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MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND WHITE WORKING-CLASS women did not relate to Friedan’s arguments in The Feminine Mystique because most of them already worked outside the home due to economic necessity and would have preferred to be full-time housewives. But the differences between these groups are actually more complex.
It is true that a black woman had far less chance than a white woman of marrying a man who earned enough to support a family. Black men earned, on average, 60 percent of white men’s wages throughout the 1950s, and the poverty rate of black families was close to 50 percent, making a male breadwinner-female homemaker marriage impossible for many black families, regardless of their preferences.
Even when African-American men earned a middle-income wage, they were typically much less economically secure than their white counterparts. Black families with the same annual income as whites had, on average, only one-tenth as many assets, and they were far less likely to receive the kind of government aid that subsidized upward mobility for white families during the 1950s. In his study of the fight to integrate the Levittown suburbs of New York and Pennsylvania, David Kushner points out that of the $120 billion in new housing underwritten by the federal government between 1934 and 1960, less than 2 percent went to minorities. By the latter date, fewer than 40 percent of black families owned their own homes, compared to more than 60 percent of whites, and on average their homes were worth much less.
In 1963, a white male high school graduate earned more than a female college graduate, white or black. A woman who married a white high school graduate could generally raise her children on his income alone, and she could almost certainly do so if she married a white college graduate. Such upward mobility through marriage was far less likely in the African-American community. Black male college graduates also earned less than white male high school graduates.
So even a college-educated African-American woman who expected to marry a man with equal education might well need, like her less-educated sisters, to work after marriage. As a result, black college women were less likely than their white counterparts to feel there was a contradiction between the professional roles they were being trained for in college and the future roles they would assume as wives.
In a study of 5,000 white college women in the 1950s, fewer than 40 percent reported that they were attending college to train for a future career. Most said they were in college to expand their cultural literacy, enjoy the social life, or acquire the prestige attached to a college degree. A study of white female freshmen and sophomores found that the majority viewed their college education not as a ticket to lifelong work but as something to fall back on in an emergency.
Black female college students, by contrast, saw education as a step toward establishing a future career. A 1956 study of black female college graduates found that nearly 90 percent reported having gone to college to prepare for a vocation.
Black women’s expectations of working outside the home were not simply a reluctant capitulation to financial necessity. The African-American women polled in 1956 were not interested in education solely as a way to earn money. They were more likely than the white college students to say that college should also train women to be “useful citizens,” concerned about matters beyond their immediate family.
Such attitudes reflected African-American women’s long-standing tradition of engagement outside the home. Historian Linda Gordon, studying female activists at the end of the nineteenth century, found that while only 34 percent of the white activists had combined marriage with life as a public figure, 85 percent of black female activists had found marriage compatible with their activism.
It was black activists, not white feminists, who first referred to women and men as “co-breadwinners” and advocated that women make a “threefold commitment”—to family, career, and social movements. Long before Betty Friedan insisted that meaningful work would not only fulfill women as individuals but also strengthen their marriages, many African-American women shared the views of Sadie T. Alexander, an influential political leader in Philadelphia, who argued in 1930 that working for wages gave women the “peace and happiness” essential to a good home life.
This is not to say that black women were sheltered from the problems and prejudices facing women who tried to combine work with marriage. A study of African-American women who graduated from college in the 1930s found that many expressed anxiety about their relationships with men. Like their white counterparts, these women were concerned that their education might make them less attractive to potential mates. They worried about whether holding down a job would leave enough time for their family, although, far more often than white women, they also expressed concern about whether they would be able to devote enough attention to religious, cultural, and community affairs while managing both a job and a family.
As in the white community, many African-American men wanted to reserve the upper ranks of work and politics for their own sex. Black women were the backbone of the civil rights movement, but they were seldom its public representatives. Rosa Parks’s lawyer once told her that he believed women’s proper place was in the kitchen. Ella Baker ran the voter registration drives for the Southern Christian Leadership Council in the 1950s but was never considered for its most prestigious position, which was always held by a male. During the 1960s, as the Black Power movement gathered steam, Baker complained that some leaders were urging black women to step back to “bolster the ego of the male.”
