And then the agony and despair of those times came flooding back to my heart and mind.”
For some women, the book was literally a lifesaver. When Rose Garrity read the book she was a young mother whose husband regularly beat her. She had married at age fifteen, dropped out of school after just one week in the tenth grade, had her first child at age seventeen, and then had four more in the next five and a half years. “I was trapped in what felt like hell,” Rose recalls. “I had been forced to drop out of school.... There were no domestic violence programs and no one ever talked about the issue.... I thought I was the only one being beaten and there was something terribly wrong with me. I was ashamed.”
Rose worked on getting her high school diploma in secret, hiding her study materials from her husband. “When I read this book it was like the curtain was thrown back on the ‘wizard’! I suddenly understood what was going on, how sexism works, and was energized to begin to survive as an individual person.” Today Rose runs a domestic violence program in rural New York and serves on the board of directors of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
Most women had less burning reasons for their discontent, which made them even more likely to feel there was something “terribly wrong” with themselves. “I didn’t think I had any ‘excuse’ for what I was feeling,” says Sharon G. “My dad used to hit my mom, and I swore I would never put up with that. But no one was hitting me. I loved my husband and he loved me. Yet I was miserable.”
Judy J. remembers crying helplessly as she tried to explain her depression to her unsympathetic mother. “What more could you want?” her mother kept asking. “Do you remember what my life was like when I was raising you and your brother, with no washing machine and a wood stove I had to feed four times a day? What’s wrong with you?” Friedan’s book told Judy it was okay for her to want more, and helped her figure out what that “more” might be.
Cam Stivers recalls that around the time she read The Feminine Mystique , “I had the feeling (at 25!) that my life was over, and that nothing interesting would ever happen to me again.... I told myself that the fix I was in was my own fault, that there was something wrong with me. I had everything a woman was supposed to want—marriage to a nice, dependable guy (a good provider), a wonderful little kid, a nice house in the suburbs—and I was miserable.”
“I didn’t know why I was so unhappy,” recalls Danielle B., “until I read The Feminine Mystique. Then something clicked.” The letters Friedan received at the time were full of similar phrases: “Like light bulbs going off again and again”; “What a sense of relief”; “Now I know I’m not alone”; “It’s not just me”; “Suddenly I understand.” Nearly fifty years later, women recollected the same tremendous sense of relief. “I suddenly realized maybe I wasn’t an outcast”; “I wasn’t a nut-case”; “I wasn’t going mad”; “I recognized what was missing from my life”; “I understood what I was feeling and felt validated!!”
Cam Stivers remembers thinking, Your unhappiness isn’t just you. There’s something wrong with the whole arrangement. “I can’t express how freeing it was for me to realize that my predicament was not all my own fault.”
After finishing the book, Glenda Schilt Edwards, who still felt terrible after being treated by two different psychiatrists, “realized that what I thought might be wrong with me, was in fact, right with me!” “It was a real ‘click’ moment for me,” commented Linda Smolak, who went on to become a professor of psychology and women’s studies. “It literally changed (and perhaps saved) my life.”
Jeri G., then a thirty-six-year-old mother of three, read The Feminine Mystique in 1963. She had taken an overdose of sleeping pills the year before. “Maybe it was just a ‘bid for attention,’ as the cliché goes, and not a serious attempt at the time,” Jeri said, “but if so, no one gave me the kind of attention I needed. My doctor sent me to a psychiatrist, but he only made me more ashamed of my feelings. I truly believe that if I hadn’t found that book when I did, I might really have killed myself the next time.”
A look at the life of Anne Parsons reveals how tormented some women were by the pressures of the feminine mystique. Anne was the daughter of Talcott Parsons, the renowned Harvard sociologist who insisted on society’s need for “normal” families consisting of male breadwinners and female homemakers. Even though Anne’s parents encouraged her to develop her own intellect, she felt pressured to live the kind of life her father prescribed for most women. In an eight-page letter she wrote to Betty Friedan in 1963 after reading the book, Anne recalled that she had chosen not to take fourth-year math in high school “for fear of being called a brain,” and while in college had agreed to a marriage based more on the desire for security than anything else.
