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ONE MONTH AFTER THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE WAS PUBLISHED, FRIEDAN received a letter from Gerda Lerner, a civil rights activist with a background in left-wing politics who later became a pioneer in women’s history. Lerner congratulated Friedan on a “splendid . . . job which desperately needed doing.” But she expressed concern that Friedan had addressed herself “solely to the problems of middle class, college-educated women.” Lerner reminded Friedan that “working women, especially Negro women, labor not only under the disadvantages imposed by the feminine mystique, but under the more pressing disadvantages of economic discrimination,” and suggested that in addition to Friedan’s proposals for expanding women’s access to higher education, such women needed child care centers and maternity benefits.
Many critics have since gone further, dismissing The Feminine Mystique as written by a middle-class housewife who did not understand the needs of working women or minorities and who addressed problems unique to elite, educated readers. Even at the time of its publication, some people had the same reaction. Janice B., a sales clerk with two children in 1962, read the excerpt in the Ladies’ Home Journal and couldn’t understand what middle-class homemakers were making such a fuss about. “It wasn’t that hard to go get a job,” she recalls. “And having a job sure didn’t solve all my problems as a wife and mother.”
Vietta Helme, who read the book in the 1970s, recalls that Friedan’s experiences were “utterly foreign to me as a working-class farm kid.” Helme says that she could understand that it might have had “some value for over-privileged women,” but “it was too far out of my demographic to have much meaning for me.”
Lorraine G., an African-American woman who never read the book, wrote in an e-mail to me that she and her friends “were too busy struggling to achieve the American dream to be concerned with women who appeared to have it all.” The summaries of Friedan’s book she read while pursuing her doctorate in sociology led her to believe that the audience for The Feminine Mystique was “white women [who] had the luxury of being bored with their middle-class, full-time homemaker role, a role that most working women would cherish.”
Larry R., a white man who read the book in 1966 after graduating from college, was similarly unimpressed, saying he couldn’t understand why anyone would complain about being left in a large suburban home while someone else earned the money. “I don’t have much patience with people who do not worry about food and shelter lamenting that they are bored.”
Even middle-class women who remain grateful to Friedan for writing The Feminine Mystique often mention that, in retrospect, they are taken aback by how little Friedan seemed to know about the issues facing women who had to work out of necessity.
Friedan actively encouraged the belief that she was writing from her own middle-class experience, speaking to the largely apolitical, white, middle-class, suburban woman because she had been one herself. She too, she told her readers, had “lived according to the feminine mystique as a suburban housewife,” only gradually coming to see that something was wrong with how she and other American women were being told to organize their lives. “I sensed it first as a question mark in my own life, as a wife and mother of three small children, half-guiltily and therefore halfheartedly, almost in spite of myself, using my abilities and education in work that took me away from home.”
Her epiphany came in 1957, according to her account in an early chapter of the book, when she interviewed her college classmates fifteen years after their graduation from Smith College and found “a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique. I wondered if other women faced this schizophrenic split, and what it meant.” And so, in her telling, she set out on a journey of discovery that culminated in The Feminine Mystique.
Friedan repeated this account in a 1973 New York Times reminiscence called “Up from the Kitchen Floor.” “Until I started writing the book,” she wrote, “I wasn’t even conscious of the woman problem.... I, like other women, thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor.”
Friedan’s version of her own past was accepted as gospel until 1998, when historian Daniel Horowitz published—to Friedan’s considerable chagrin—his meticulously researched (and very sympathetic) account of Friedan’s intellectual and political history, which was much closer to that of activist Gerda Lerner than to the suburban housewives Friedan targeted in her book.
In 1943, four years before she married Carl Friedan, Betty Goldstein hadn’t been thinking about orgasms when she wrote about kitchens. “Men, there’s a revolution in your own kitchen,” she had warned in an admiring review of Elizabeth Hawes’s Why Women Cry. It was the revolt of “the forgotten female,” she wrote, “finally waking up to the fact that she can produce other things besides babies.”
Betty Goldstein’s concerns about gender equality and her critical attitudes toward mainstream social scientists were forged long before she became Betty Friedan, the suburban housewife raising three children. At Smith College she had been an outstanding psychology student and a committed political activist, and after graduation, she wrote for union newspapers. Goldstein was familiar with the work of left-wing feminists such as Hawes, Eve Merriam, and Betty Millard, and wrote many articles about working women’s struggles and needs.