Nor were black women exempt from the attacks of Freudians and social scientists who argued that female independence was bad for husbands, children, and the community at large. Psychologist John Dollard, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and psychoanalyst/anthropologist Abram Kardiner insisted that black men had been doubly emasculated—first by slavery and later by the economic independence of their women.
Frazier, a black sociologist, acknowledged that the female-centered kin networks of the rural South had helped protect black communities in the past. But he claimed that in the urban North, black women’s economic dominance and sexual aggressiveness had resulted in disorganized families and impoverished communities. And, like his white counterparts in sociology and psychiatry, he saw no contradiction in simultaneously attacking middle-class homemakers. “The life of many a ‘wealthy’ Negro doctor,” he wrote in 1962, “is shortened by the struggle to provide diamonds, minks, and an expensive home for his wife.”
In August 1960, Ebony magazine published an article by Lerone Bennett Jr. on “the problems and possibilities” inherent in black women’s traditional “independence and self-reliance.” Bennett noted that black women had played an important role in the fight for freedom but argued that their independence had not been “an unmixed blessing.” Reflecting the influence of Freudianism, he reported that many researchers believed that the traditional self-sufficiency of the Negro woman had placed her “more in conflict with her innate biological role than the white woman.” The black woman has “proved that women are people,” he concluded, but she “now faces a greater task. In an age when Negroes and whites, men and women, are confused about the meaning of femininity, she must prove that women are also women.”
Still, articles in Ebony from the 1950s and 1960s were less likely to interpret family behaviors through the lens of Freudianism than were articles in the middle-class white magazines of the period, and more likely to assume that black women would work outside the home and take an active role in community affairs.
Bennett’s 1960 article, which was reprinted in the September 1965 issue, described several successful marriages where husband and wife both worked. He quoted an African-American researcher, Dr. Angella Ferguson, who argued that black women should have the opportunity to pursue a “career outside the home” and that even wives and mothers who didn’t want paid work “should participate in some civic or community activity in order that they may continue to grow throughout their married life.” The article also featured a sidebar by E. Franklin Frazier, who in this particular piece praised the “self-assertion” of black women and the egalitarian nature of modern African-American marriages.
Several black women I interviewed for this book said that in the 1950s and 1960s, they knew no families in which mothers dropped out of the labor force for more than a year or two at a time. White women raised in the 1950s often reported that their mothers and grandmothers criticized them when they later chose to combine motherhood with paid employment. But black women raised in that era often faced the opposite reaction when they or their friends considered becoming stay-at-home mothers in later decades. Their mothers and grandmothers made disapproving comments such as “I didn’t raise you to be dependent” or “You’ll never get any respect by just staying home.”
In 1960, almost 60 percent of black middle-class families were two-earner households, compared to less than 40 percent of white middle-class families. And a much higher proportion of black middle-class moms with children of preschool age were in the labor force than their white counterparts. Furthermore, sociologist Bart Landry points out, the black women most likely to work outside the home in this period were those least likely to need to do so.
In the 1950s and 1960s, white, college-educated, middle-class wives were already more likely to hold a job than the less-educated wives of blue-collar men, though such women rarely worked while their children were young. But those in the upper middle class were the least likely of all white mothers to work outside the home.
By contrast, upper-middle-class black mothers were the most likely among black mothers to hold outside jobs. Sixty-four percent of black upper middle-class mothers had jobs in 1960, compared to only 27 percent of white upper-middle-class mothers and 35 percent of white lower middle-class mothers.
Landry’s contention that black middle-class wives, not white feminists, were the true pioneers of modern family patterns is supported by his finding that black wives were less willing than white wives to let their husbands decide whether they would work. Among white middle-class families, when the husband expressed a preference for the wife to stay home, 89 percent of the wives did so, but this was true for only 56 percent of black wives whose husbands disapproved of their working.
In ignoring the experience of African-American women in The Feminine Mystique, Friedan missed an opportunity to prove that women could indeed combine family commitments with involvement beyond the home. Friedan could have used their example to show that women need not feel guilty for engaging in work or community activism outside the home, even if they had the financial means to be full-time homemakers, and that working mothers could maintain strong family ties, inspiring both love and respect in their children.