When she came to grips with her motivation, Anne explained, she broke off the engagement and pursued advanced work in psychiatric theory and anthropology, but at age twenty-five she was haunted by the price she felt she had been forced to pay for her choice. The unmarried career woman, she complained, was not seen “as a person at all.” Instead, she was stereotyped as “aggressive, competitive, rejecting of femininity and all the rest.” It “is like being a Negro or Jew,” she commented, “with the difference that the prejudices are manifest in such subtle ways that it is very hard to pin them down, and that the feminine mystique is so strong and attractive an ideology that it is very hard to find a countervailing point of view from which to fight for oneself.”
Feeling increasingly marginalized in her relations with colleagues, Anne committed herself to a mental institution in September 1963, where she kept a diary recording her fears about the Cold War and the arms race and her frustration with her psychiatrist’s insistence that she was “resisting insight into my feminine instincts.” Page-long sentences veer back and forth between Anne’s anxieties about the state of the world and the refrain, written in caps, “you CANNOT COME TO TERMS WITH YOUR BASIC FEMININE INSTINCTS.” Nine months later, after writing to her father that she thought the psychiatric treatments had made her worse and trying in vain to get released from the hospital, Anne committed suicide.
Anne Parsons might have developed her mental problems even in a world where single female intellectuals were not regarded as defective women and psychiatrists did not tell patients they were resisting their feminine instincts if they held strong political opinions or harbored intellectual ambitions. But many other women insisted it was the tenets of Freudian psychiatry that had made them feel crazy, and it was Friedan’s book, not talk therapy or medication, that allowed them to reclaim their sanity.
Some, like Edwards, echoed Anne Parsons’s claim that seeing a psychiatrist had made things worse. Edwards recalls: “My presenting complaint was that I did not know why I had such sad and distressed feelings, as I had everything I thought I should have to feel happy; a successful husband, three wonderful children, a house in the suburbs, a station wagon and a family dog, what else could possibly be lacking? They told me I was having trouble ‘accepting my role as a wife.’”
A self-described “ex-newspaper woman” with two young children wrote to Friedan in November 1963 that when she talked to a psychiatrist about the sense of emptiness she felt in being a full-time homemaker, he kept asking “if I was sure there wasn’t ‘Another Man’ involved and whether I really loved my children.”
Other women reported a better experience, finding psychiatrists who sympathized with their frustration or depression and made useful suggestions about how to alleviate it. But most of the women I interviewed told me that the turning point in their lives came when they started seeing their anxiety as a legitimate social grievance rather than an individual problem. This insight gave them the courage to pursue their dreams, or sometimes just the permission to have a dream. For that, most credit The Feminine Mystique.
CONSTANCE AHRONS IS THE LAST PERSON IN THE WORLD I WOULD HAVE expected to have subscribed to any form of the feminine mystique. When I met her back in the early 1990s, she was already the author of a groundbreaking book challenging the conventional wisdom about divorce and directed the Marriage and Family Therapy Doctoral Training Program at the University of Southern California. Having heard Ahrons explain complex topics in interviews and give no quarter when confronted with sloppy thinking, I found her thoroughly intimidating. Well groomed and self-assured, she seemed the kind of woman who would simultaneously notice the holes in my arguments and the ones in my stockings.
But when I interviewed Ahrons for my research, I learned that she was not born to the professional, capable role she seems to inhabit so effortlessly. She might have gone down a very different path had it not been for reading Betty Friedan’s book.
Ahrons was the daughter of immigrant parents from Russia and Poland. Her father had three years of college and was a small merchant. Her mother was a high school graduate who alternated between being a full-time homemaker and helping her husband in the store. When Ahrons was growing up, she never thought about preparing for a profession. She entered college in 1954, the first woman in her family to do so. But she and her family saw college “more like a finishing school” than a training ground for work. She almost flunked out the first year, in part because she had never thought of herself as smart. In the family folklore, “my brother was the bright one, and I was the pretty one.”
Ahrons got married in her sophomore year, at age nineteen, and had her first child at twenty. At that point she dropped out of college to become a full-time housewife and mother. Getting married, she recalls, was such an overriding dream that once she achieved it, she had no idea what to fantasize about next.
This was a common theme among the women I interviewed: Having been raised to believe that finding a husband and having children would be the crowning achievements of their lives, many said that they looked into the future a few years after having children and found that they had no compelling goal left to pursue. As Cam Stivers said, it felt as if her life was already over.