After she married Carl Friedan, she continued this work, although she took a year off after having her first child. In 1952 she permanently lost or left—it is unclear which—her regular job with the United Electrical Workers union. From that point on, she struggled to establish herself as a self-employed writer.
In 1950, the Friedans moved to Parkway Village, a racially integrated development in Queens, among whose tenants were civil rights leader Roy Wilkins and several UN staff members. In her years there, Friedan was certainly not an isolated, apolitical housewife. She edited a community newsletter, participated in a babysitting cooperative, and in 1952 helped organize a rent strike. In a 1953 piece she wrote for the UE News, “Women Fight for a Better Life!” Friedan celebrated the struggles of immigrant, African-American, and union workers.
As the 1950s progressed, Friedan distanced herself, geographically as well as politically, from the leftist circles in which she had originally trained as a writer. In 1956 the Friedans moved to the suburbs of Rock-land County, New York. She remained an engaged community activist but switched her focus to education, founding an “Intellectual Resources Pool” that offered adult education classes; brought in artists, scientists, and writers to enrich the school curriculum; and set up mentoring relationships between students and professionals. She forged a career as a freelance writer, gradually adapting her work to an audience of middle-class women rather than the union members for whom she had written during the previous decade.
Friedan’s selective version of her own history has led many people to think that she didn’t understand or sympathize with the obstacles facing working women and minorities. But in early drafts of The Feminine Mystique, she drew parallels between the prejudices against women and those against African Americans and Jews. Even in its final, watered-down version, The Feminine Mystique several times mentions Friedan’s support for the civil rights movement and “for oppressed workers.”
And only a few years after the book’s appearance, as chair of the National Organization for Women, Friedan broadened her agenda to include many of the issues Lerner had suggested. Sociologist Cynthia Fuchs Epstein notes that most of the early legal cases NOW pursued were taken on behalf of working-class women, including African-American working women.
But there is no denying that The Feminine Mystique focused on the problems facing comparatively privileged white housewives, those who had more education than the three years of high school that George Gallup had found typical in his 1962 survey for the Saturday Evening Post. Although Friedan noted that “housewives of all educational levels” suffered from the feminine mystique, she assumed—not entirely without justification—that “the problem that has no name” was especially acute for women who had a middle-class standard of living and enough education that if they went back to work or school, they could find “meaningful” middle-class jobs.
Friedan’s bias toward women from middle-class backgrounds, or married to middle-class husbands, was evident in her suggestion that women who wanted to work should hire housekeepers and nannies to take over their chores at home. Her book never discusses the issues facing the women who worked in those domestic jobs. In fact, several passages imply that such work, together with other types of service or clerical work, was beneath the talents of her readers. This elitist prejudice came from the same Betty Goldstein who as a student at Smith College had actively supported a drive to organize a union for maids in the campus dorms.
Despite its middle-class orientation, some uneducated and working-class women did embrace The Feminine Mystique. A postal clerk wrote to Friedan that it was “the most factual true book” she had ever read. Other letters praised the book but expressed a wish that the book could have been priced more affordably. One woman described herself as a housewife and mother of five with “a very poor education” and lamented that “if this is all there is for me to look forward to, I don’t want to go on.”
Still, the book was largely addressed to—and elicited the most heart-felt responses from—white women who had some higher education and whose husbands provided enough economic security that they could choose whether to work. This rapidly growing group of women faced new and distinctive dilemmas in postwar America.
The 1950s saw a remarkable increase in the number of Americans who achieved economic security. In the thirteen years between 1947 and 1960, the average worker’s purchasing power increased by as much as it had during the previous fifty years. By 1960, nearly 60 percent of Americans had midrange incomes, about twice as many as in the prosperous years before the Great Depression.
One mark of this new prosperity was an explosion in the number of students in institutions of higher education. Men’s enrollment in college grew faster than that of women, largely because of the benefits of the GI Bill, but between 1940 and 1960, the number of female college graduates increased from 1.4 million to 3.5 million. The number of women who had completed a few years of college grew even faster.