Some black women did read The Feminine Mystique back in the 1960s and got something positive from it. Three African-American professionals e-mailed me to say that Friedan had been important to them as they struggled against male prejudices in graduate school or medical school. Gloria Hull, a black feminist scholar and poet, has written elsewhere that Friedan’s work affected her deeply when she read it in 1970 and that even today she remains “struck by its clear passion and radical persuasion.”
However, the content of The Feminine Mystique and the marketing strategy that Friedan and her publishers devised for it ignored black women’s positive examples of Friedan’s argument. So it is not surprising that The Feminine Mystique got little attention in the black community. Nor is it surprising that the black women who did read the book seldom responded as enthusiastically as did her white readers. African-American women had less need for outside reassurance to view themselves as strong and independent, and they felt less guilt about working outside the home. Their self-image as mothers coincided rather than conflicted with their identity as providers for the family.
Furthermore, black women were less likely than white women to have access to employment Friedan defined as fulfilling and creative. In 1950, 41 percent of all employed black women worked in private homes, almost invariably as domestic laborers. An additional 19 percent worked as cleaners or maids in offices, hotels, and restaurants. Working-class African-American women began to make their way out of domestic labor and into white-collar or manufacturing jobs in the 1950s, but given the low wages of African Americans in this era, few black women would have related easily to Friedan’s advice that women should hire a house-keeper or nanny to take over their household chores. And given her own experience—or her mother’s—any black working woman who read the book through to page 255 probably would have been offended by the suggestion that housework was especially suited to the “feeble-minded.”
Finally, many black women considered the struggle for racial equality more urgent than the struggle for male-female equality. They might resent the antifemale prejudices they encountered in the black community, but they did not feel the same sense of relative deprivation as white women. “Our menfolk weren’t doing all that well either,” Donna G. told me. “We didn’t feel much envy for their options. And most of the time—not all, but most—it felt like the racial stereotypes we faced were causing more immediate harm than the gender ones.”
THE ARGUMENT THAT MANY WOMEN WOULD HAVE ENVIED THE PROBLEMS of middle-class wives who felt trapped in suburban homes may apply in part to white working-class women. White working-class wives were not only less likely to work outside the home than college-educated women, but they also expressed more satisfaction with housework and more agreement with prevailing notions of women’s roles.
When sociologist Mirra Komarovsky interviewed working-class women in 1958 and 1959 for her book, Blue Collar Marriage, she found that the lower the educational level of the homemaker, the more likely she was to identify herself in terms of her family role and the less likely she was to disparage housework. College-educated housewives had the most unfavorable attitudes toward housework, and high-school-educated housewives came next. Women who had not completed high school expressed the least disrespect for the job.
A 1959 study of women married to blue-collar workers found that working-class wives were more likely than middle-class wives to accept their husband’s dominance and to express fear of his disapproval. They expressed fewer expectations of intimacy and equality in their marriages.
But this acceptance of inequality meant that in some important ways femininity was less of a mystique for working-class than for middle-class wives. These women acquiesced to masculine privilege with a clear-eyed sense of their economic dependence. They had little illusion that embracing their “feminine role” would produce inner fulfillment and were therefore less likely to feel bewildered when it did not. Unlike middle-class housewives, most had no qualms about saying they found domestic chores monotonous.
The working-class women interviewed by 1950s sociologists saw the home as a place where women worked, not as a place where they might satisfy creative or intellectual needs. Market researchers discovered that working-class women and middle-class women had very different wish lists for the perfect home. Middle-class women wanted distinctive architecture and aesthetically pleasing designs that would express their individual tastes, making the home a place of self-realization. Working-class women wanted modern appliances that would save time and make their work easier.
Working-class housewives also had less exposure than middle-class housewives to Freudian prescriptions for marital relationships and parenting. They expressed fewer worries about whether their own feelings were normal or their child rearing practices up to date. When Komarovsky interviewed working-class wives who did work outside the home, she found that they felt much less guilt than middle-class mothers who did so.