When The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963, Ahrons had two children and had been deeply unhappy for several years. “The thoughts I had were terrible. I wished for another life. I woke up and started to clean and wash clothes and was miserable. No one seemed to understand. My friends didn’t feel that way.” Her husband could afford to hire household help, which was the norm in the upper-middle-class family into which Ahrons had married. But her friends used their babysitters to get their hair done, go shopping, or play bridge. Ahrons longed for something different. “I tried to sell LIFE magazine over the phone,” she recalls, “which resulted in a terrible sense of rejection. I took a Christmas job three evenings a week, without telling my husband, and he made me quit after a week.” None of her friends worked, and none understood her dissatisfaction with a life that they enjoyed. In 1961 she began seeing a psychiatrist, who put her on tranquilizers.
Ahrons began to think about going back to school, and her psychiatrist was supportive, “but he saw it mostly as a way for me to keep myself busy.” Almost everyone else was furious at the idea. Her mother told her she would be neglecting her children. Her friends said she was crazy. Her husband couldn’t understand what the point was. After all, he earned more than enough to support, even indulge, her. Connie’s father was the only person who approved of her returning to school.
Then she read The Feminine Mystique and “it slammed me in the face.” Four decades later, Connie can “distinctly remember reading the book and crying the entire time.” The second chapter “said you aren’t the problem, society is the problem. It never occurred to me before that I wasn’t the one who needed treatment.” She felt a weight lift from her shoulders because “now I could name the problem, and know it didn’t originate in my own psyche.” She got up from her reading and flushed her tranquilizers down the drain.
When Ahrons applied to return to college, she did so mostly to relieve her boredom and depression rather than to train for a career. “The most daring goal I could imagine was to be a substitute teacher.” But she did well in her studies and got interested in new subjects, and as she did, her horizons broadened. She went on to earn a PhD and become a distinguished researcher. “It was Friedan’s book that opened those doors.”
Ahrons knows now that Friedan’s arguments had been anticipated by earlier writers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Mirra Komarovsky. “But for women like me who had never read anything else, this was life changing.... For us it wasn’t derivative, it was a bombshell of new ideas and information.”
Many women who read the book at the time told me they were astounded by the women’s history Friedan recounted. In reading about what the suffragists did, they came to believe that their feelings of incompetence and helplessness were not natural, but were a learned response to the way society had infantilized women.
It is difficult for modern American women, steeped in the power of positive thinking, to realize how pervasive negative thinking was for women in the 1950s and early 1960s. Friedan gave many of her readers their first exposure to what is now a self-help cliché: that individuals can achieve their full potential when they reject the stereotypes that have been laid on them and realize they have the power to change.
In the early 1960s, stereotypes about women were so prevalent that even those who consciously rejected the status quo and protested inequities elsewhere in society seldom applied their political insights to their own experiences as women. A case in point is Lillian Rubin, now an internationally known social scientist who has published twelve books over the past thirty years.
Rubin was raised in the Bronx by an immigrant working-class single mother who had a very clear view of how her daughter could better herself. “I work in a dirty factory,” her mother told her when she was young. “You’ll work in a clean office. And then you’ll get married.”
Rubin wanted to go to college, and she was a better student than her brother, who didn’t even want to attend college. But her mother believed “college was reserved for a boy; I was a girl who’d have a husband to take care of her.” Like Ahrons’s family, Lillian’s mother discounted her daughter’s intelligence. “My mother’s line was: ‘He’s the smart one, you just study harder.’”
Although Rubin was disappointed to miss out on college, she accepted that her brother would go to school and she would go to work and help pay his way. But she became increasingly anxious to escape from her mother, and the only way she could even contemplate not living at home was to get married. So in 1943, at age nineteen, she married “the first man who asked me.”
Rubin’s husband became a certified public accountant after the war, which moved them into the middle class, fulfilling her mother’s ambitions for her. Lillian stayed home with her daughter until the child turned three, after which she worked outside the home for several years. She was also active in politics in Los Angeles, where the family lived. “But despite the work and the political activity, I still felt trapped. My life never felt like my own. Friedan called it perfectly. 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.
“I thought I was a troubled person who couldn’t be satisfied with the fine life I now led—at least fine in comparison to where I came from. I had moved into this pretty house on a pretty street with a wonderful kid I adored and an okay-enough husband. So what did I have to complain about? I had climbed up to where I was supposed to—higher than my mother had hoped—and I wasn’t happy. And I didn’t know why.”