In the 1940s, the number of women who entered college each year was less than a third of those who graduated from high school. By 1958 it was 40 percent, and by 1963 it had reached 45 percent. And this increase occurred even as the percentage of female high school graduates was also rising sharply. In 1930, only 32 percent of seventeen-year-old girls had graduated from high school. By 1963, that number had increased to 73 percent.
The Feminine Mystique had its biggest impact on women in a generation caught between two worlds when it came to education. One world was that of their mothers and grandmothers, where any woman who aspired to go to college was consciously defying society’s expectations of her role, and such a woman often continued to challenge societal norms after graduation. The other was the world their daughters and granddaughters would inherit, where the definition of appropriate female behavior would broaden to include not only getting an education but utilizing that education in paid work even after marriage.
In the early twentieth century, it still took audacity for a woman to attend college, and doing so was often a sign of unconventional aspirations. Women who entered college in the first two decades of the twentieth century tended to be fervent supporters of social causes such as votes for women, and most of them intended to make their mark after they graduated.
However, women who sought higher education in that era often felt they had to sacrifice family life. Up until 1900, more than half the graduates from women’s colleges remained single, many of them carving out careers in new fields such as social work. Even as late as 1940, more than 30 percent of female college graduates ages forty to forty-nine were unmarried, compared to less than 13 percent of high school graduates and grade school graduates the same age.
When it came to graduate work, women were especially likely to feel they had to choose between getting a master’s degree and a “Mrs. degree,” and even when they did marry, a stunningly small percentage of highly educated women had children. An analysis of the marriage and motherhood patterns of women who attended graduate school at Columbia University found that only a quarter of the women born before World War I became mothers.
In the 1940s and 1950s, attending college became much more compatible with getting married and becoming a mother. Many women went for only a year or two, then dropped out to marry. But even women who graduated from college were more likely to marry and have children than their counterparts in the early decades of the century. Of the female Columbia University graduate students born between 1925 and 1929, almost 90 percent became mothers, compared to only 25 percent of the women born prior to 1914.
For many women of the 1950s, however, the growing likelihood that a woman would attend college and also embark relatively early on raising a family presented new dilemmas rather than new opportunities. By then, going to college was a statement of status, signifying that a family had achieved a secure middle-class standing in society. But becoming a full-time homemaker after marriage was also a statement of status. So the value of a college education played out differently for daughters and sons. For men, going to college was the way to get a good job. For women, it was the way to get a good husband.
In the transitional world of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, it was now socially acceptable, even desirable, for a woman to attend some college before embarking on marriage and motherhood, but the aspirations that a college education sometimes encouraged were still frowned upon. Society strongly discouraged women who intended to marry and have children from setting their sights on a lifelong career, or even from taking their studies very seriously.
As early as 1953, in a thoughtful book on the dilemmas of educated women, sociologist Mirra Komarovsky noted that “technological and social changes over the past century and a half have disturbed an old equilibrium without as yet replacing it with another. As a result, our society is a veritable crazy quilt of contradictory practices and beliefs.... The old and the new moralities exist side by side dividing the heart against itself.”
Komarovsky suggested that female students in the late 1940s and early 1950s were tempted by newer options and goals, but that they understood the likelihood of social censure if they pursued them. The reason so many came to espouse traditional roles “all the more passionately” during the 1950s, Komarovsky speculated, was that they were trying to silence or deny the other aspirations their education threatened to raise.
Whatever their motives, the vehemence with which postwar female college students insisted that marriage was their top priority was striking. Some young women stated in their college applications that their main goal in acquiring an education was to communicate better with their future husbands. One Vassar candidate wrote: “When I marry, I would like to converse with my husband’s friends and business acquaintances with a mature and confident manner that can only come from a thorough education.” Even when college students planned to work after graduation, they often attributed this to a desire to gain “some insight into the husband’s world” or expressed the hope that a year or so of work might give them organizational skills they could use in the home.
Many educators encouraged this growing preoccupation, seeing it as a welcome shift from the “antifamily” tendencies of earlier generations of female college students. During the 1950s, the president of Radcliffe College, the women-only counterpart to Harvard, assured incoming students that their education would prepare them “to be splendid wives and mothers.” If they were really lucky, they might even “marry Harvard men.”