Komarovsky commented that speaking with working-class wives transported her back to a “pre-Freudian” world where a woman did what she had to do without constantly examining her motives or second-guessing her choices. “The self-doubts raised by the spread of psychoanalytic theory (‘What is wrong with me that motherhood and homemaking do not suffice? ’) do not plague our respondents,” reported Komarovsky. Blue-collar housewives who worked or wished to work at a paying job admitted their desire to “get out of the house” or away from the kids “without any embarrassment or defensiveness.”
The 1959 marketing study also found that the stay-at-home wives of blue-collar men were quite open about their full range of motives when they wanted to take a paying job. “I wish I was working,” one homemaker told the interviewers. “When you’re out working you make friends and it’s more fun. I hate housework.” Another volunteered: “I would like to get to work, and quit this housekeeping. This is monotonous.” A woman who had left a part-time job in a real estate office complained that at home all day, “I feel like I’m no use to anyone.” Not one expressed any guilt or ambivalence about wanting a job.
When working-class homemakers expressed a preference for staying home, it was often not because they didn’t want to work but because they recognized that few husbands in those days were willing to step up and share the housework. After the publication of The Feminine Mystique, one woman wrote to Friedan to say, “Most working women don’t have careers. We have jobs, just like men. . . . If we’re lucky, we like our jobs, and find some satisfaction in doing them.” But as long as husbands refused to help around the house, she continued, most of us would be willing to “chuck the wage earning back in our husbands’ laps.”
She proceeded to explain why: “We don’t really like to throw the last load of clothes in the washer at 11:30 P.M., and set the alarm for 6:00 so we can iron a blouse for a school age daughter, fix breakfast and school lunches all at the same time, do as much housework as possible before bolting to the office, and face the rest of it, and the grocery shopping and preparing dinner when we get home. This isn’t our idea of fulfillment.”
Another woman wrote that she had held several jobs on and off since her marriage but the burden of a job plus caring for three children and a husband was too much. “It’s no fun to come home and see the sweet, dear, lazy bum asleep on the couch after being on my feet all day.” She added that he “thinks he would lose some of his masculinity if anyone saw him hanging out the wash, or washing dishes.” So she was determined to stay home “until men get some of their Victorian ideas out of their heads” and become “willing to help with the housework.”
Many critics have since argued that Friedan oversold the benefits of employment in The Feminine Mystique, waxing eloquent about its role in building women’s self-esteem while ignoring the fact that few jobs available to women involved creative and satisfying work. But I believe the book suffers from the opposite flaw. Friedan did not appreciate the intangible rewards, such as a sense of self-confidence or independence, that women could gain from work she dismissed as unskilled or menial.
Friedan insisted that the only way for a woman “to find herself, to know herself as a person,” was to embark on “work of her own,” but she was also adamant that “a job, any job, is not the answer—in fact, it can be part of the trap.” Friedan discouraged her readers from expecting any satisfaction from the jobs that were then employing most female entrants into the labor market, such as retail sales and clerical work. “Women who do not look for jobs equal to their actual capacity, who do not let themselves develop the lifetime interests and goals which require serious education and training” are condemning themselves “to a non-existent future.”
Contrary to the claims of some critics, Friedan did not urge women to place the pursuit of money, fame, or power above all else. If faced with a choice between “serious volunteering” in connection with some “lifelong commitment” and taking a moneymaking job that was not part of a larger life plan, Friedan advised her readers to opt for volunteering.
But Friedan did not recognize that many women found a sense of satisfaction and confidence even in jobs that she assumed her readers would look down on. One woman who worked in a cafeteria told Komarovsky, “I’m strong and I do a good job. They like the way I put food on the plates without slopping it over.... They tell me I help digestion because I make cracks and laugh, and they like it.” Another said she liked being able to bring home stories from the job to tell her husband.
In interviews conducted in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Champaign-Urbana area of Illinois in the late 1950s, nearly 90 percent of working women said they valued the opportunity to interact with other people and the recognition they received for doing their work well. Other surveys found that even women whose primary reason for working was economic often mentioned the sense of independence and accomplishment they achieved as reasons they stayed on the job.