As time passed, Rubin began to feel that her husband wasn’t really “okay enough,” and she initiated a separation. “When my mother heard we’d separated, she called my husband and told him, ‘If Lillian wants to come back, treat her like a dog in the street. She doesn’t deserve what you’ve given her.’” Fearing that she would not be able to support her child, Lillian agreed to reconcile three months later. She also consented to move from central Los Angeles, where she was a community activist, to the suburbs where her husband worked.
For several years, she tried to be the supportive wife. When her husband brought clients home, she entertained them. “I was constantly putting on a show. I didn’t like the clients, and I didn’t want to be doing this, but I felt I had to. I’d look at the young mothers walking in the park and they looked very happy. How much easier their lives seemed to me. But I couldn’t do it, so I would run off to do politics. At the time, I was helping to organize the black community in Watts (what they now call South Central), where we ultimately succeeded in electing the first black congressman in California. I loved the political work. That’s what kept me in the marriage and made the suburbs bearable.”
Rubin got home for dinner every night and did “everything expected of a wife. But I didn’t like it. And I always thought there was something wrong with me.” So did her husband, who not only couldn’t understand her discontent but feared her political activism would hurt his own reputation.
Rubin ended up leaving her husband and holding down several responsible jobs during the 1950s, first as a politician’s campaign manager and then as personnel manager in an electronics firm, where she was fired when the FBI came around asking about her political activities. She next got a job at a nonprofit company, where her boss decided to keep her on even after the FBI visited again.
Yet Rubin still did not recognize the parallels between the racial and class inequalities against which she was organizing and her own situation as a woman. She met her present husband in 1961 and married him in March 1962. “Then the rest of my life started. I sat around trying to figure out what that meant. I’d changed a man I didn’t care for, for one I adored, but that didn’t do anything for my internal life, for the things that had made me restless.”
In January 1963, Rubin went back to school at the University of California. Shortly afterward, she read The Feminine Mystique and “it was a revelation. It was like having a pain and finally your doctor tells you, your pain actually has a source. You aren’t imagining it.” For the first time she felt “total reassurance” about what she wanted to do with her life.
Rubin had already embarked on a new path, but Friedan’s book helped her to understand what had led her there and to avoid the second thoughts about her choices that had plagued Anne Parsons. “I had lived the life Betty described. I woke up every day wondering if this was all there is, berating myself for not appreciating my good fortune, my nice suburban house, and my neighbors, all of whom seemed so much happier than I. I had no way to relate to them. Until I read The Feminine Mystique, I thought my feelings were unique and that I was somehow flawed, not a proper woman.” But Friedan’s book told Lillian that the course she had embarked on was exactly what “a proper woman” would do.
EVEN BEFORE THEY READ FRIEDAN’S BOOK, MANY OTHER WOMEN HAD already begun to take steps to build a different life than that prescribed by the feminine mystique. But surrounded by disapproval of their lives and denigration of their capacities, they thirsted for validation. Pat Cody, co-owner of Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley, California, was the fourth of eight children of Catholic working-class parents and the first to go to college. “I did not feel guilty about working,” she recalls. “It had been a necessity in my life since I did babysitting when I was fourteen.” But once she went into business with her husband, she was puzzled and angered by the way men treated her. Often, when she asked a sales rep a question, he would reply to her husband. When her husband brought home The Feminine Mystique, her reaction was “At last, a name for a situation!”
When Barbara Bergmann graduated from Cornell University in 1948, her mother asked, “How come you’ve come back without a husband? What do you think I sent you there for?” When The Feminine Mystique was published, Bergmann was in her mid-thirties and an untenured associate professor at Brandeis University. “I was unmarried, and fairly sure I had missed out on having a family. So when the book came out, I was in a state of envying housewives. Reading the book didn’t make me any happier with my single state, but it showed that the most common alternative wasn’t so hot either.” Her mother died in 1965, “and later that year I married the first man that walked in. We are still married, both just turned eighty.” But she made sure to marry someone who did not ask her to give up the career she had once thought could preclude marriage.
IT HAS OFTEN BEEN CLAIMED THAT THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE MADE women dissatisfied with their marriages. Certainly many women who felt trapped in unhappy marriages credit Friedan with giving them, as Janet C. said, “the courage to decide that the world wouldn’t end if I left my husband.”