One 1952 advice book for teenage girls warned that studying could be a “dating handicap.” Another advised young women to go far enough in school to be good companions to their husbands, but not so far as to compete with them. And a 1957 advice manual approvingly remarked on the “bright new trend” of women dropping out of college to help finance their husbands’ more timely graduation. This gave a woman the “joy of being a part of her husband’s preparation for a career” and of achieving her PhT, “Putting husband Through.”
Coeds of the 1950s took this advice seriously. Komarovsky noted that 40 percent of them reported playing dumb on dates. And although a higher proportion of women entered college than in the early decades of the century, a lower proportion of women who entered college actually completed their degrees. In 1920 women composed 47 percent of all college students and earned fully half of all degrees, which meant they were less likely to drop out than men. In 1960, more than 60 percent of female college students dropped out before graduation, usually to get married.
Women who did graduate from college seemed less inclined to strive for excellence or aspire to nontraditional fields than in the prewar period. A study of female students at Vassar College at the end of the 1950s found that the percentage of physics and chemistry majors fell by more than half in the decade following World War II. Graduates became more likely to turn down a research job or forgo graduate work because it might hurt their marriage prospects.
A study of U.S. college seniors in 1961 found that almost 70 percent of the men who placed in the top 20 percent of their class planned to go on to graduate school, while only 36 percent of the equally high-achieving women had similar plans. A report funded by the Rockefeller Foundation pointed out that one in thirty of the highest-scoring male high school students went on to get a PhD, but only one in three hundred of the highest-scoring girls did. In 1920, women had earned 20 percent of all PhDs. That dropped to a low of 9 percent from 1950 to 1955, and had recovered to only 11 percent by 1963.
Some educators who remembered the commitment and drive of the earlier generation of female college students were appalled by the changes they saw in the postwar period and greeted The Feminine Mystique with tremendous enthusiasm. One woman, who had graduated in the first wave of women’s education in the early twentieth century and then become a professor at the University of Illinois, wrote to Friedan that in the ten years before she retired in 1954, she had increasingly felt “that something had gone wrong with our younger women of college age.” A Vassar professor expressed his frustration that female students “just won’t let themselves get interested. They feel it will get in their way when they marry.”
Even when young women did take their education seriously and wanted to pursue it further, many parents refused to support these aspirations. When anthropologist Sherry Ortner interviewed fellow female graduates of her 1958 high school class in Newark, New Jersey, several noted that their parents had steered them away from the better colleges where they sent their sons. One woman recalled that her parents had been willing to spend more on her brother’s education than her own, even though she had been the better student. Another said that her father refused to help her attend graduate school because she would be “pricing herself out of the [marriage] market.”
Parents also pressured their daughters to major in traditional women’s fields such as teaching or nursing, even if their interests lay elsewhere. “They kept saying that ‘if something happens to your husband, which God forbid,’ I would need a ‘respectable’ occupation ‘to fall back on,’” reports Rosalind F. “The assumption was that I wasn’t going to work anyway, so why should I care what I majored in.”
And women who harbored intellectual aspirations continued to fear that these were incompatible with a satisfying family life, except perhaps vicariously. When Peta Henderson, now a retired college professor, was a seventeen-year-old freshman at Swarthmore in the mid-1950s, she babysat to earn extra money. One evening she was working at the home of a humanities professor at her college. It wasn’t a fancy home, and it certainly wasn’t as well kept as the pictures of houses she had sometimes admired in women’s magazines, but she found it tremendously appealing. After she put the children to bed, she walked through the house looking at all the books and papers, “and I distinctly remember saying to myself, ‘I want to marry a college professor.’”
Six years later, still unmarried, she had completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees. But when her adviser praised her work and suggested that she go on to earn a PhD, Henderson grew anxious. “I can’t get a PhD,” she told her adviser. “I want to get married someday.”
Another factor that may have dampened women’s aspirations was the relative decline in their representation within colleges. Although women were entering colleges and universities in higher numbers than in the past, they were overwhelmed by the massive influx of male veterans. Even as the absolute numbers of women in college rose, their proportion decreased dramatically. Women were 47 percent of college students in 1920, and still a full 40 percent in 1944, but by the mid-1950s they were only a third.