Marie B. describes working as a typist after graduating from high school in 1959. Despite her parents’ and in-laws’ disapproval, she kept her job after she married her high school boyfriend in 1961. “There wasn’t any ‘job ladder,’” she recalls, “except for moving out of the typing pool and becoming someone’s private secretary. Or marrying the boss, I guess. So it might sound funny to you professionals, but I really liked my job. It gave me a sense that I was ‘someone,’ more than being just a wife gave me. But my mother-in-law was always making catty comments about working. So I began to think there was something wrong with me for liking it and especially for not wanting to quit when I got pregnant. Not that I had a choice. As soon as I began to show, my boss ‘suggested’ I resign.”
Myra Marx Ferree has devoted most of her professional life to studying working-class women. Raised in the 1950s and 1960s by a mother who worked as a sales clerk in the lingerie section of a department store, she became the only one of seven children to graduate from college. She readThe Feminine Mystique in graduate school and remembers thinking that “Friedan misrepresented my mother’s life and that of other working class women I knew. She seemed to think that women could only feel oppressed if they already had a college education that they were ‘wasting.’”
Ferree felt that all women, not just those with college educations, were subjugated by the idea “they weren’t people with aspirations and a sense of adventure or desire to make some sort of mark on the world, or that if they were, they had to renounce that self . . . when they got married.” It bothered her that Friedan “seemed to think that only some women wanted or needed meaningful work and that most jobs for non-college-educated women were ipso facto not meaningful.”
For her dissertation, Ferree interviewed 115 working-class women in Somerville, Massachusetts, and the experience reinforced her reservations about The Feminine Mystique. The women told her that working outside the home gave them a sense of self-reliance and worth, even when the job itself was far from ideal. “I will never forget the woman who worked in a mayonnaise factory, often in water up to her ankles in a refrigerated room,” Ferree recalls. “I expected her to say she would prefer not to be working.” Instead, the woman made a distinction between her specific job and her self-identity as a worker. “I sure would like to quit THIS job,” the woman told Ferree, “but I can’t imagine not working.”
In later studies Ferree found that working-class women who held jobs were more satisfied with their lives than those who stayed home. They had a greater sense of competence and self-esteem, and higher feelings of social connectedness and personal autonomy. Other surveys over the years have shown that women who earn an income also feel more entitled to a voice in family decisions.
Like Komarovsky, Ferree did find that less-educated housewives were happier staying home than educated housewives. But they were still less happy than women of the same education who had jobs. Whatever their degree of education, women who worked outside the home were more likely to be satisfied than comparable women who did not. Part-time workers were the most satisfied of all, perhaps because they had the benefits of employment without as much conflict between the time demands of work and family.
Another problem with the claim that The Feminine Mystique was irrelevant to working-class women, historian Ruth Rosen points out, is that many of the young college women attracted to the women’s movement in the 1960s “were raised by blue collar parents who wanted their daughters to be the first in their family to attend college. Higher education is what transformed these working-class adolescents into middle-class women.” As late as 1966, according to a Higher Education Research Institute Study, fewer than 30 percent of entering freshmen came from a family where the father had completed college, and only 20 percent had a mother who was a college graduate.
Rosen told me that in researching her book, The World Split Open, she was struck by how many such daughters, whose mothers had worked outside the home while they were growing up, were terrified that they themselves might become housewives. “The dominant image was that even if your mom was working, the right ‘step up’ into the middle class was to become a housewife. Only they didn’t want to.” For many of these upwardly mobile women, The Feminine Mystique provided welcome reinforcement for their desire to build a career rather than retire into full-time homemaking.
Jennifer Glass, now a sociology professor, reports that in their working-class neighborhood of Dallas, her mother was the only woman employed outside the home, “and she held it against my father, even though he worked two jobs.” For as long as Glass can remember, “my mother complained about having to work, probably because she got stuck with the second shift and was very tired all the time.”
But because the other neighborhood mothers often picked up a little extra cash by babysitting Jennifer, she “really got to know the other mothers on our block, watched their soap operas with them, and saw how their husbands treated them and how diminished their own lives were. It did not seem like a life I wanted to live, so I just discounted all my mother’s griping and complaining.”