Sandra G. wrote that in 1953, at age eighteen, she had married the first boy she had sex with, “and he threw that up to me every time we had a fight. I had ‘given in’ to him, he said. How did he know I hadn’t ‘done it’ with other boys? And I felt bad, but I also kept thinking, ‘He was the one who slept with other people before me; why am I the one who has to feel so bad?’” Reading Friedan made Sandra feel “like I had a right to get respect from a man, and if I didn’t get it I could actually fend for myself.”
Joanne Kinney was married with two children when she read the book “in pieces and parts when time permitted” in 1963 and 1964. Joanne and her sister would discuss Friedan’s views and their husbands’ reaction to the book’s publicity. Both husbands hated the ideas they were hearing.
Joanne had always resented that she had to ask her husband for permission to buy clothing. She was also frustrated because “working outside the home was not allowed.” He claimed it “would be too embarrassing for people to think I had to work.” The Feminine Mystique showed Joanne that there were other unhappy housewives in America. It also made her think that a woman didn’t necessarily have to stay with someone just because she wasn’t sure where she would live and who would support her if she left. In Joanne’s words, “I guess Friedan gave me the right to divorce . . . or so I thought.”
But few of these women took an antimarriage attitude away from The Feminine Mystique, which made a point of not criticizing husbands for their wives’ unhappiness. Instead, they took Friedan at her word when she said marriages would be happier when women no longer tried to meet all their needs through their assigned roles as wives and mothers. Many of the women who left their husbands in the wake of discovering feminist ideas practically glow with happiness when describing their second marriage. Joanne told of her joy at being able to marry the close friend who “is and was the love of my life since I met him in my second year of high school.”
Jocelyn M. makes a similar point. “Once I gained the confidence to expect more out of life, I learned just how happy a marriage could be. But it took a second marriage, after a lot of miserable years as a passive wife, before I knew that happiness.”
Other women reported that their marriages were improved or even saved because they read the book. Several said that before they read Friedan they had tried to deal with their feelings of emptiness by flirting with other men or drinking too much. “For a while I and a couple of my neighbors lived a Desperate Housewives-lite sort of life,” recalls Jolene W. “I never actually committed adultery, but I came close a couple of times. But once I took Betty’s advice and got the part-time job I had been interested in, I didn’t seem to need that kind of gratification anymore.”
Heather Kleiner first heard of The Feminine Mystique in the early 1960s, but she didn’t immediately relate to it because she and her husband, then in graduate school, “were part of a group of other student-parents, beset with similar problems of juggling work, studies, and parenting. So I did not feel the loneliness and isolation of my suburban counterparts.”
But after the birth of her second child in 1966, recalls Heather, “I became a housewife, and my ‘days of rage’ began. . . . I remember being very, very angry.... And I blamed my poor husband for contributing to my stultifying unhappiness.” Reading The Feminine Mystique helped her realize “that my problems were societal and that my husband and other family members were as much ‘victimized’ as I by gendered role expectations.”
A few women said they might have saved their marriages if they had read The Feminine Mystique sooner. One woman, after reading an article by Friedan in Good Housekeeping, wrote her a letter in August 1960, saying, “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.”
Journalist Laura M. credits Friedan’s book with reinforcing a cautious approach to marriage that ultimately stood her in good stead. “I was surrounded by girls who were very into becoming a Mrs., getting a teaching certificate along the way, ‘just in case.’ When I read the book, it confirmed that there was good reason for my distaste for this ‘domestic goddess’ lifestyle. When I fell in love and became a mother years later, I feared I would be like a bird flying into a cage and having the door shut after her.” In fact, “domestic life turned out to be wonderful.... But that was only because I took care to choose a man who wanted me to have a career and would participate fully as a parent. The book was life-changing for me.”
Ruth Fost reports that the book affected her husband almost as much as it affected her. “He began taking a more active role in child rearing (changing diapers, bathing, bedtime—most men did not do this in 1963)” and supported her decision to take a job. “I have enjoyed the bliss of parenting (now add grandparenting!) and working since 1963.”