In historian Linda Eisenmann’s view, women became “increasingly incidental” on campus as administrators focused on meeting the needs of returning veterans. To accommodate the flood of male students, many schools limited the number of women they would admit. Some medical and engineering schools capped female admissions at 5 percent of their total enrollment.
Several political scientists have argued that the reason the women’s movement of the 1960s appealed to white middle-class women, especially those with a college education, was that they experienced the most “relative deprivation” compared to the progress their male counterparts were making. The wage gap between men and women widened during the 1950s, and college-educated men gained more ground in the professions and other high-paying occupations than college-educated women. A survey of white women who graduated from college between 1946 and 1949 found that only half had been able to find the kind of work for which they had trained. Even at women’s colleges, traditionally the largest employer of female academics, the proportion of women on the faculties declined substantially during the 1940s and 1950s.
The frustration and anger triggered by women’s relative deprivation may have fueled the women’s movement in the mid-1960s, but initially that relative decline merely discouraged many women from taking their education seriously. Women who went to college for the sake of ideas or to train for a career felt outnumbered, overshadowed, and to some extent silenced by the much larger group of coeds who harbored no such “unfeminine” ambitions. Many were intimidated by the cultural insistence—which grew even more shrill as its basis in reality eroded—that a normal woman would cheerfully sacrifice her intellectual and occupational aspirations for the more satisfying achievement of getting a husband and helping him to succeed.
The prevailing expectations of educated women in this era were epitomized in the commencement address delivered to the graduating class of Smith College in 1955 by Adlai Stevenson, two-time Democratic presidential candidate. Stevenson began by observing that the new technological economy hampered man’s pursuit of larger ends, such as finding a greater meaning and purpose in life. The task of woman, said Stevenson, was to help her own particular man become “truly purposeful” and “to keep him whole.” That, in his view, was how woman could play her “part in the unfolding drama of our free society.”
Stevenson went on to explain to the Smith graduates the two main benefits of accepting this “assignment.” First, “it is home work—you can do it in the living room with a baby in your lap or in the kitchen with a can opener in your hand.” Second, it is “worthy” work, because by countering the male breadwinner’s “contraction of mind and spirit,” wives could help America defeat “totalitarian, authoritarian ideas” and “frustrate the evils of vocational specialization.”
Like Friedan, Stevenson noted that the “mundane” nature of housework could be frustrating for women who had been exposed to “the great issues and stirring debates” fostered by higher education. “Once they read Baudelaire. Now it is the Consumers’ Guide. Once they wrote poetry. Now it’s the laundry list.
“Once they discussed art and philosophy until late in the night,” Stevenson continued. “Now they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the dishes are finished. There is, often, a sense of contraction, of closing horizons and lost opportunities. They had hoped to play their part in the crisis of the age. But what they do is wash the diapers.”
Unlike Friedan, however, Stevenson called on women to embrace this “contraction” in their lives as “yet another instance of the emergence of individual freedom in our Western society.” Across the world, “women ‘never had it as good’ as you do,” Stevenson proclaimed. And regardless of whether you like the idea of becoming a housewife just now, he assured the graduates, once it happens, you will like it.
Many women who switched from Baudelaire to baking did like being full-time housewives. But those who failed to experience homemaking as the ultimate expression of their “individual freedom” were beset by feelings of self-doubt and guilt to a degree that is difficult for contemporary women to grasp—not despite their education but precisely because of it.
Women who attended college in the 1950s were especially likely to have been taught the “scientific” findings of Freudian psychiatrists and functionalist sociologists that any woman who wanted more meaning in life than she found in the kitchen and nursery suffered from psychological maladjustment. The magazines targeted to housewives of their race, income, and educational level promoted the views of Freudian psychiatrists and other human behavior “experts” about “healthy” and “unhealthy” gender roles more often and in more detail than did the periodicals aimed at white working-class or black middle-class women. The result was that educated housewives who did not feel what they knew they should be feeling experienced a special kind of self-doubt.