Kathleen D. was the first in her family to go to college, and her working-class Irish grandparents were “already planning the wedding I was going to have and the house I was going to live in as soon as I met a nice college boy who would marry me and rescue me from the life that my mother had had to live. But I didn’t want to be rescued. I wanted a better job than she or my dad had, but becoming a full-time housewife was not the sort of occupational mobility I had in mind.”
Brigit O’Farrell, who came from a white working-class family in Ohio, was a college sorority girl when she read The Feminine Mystique in 1965. “The general expectation [in my family] was that I would be a teacher or work for the telephone company, then marry and have a family,” she recalls. Reading The Feminine Mystique “made me question the whole idea that the most important thing in life was to find the right man.” After college she found a job at the newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and devoted her entire career to battling sex discrimination, especially that faced by blue-collar and union women.
Elaine Ingalli, raised in a blue-collar Catholic family, was fascinated by biographies of famous women as early as the third grade. “Almost my whole childhood I wanted to be one of two things: an airline stew or president.” She read The Feminine Mystique “some time between 1970-74, as a newlywed, newly minted college grad. . . . About all I remember from the first reading of Friedan was the idea that housework expanded to fill the time/space one had for it—and that stayed with me for years.”
Maddy G., whose father was a blue-collar worker, reported that her mom, who had worked as a secretary for several years, had become depressed after quitting her job when her third child was born. She did not want to end up the same way, and reading Friedan in the late 1960s bolstered her resolve. “I became doubly determined not to let housework and marriage take over my life.”
Someone loaned Friedan’s book to Shirley Sandage when she was “a working-class young mother . . . with one son and another on the way.” Her immediate reaction was, “My God, she’s talking about me.” Sandage later founded the Migrant Action Program in northern Iowa in the 1960s and held down a variety of important government jobs. In 2008, at age eighty, she was still helping other women “understand their possibilities in this modern world.” She credits The Feminine Mystique for helping set her on this path.
Sherry Fisher’s father and mother, both factory workers, scrimped and saved to send her to college. “I was the first from my neighborhood to go to college, and I was so excited by the new possibilities in front of me. I could be a nurse, an accountant, a journalist. And then it dawned on me that even though my parents were really proud that I had been at the top of my class all through high school, now that I’d ‘made it’ into college, they wanted to marry me off to a man who could take care of me so I could stay home for the rest of my life. The Feminine Mystique gave me the arguments I needed to resist their pressure. I carried it around with me like a shield.”
THE MAJORITY OF YOUNG WOMEN FROM WORKING-CLASS FAMILIES IN THE late 1950s and early 1960s did not go to college. They took a job before marriage and expected to quit work soon after they wed. The ranks of such women swelled in this period, with growing numbers of young women heading out to work in the new “help wanted—female” jobs opening up in urban America.
In 1958, The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe’s novel about work, sex, romance, and disappointment in the lives of these young women, hit the New York Times best-seller list and remained there for five months. It was soon made into a hit movie.
“You see them every morning at a quarter to nine,” the opening paragraph of the novel began, “rushing out of the maw of the subway tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls. Some of them look eager and some resentful, and some of them look as if they haven’t left their beds yet.... Some of them are wearing pink or chartreuse fuzzy overcoats and five-year-old ankle-strap shoes and have their hair up in pin curls underneath kerchiefs. Some of them are wearing chic black suits (maybe last year’s but who can tell?) and kid gloves and are carrying their lunches in violet-sprigged Bonwit Teller paper bags. None of them has enough money.”
Jaffe’s novel mixed erotic tension with cautionary tales about the dangers of “giving in” to predatory men. But however unconvincing some of her plot lines sounded to highbrow critics, Jaffe was describing a real sociological phenomenon: the explosion of white-collar jobs that brought huge numbers of young women into the workforce. Many, perhaps most, aspired to marry a man who would support them, but along the way they were exposed to the pleasures and risks of personal independence, as well as the growing prevalence, even emerging acceptability, of premarital sex.