Fost acknowledged that Friedan’s own “marriage (and many others) could not withstand the conflict that her liberating theories demanded. But somehow, my husband and I (it takes two to make this work) were able to choreograph our lives to be independent and interdependent—giving each other the room to do what we needed to do for ourselves, for each other and for our children to find happiness and fulfillment.” It was The Feminine Mystique, she says, that launched them on this path.
Harry J. also believes that reading The Feminine Mystique improved his marriage. He and his wife were both raised strict Catholics. “We married in 1966 and approached married life just as our parents and society directed. We became breadwinner and homemaker without any second thoughts.” But their marriage had some problems, and when he read Friedan’s book in 1973, he found it “an eye-opener. My recollection is that it was a stunning description of the forces at work in our life.” He adds that it “made me aware of my wife’s need to someday escape this condition. I believe it prepared me to support her changing from homemaker to individual career woman.”
Even reading the book in the 1990s, Trent Mauer came away with a clearer sense that marriage should be a true partnership. It made him resolve to improve his own domestic skills so that he “would never need to be with a woman because I didn’t know how to cook or do laundry or care for children. I wanted to know that I would only be with her because I wanted to, and I wanted to make sure that she would never have to doubt why I was with her.” Trent also vowed to make sure “that she would never have to go through the types of experiences that Friedan described.”
SOME WOMEN WERE INTRODUCED TO FRIEDAN’S BOOK AS TEENAGERS BY their mother or an older female friend. Sunny M. read the book together with her mother when she was fifteen, three years after it was published. “My mother wanted me to have what she felt that she had not been allowed to have.”
In a tribute to Friedan on the National Organization for Women web site, Linda Morse reported that a neighbor handed her the book when she was in her teens, saying, “Here, you read it, it’s too late for me.” Many of the women who wrote to Friedan soon after the book’s publication expressed the same sense that it was too late for them but not for the next generation of women. One, describing herself as a college dropout and “victim of the Feminine Mystique,” expressed her hope that her daughter could grow up without the “servile feeling” that had haunted her own life. Another declared, “It would be a crime to let another generation go as mine had,” and prayed that her daughter could “avoid becoming a miserable housewife!”
Jessica T., now a nationally syndicated columnist, remembers: “I first heard of The Feminine Mystique when my mother, a stay-at-home farm wife who had dropped out of college to marry my father, began talking about it at the family dinner table. The culture of our rural farming community and our family was very patriarchal, and my sweet, self-effacing mother was not regarded by any of us as our father’s equal.
“We loved and revered her,” Jessica continues, “but Dad was definitely the boss. When Mom started talking about feeling ‘trapped’ like other housewives in the book, we all looked at her as if she had two heads.” Jessica was about twelve at the time. The experience reinforced her resolve, already formed by seeing “how circumscribed” her mother’s life was, “to chart a course as different from hers as I possibly could.”
Marjorie Schmiege’s daughter Cynthia said that her mother’s discovery of the book not only relieved Marjorie’s depression but also changed the goals she held for her children, opening opportunities for Cynthia that she might never have had were it not for Friedan’s influence.
Other women came to the book on their own as teenagers or young women, and it helped them understand why they did not want to follow in their mothers’ footsteps. Mary Rinato Berman vividly recalls reading the book in the park near her home in 1963, during the summer after she graduated from high school. Mary grew up in a six-story, forty-two-unit apartment building in New York, populated by a mix of Italian and Jewish families. Her Catholic parents had a “fairly balanced” marriage, but in a building where “everyone kept their doors open and we kids felt comfortable in all of the apartments,” she had seen forty-one other marriages up close, and it wasn’t pretty. She remembers “knowing of husbands with girlfriends living in the neighborhood, seeing women with bruises, hearing complaints when the women would get together.”
The husband next door “regularly beat up his wife. He was also the biggest celebrator of Valentine’s Day—armloads of flowers, chocolates, and the like. It definitely gave me a total dislike of the holiday.
“Then along came The Feminine Mystique and . . . I remember thinking that it didn’t have to be that way.”
Historian Ruth Rosen and sociologist Wini Breines have pointed out that many women who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s developed a deep suspicion of marriage and motherhood not by reading Friedan but by observing life in a “normal” family. These young women came to see their mothers as negative role models: the epitome of what they did not want to be. Friedan reinforced their determination not to repeat their mothers’ lives.