Certainly the pain of a frustrated stay-at-home housewife or a young middle-class woman contemplating her future as a homemaker was different than that of a low-paid clerk or a factory worker struggling to combine an exhausting job at work with an equally exhausting job at home. It was different from the stress facing a black woman in a marriage where even two incomes were not enough to raise the family out of poverty or protect her children from racial discrimination. But using the word “boredom” to describe the doubts and insecurities of these middle-class women unfairly trivializes their pain. While their distress may have been less rooted in material deprivation than that of working-class and minority women, it was in some ways more bewildering. And it was more frequently turned inward, because most of Friedan’s readers recognized their privileges and acknowledged their own complicity in creating the life that was now making them unhappy. Many felt terrible because they did have the choice not to work and thought there was something wrong with themselves for not being properly grateful for that advantage.
Sharon V., who was thirty-four when she read The Feminine Mystique in 1964, explained the sense of unworthiness that had been haunting her: “There were Negroes being beaten in the South. There were children with bellies swollen from hunger in Appalachia. And here I was with comforts my mother would have given her eye-tooth for. What right did I have to be so miserable?” But telling herself that she had “no right” to these feelings didn’t help. “I still had the feelings, but I felt guilty for having them, which made me feel even worse. Until I read The Feminine Mystique.”
Julie Olin-Ammentorp’s mother was another such woman, and Julie found that reading The Feminine Mystique helped her make sense of her mother’s life. “She was of that generation of housewives that did not have much outlet for their intelligence, but also felt they couldn’t complain because, generally speaking, they had it so good.... At the same time, knowing that you ‘should’ be happy because you had what all women were ‘supposed’ to want really didn’t help.”
This combination of insecurity in the face of experts and guilt about their discontent explains why so many of these comparatively privileged women gradually lost the self-confidence of their early years. In oral histories of and surveys from the 1950s, it is striking how frequently middle-class white women, especially those with some college education, expressed guilt, self-doubt, and inadequacy about their family behaviors.
Educated white middle-class women in the 1950s were more likely to feel guilty when they went to work—or even when they just wanted to work—than comparably educated black women or white working-class women with less education. And numerous sociological studies in the 1950s and early 1960s found that educated housewives, even those who enjoyed being homemakers, tended to devalue or second-guess their own child rearing more than working-class women did.
Constance Ahrons felt guilty about wanting to go back to school when all her friends were happy to stay home with their families. “I just assumed I’d be punished in some way,” she told me. “That’s what happens to women who are selfish. My friends said, ‘You’re so selfish.’”
Sandie Nisbett, a college graduate who was married with three children in the 1950s, loved her husband and kids immensely. “But I was totally wrapped up in that. I thought it was my responsibility to fix all the emotional issues in the household, and I gradually lost my sense that I could fix anything else.” When Sandie finally decided she had to get out of the house, she felt “so insecure that I remember picking up a shorthand book at the library, thinking maybe I could be a secretary. It had nothing to do with my interests or my former training, but I couldn’t imagine doing anything bigger. Women had jobs, not careers. The job would give me something to do, but I didn’t dream higher.”
Nisbett ended up teaching reintroduction classes for other women who had been housewives for years, “and you could see it every year. They came back with no self-confidence at all, even those who had been National Merit scholars.”
Joyce Robinson, whose dreams included law school, didn’t know what she “was more scared of—not being able to do it, or being able to do it and ruining my children’s lives as a result.” Robinson says that her self-confidence shot up as soon as she earned an A in her first class, “but the guilt didn’t go away, even when my twenty-year-old daughter sat me down and read me a three-page letter about how much she loved and respected me.”
Once women did go back to school or got jobs commensurate with their training—and many of them report that it was The Feminine Mystique that gave them the impetus to do so—they typically experienced a resurgence of self-confidence and self-esteem. Thanks to the book, “I got my mind back,” one woman told me. “My depression fell off in layers, month after month, after I took her advice and went back to work the way I’d always wanted to but never quite dared,” said another.
The difference that employment made in such women’s lives is confirmed by a long-term study of women who graduated from Mills College in 1958 and 1960. The researchers found that between ages twenty-seven and forty-three, “large increases in independence and assertiveness” took place among all the women who went on to work outside the home, married and unmarried alike. The only women who did not experience such increases were the full-time homemakers.