Historian Elaine Tyler May argues that in the course of the 1950s, sexual repression gave way to “sexual brinksmanship.” As the Ladies’ Home Journal put it at the time, “sex suggestiveness” was now part of “the nicest girls’” repertoire. But it was still the woman’s responsibility to “draw the line.” The balancing act this required created new sources of private guilt and public humiliation for women.
When The Best of Everything was reissued in 2005, Jaffe recalled: “Back then, people didn’t talk about not being a virgin. They didn’t talk about going out with married men. They didn’t talk about abortion. They didn’t talk about sexual harassment, which had no name in those days.... I thought that if I could help one young woman sitting in her tiny apartment thinking she was all alone and a bad girl, then the book would be worthwhile.”
In 1962 Helen Gurley Brown, later editor of Cosmopolitan, published an even more phenomenal best seller. Written in a style that was far more accessible for women without a college education than Friedan’s book, Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl advanced the provocative idea that women should not see marriage as “the best years of your life.” Rather, wrote Brown, marriage “is insurance for the worst years of your life. During your best years you don’t need a husband. You do need a man of course every step of the way and they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the bunch.”
Brown insisted that women had the same sexual desires as men and the same right to satisfy them. She also thought women needed a job. “While you’re waiting to marry, or if you never marry, a job can be your love, your happy pill, your means of finding out who you are and what you can do, your playpen, your family, your entrée to a good social life, men and money.” She advised women to try for “some kind of work that brings recognition. That can build more self-esteem than any psychiatrist, self-help book, or lecture.”
Like Jaffe, Brown recognized that working girls seldom earned enough money to live the good life she espoused. Since men made more money, women could use their sex appeal to even things up while getting their own sexual pleasure along the way. Brown encouraged them to make sure their sexual fun came with material perks. The single girl, she advised, should insist that the man pay for all dates, all trips, and all alcohol (even if it was consumed at her apartment). Periodically he should throw in some expensive gifts, or even cash.
Sex and the Single Girl was an even bigger publishing sensation than The Feminine Mystique, selling more than 2 million copies in three weeks. Brown received so much fan mail that the post office told her they could not continue to deliver it and she would have to pick it up herself.
Jennifer Scanlon, a professor at Bowdoin College, argues that Brown was “a feminist trailblazer” who did for young white working-class women what Friedan did for middle-class suburban wives. Brown did identify as a feminist, even writing to Friedan to praise The Feminine Mystique. She vigorously supported the Equal Rights Amendment and the struggle to legalize abortion. And her rejection of the prevailing cant about virginity and female sexual passivity struck a chord with many young women.
Still, Brown’s advice to women was double-edged. She suggested that women use their femininity at work to get promotions and after hours to get treats and luxuries they could not otherwise afford. But although manipulating gender and sexual stereotypes to one’s own advantage may be satisfying, even empowering, to individual women, it can set back equality for other women by reinforcing those stereotypes. Brown’s strategy ultimately pitted working women against one another in competition for the favor of men rather than uniting them for collective goals.
Throughout the postwar era, however, some working-class women did come together to combat sexual discrimination. During the 1940s and 1950s, female workers in auto factories, the meatpacking industry, electrical plants, and other industrial jobs began challenging sex discrimination by employers as well as by fellow unionists. They campaigned for after-school programs and low-cost nurseries, along with tax exemptions for child care expenses. In the late 1950s, flight attendants began their campaign against being treated like sex objects.
Well before pay discrimination was made illegal in the 1960s, writes historian Alice Kessler Harris, working women were flooding government agencies with complaints about the practice. It was on their behalf that the National Organization for Women, which Friedan helped to found in 1966, mounted its first legal actions and legislative campaigns.
So despite its silence about the specific needs of working-class and minority women, and despite its occasional lapses into elitism, The Feminine Mystique’s assault on stereotypes about femininity and its defense of women’s right to work were certainly in the interests of working women, black and white. And the prominence Friedan achieved as a result of the book helped make her a leader of a movement that improved the status of working-class as well as middle-class women. The relationship of The Feminine Mystique to the origins and evolution of the feminist movement, however, is more complex than many of the book’s fans or critics realize.