One young woman wrote to Friedan that the book perfectly captured the story of her mother, who had stayed home for twenty-three years and raised four children: “The emptiness of her life appalls me: her helplessness and dependence on my father frightens me.” As Linda Smolak put it decades later, reading Friedan “articulated what scared me to death about being a ‘homemaker/housewife.’”
Many daughters raised by homemaker mothers had similar reactions to their mothers’ lives even if they had not read Friedan. In an interview conducted by a researcher in the 1950s, one young woman commented, “I feel deathly afraid of devoting all my time and energy to being a wife and mother and then being nothing in middle age, because that’s what happened to my own mother in her marriage.”
Journalist and best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich reports having the same fear. She was born in 1941 in Butte, Montana, into a working-class family supported by her father, a miner. By the time she was in her mid-teens, he had earned a degree from the Butte School of Mines and the family had risen into the middle class. Ehrenreich later told Ruth Rosen that in those days, “you had to steel yourself as a girl if you didn’t want to follow a prescribed role.... Even at a young age, I could understand that the only good thing you could do as a woman was to be a housewife, but you would never have any respect that way. Because I don’t think my father respected my mother. She was a full-time housewife, and that’s what I did not want to be.”
Some daughters grew up simmering with anger toward their mothers, whom they resented for trying to mold them into their own housewifely image. Polly J. says, “I felt nothing but contempt for [my mother] when I was in my teens. She never stood up to my dad. She never had an original idea, and she wasn’t interested in anything my brothers and I were learning about, except the grades we were getting and if my homework looked neat.
“She was so sweet with the neighbors,” Polly remembers, making a little face at the word “sweet,” “but she sure bossed us around—especially me, because I was ‘the girl’ and my job was to keep the house picked up and never go downtown wearing pants. I hated all her petty rules and put-downs of my behavior. Only much later did it occur to me that her attitude might have come out of her own frustration or depression.”
Judith Lorber recalls that her mother didn’t like doing housework but explained that it was something a wife did for her husband. “She implied that the more you loved him, the less onerous housework was.” The teenage Judith resented being required to help with the dishes and the cleaning while her brother did not have to do any work around the house. “My mother kept saying I had to be domesticated, and I said domestication was for cows! The end result was that I did everything I could to be the opposite of my homemaker mother.”
Several women said that reading The Feminine Mystique allowed them to understand their mothers better and let go of their anger or resentment. “I had a lot of issues with my mother growing up, which I couldn’t even begin to resolve until my late twenties,” reports June Pulliam, now a college professor. When she was in her thirties, Pulliam assigned The Feminine Mystique in a class. “For the first time I understood the thwarted existence of my own mother and my father’s sisters and the mothers of my friends.... It was as if someone had gone back and shown me a movie of my childhood with the director’s commentary about my mother’s grumbling discontent with her domestic role.”
Kathy Heskin’s mother graduated from college in 1930 “but was not allowed to work, either before or after her marriage. She was a woman who had great sadness and depression, and her mental illness progressed over the years, partly due to her frustration with life.” When Kathy was sixteen and a counselor at summer camp, her mother wrote her a six-page letter about how deeply she had been affected by reading The Feminine Mystique. Her letter “was passionate and utterly bewildering,” but “as sixteen-year-olds will, I forgot all about it until I was much older.” Only then did she read the book herself. There were just two times, Kathy says, when she felt she understood her mother—“when I read the book of Job and when I read The Feminine Mystique.”
Gary Gerst reports that reading The Feminine Mystique in 1968 or 1969 was just as transformative for him as a son—and as a future husband: “I gained a new sadness and empathy for my mom’s squelched abilities.” When he asked his mother about what he’d learned from the book, she admitted that she had actually read it much earlier but had never told her husband and family.
“I realized,” recalls Gary, “that this was like a ‘banned book’ and she had to hide it from Dad.” As she opened up to him about her musical and math talents and all the other interests she had put to one side for her marriage, Gary recognized for the first time how much of his mother’s life “had been subverted or abandoned to ‘be attractive to’ or ‘complement’ a man.” For Gary, “the problem with no name” meant that women “had been muffled, ignored, not even allowed to give voice to a truth or even able to describe it. How awful that such discontent by so many for so long was muted without even a term with which to understand it.... I know that from then on it also influenced what type of women I wished to date and eventually marry. I sought strong women who were not about to surrender their dreams or self to assigned servitude or silence.”