A study of women who graduated from various colleges between 1945 and 1955 found that, decades later, women who took paid work, whether married or single, displayed higher self-esteem than those who became full-time homemakers. The married professional women even assessed their child care skills more positively than did the housewives. But these studies came too late to alleviate the guilt and anxiety many middle-class women felt at the time about their discontent with being a full-time homemaker.
The comparative lack of guilt expressed by working-class wives who worked or wanted to work did not mean that women in blue-collar families were more psychologically secure than middle-class women, or conversely, that middle-class women were more sensitive than their more impoverished counterparts. A twelve-year study of women married to blue-collar workers and living in blue-collar neighborhoods reveals much about the different patterns of pain and vulnerability working-class and middle-class wives experienced. The study, which came out in 1959, was commissioned by the publishers of True Story, a pulp magazine aimed at the wives of blue-collar wage earners. Its aim was to help advertisers and magazine editors better understand the distinctive values, motivations, and buying habits of working-class women.
The working women interviewed for this study experienced “pervasive anxiety,” according to the researchers, but their anxiety was based on long-term physical hardship and material want rather than on the self-doubt and guilt recounted by so many middle-class housewives. When shown a picture and asked to construct a story about it, the two groups of housewives reacted very differently. One picture showed a girl with many hands pointing at her. The working-class women made up stories in which the girl was being shamed, ridiculed, accused, or bossed around by others. The middle-class women were “more likely to see the pointing hands as symbolic of the girl’s inner state.” One suggested she was having a bad dream because she had “something on her mind.” Another speculated that she had “stolen something and the hands are her conscience eating at her.”
Interviewers also showed the two groups a picture where a woman had her hands at the neck or head of another person. The middle-class women tended to interpret the picture as a woman helping another person who was ill or who had tripped. The working-class women were more likely to interpret it as a fight or an attack and to provide a lot of detail, often related to their own lives, about what provoked it and what might happen next.
The academics conducting the survey attributed the high degree of anxiety that ran through the blue-collar housewives’ reactions to these simulated situations to an inability to manage strong feelings or see nuance in situations. “The volatility of the working class woman’s emotions,” they concluded, “contributes to her sense of the world as being chaotic.” But a more reasonable interpretation is that these women were reacting to a world that was in fact more chaotic, insecure, and threatening than that of their middle-class counterparts.
The responses illustrate two very different sources of stress in these women’s lives. The working-class women’s experience with want and hardship directed their attention to the external world and other people as the main threats to their happiness and security. The pain of middle-class housewives arose out of the contradictions between what they were told they should be feeling and what they actually felt.
It is pointless to construct a hierarchy of who hurt more, and whether one kind of pain was more or less justified than another. And I say this as someone whose first reaction was to dismiss the pain of the middle-class housewives as less “real” than that of their working-class sisters. Early in my research for this book, I wrote to my literary agent, Susan Rabiner, expressing dismay at how few of the black and working-class women I interviewed had read Friedan. I was distressed that the book’s appeal seemed to be concentrated among such a relatively privileged section of women.
Rabiner responded by describing her own experience of trying to get a job in advertising during the 1960s and being told that a woman could only be a secretary to a male copywriter, not a copywriter herself.
“To me it doesn’t matter,” Rabiner wrote, “that this group of women wasn’t representative either in size or even aspirations of most American women of their time. It doesn’t matter that they represented a small privileged slice of American women. It doesn’t matter that there were other women who were working and not by choice.... What matters is that these women were being asked to deny what they were feeling.”
Many of these women were privileged, Rabiner conceded. “They were lucky enough to be raised into families that considered it important to educate women and therefore let these women go to college. Then they were fortunate enough to be married to ‘good earners,’ men who could let them stay at home and become full-time mothers and actually preferred that they do so.
“But they were also like the farm boys from World War I who passed through New York City on the way to the killing fields of France and then, when the war was over, couldn’t go back to the farm. We understood and accepted those soldiers who didn’t return to the farm.
“But it took Friedan to help us understand that there were women who, through their education, saw glimpses of the world of work and then didn’t want to go back to being housewives. Or they went back under enormous pressure from everyone, but spent the next years of their lives with their noses pressed against the proverbial glass—looking in at a world that they would never be part of.”