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A NUMBER OF MYTHS ABOUT THE ORIGINS AND IMPACT OF THE FEMININE Mystique have been perpetuated over the years, some by Friedan herself. One myth widely repeated in feminist circles is that the book awakened women to their discontent, igniting the contemporary women’s movement. The antifeminist version claims that until The Feminine Mystique came along, women were “living in peace in what they considered to be a normal, traditional” life. Friedan’s book “wrenched” them from their homes.
But Friedan did not “discover” what so many 1950s housewives were feeling, nor did her book launch the movement that eventually transformed women’s place in American society. These two processes were separated by several years, and giving the book or its author too much credit for these developments ignores the rich history of female resistance that Friedan herself portrayed in her chapter on the struggle for suffrage, “The Passionate Journey.” It also discounts the massive societal shifts already eroding the traditional boundaries of a woman’s place by the time of the book’s publication and disregards the multiple sources of the movement that erupted in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In describing how she came to write The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan portrayed herself as just another unhappy housewife who stumbled upon her subject almost by accident. To the extent that she acknowledged having been anything but a homemaker, it was to accuse herself of having perpetuated the feminine mystique as a freelance writer for women’s magazines. “I helped create this image,” Friedan declared in her chapter about “The Happy Housewife Heroine.” “I have watched American women for fifteen years try to conform to it. But I can no longer deny my own knowledge of its terrible implications.”
In her 1976 book, It Changed My Life, Friedan wrote that as she examined her sources for The Feminine Mystique in 1962, “I sensed the inescapable implications of the trail of evidence I had followed—that if I was right, the very assumptions on which I and other women were basing our lives and on which the experts were advising us were wrong. I thought, I must be crazy. . . . But all along I also felt this calm, strange sureness, as if in tune with something much larger, more important than myself that had to be taken seriously. At first I seemed alone in that awareness.”
A compelling story, but untrue. Daniel Horowitz’s exhaustive study of Friedan’s political background shows that Friedan’s critique of women’s place in American society can be traced back to her left-wing activism in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1951, reporting on a meeting of rank-and-file women organized by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, Friedan paid tribute to working women’s determination to no longer “be paid or treated as some inferior species by their bosses, or by any male workers who have swallowed the bosses’ thinking.”
As Friedan attempted to reach a new audience of middle-class readers in the mid-1950s, she downplayed her ties to the labor movement and to the Left, in part because she had seen firsthand how the climate of guilt by association during the Red Scare of the 1950s had derailed careers. Her boyfriend at Berkeley, physicist David Bohm, had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and accused of espionage. Although he was acquitted at a subsequent trial, his academic career in the United States was destroyed.
Bohm’s case was only one of many. In 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy charged Dorothy Kenyon, the U.S. representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, with being a “fellow traveler”—someone who worked with the Communist Party without being an official member. A Senate investigating committee cleared Kenyon, but her political career was ruined. The same year, Richard Nixon used similar red-baiting tactics to defeat Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas in a Senate race.
Civil rights activist and feminist pioneer Pauli Murray has described in her autobiography how insidious the atmosphere at that time was. The onus was placed on individuals to prove they were not subversive, rather than on the government or employers to prove they were. Murray, an African-American woman who had been denied admission to Harvard Law School because of her sex, went on to study at the University of California at Berkeley and at Yale, becoming a well-respected attorney and later an ordained Episcopal priest. She was rigorously vetted for her loyalty when she applied to practice law in New York State, but when she pursued a position in a Cornell University program that was helping Liberia codify its laws, she was turned down. The hiring officer told her that although they had no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing on her part, the university needed “one hundred percent protection” from any insinuations of disloyalty, and her past associations might be suspect in “the troublous times in which we live.”
In those “troublous” political times, many individuals and groups turned on—and turned in—past associates to prove their loyalty and save their own jobs. Hollywood celebrities went before HUAC to name acquaintances they had seen at left-wing political meetings or had heard make statements that could be construed as sympathetic to communism. Many political groups required prospective members to take loyalty oaths before they could join.
The NAACP and the National Council of Negro Women instructed their members to “prove our patriotism” by refusing to work with any individuals or groups suspected of being subversive. Some Americans dissociated themselves entirely from civil rights activists because while equal rights might be fine in principle, “communists were trying to stir the Negroes up.”
Friedan never issued the anticommunist denunciations that were a staple of public writing at the time, but she was determined not to be blacklisted or discredited because of her prior associations. That meant glossing over a large part of her life. Friedan’s secretary Pat Aleskovsky had worked many weekends typing Friedan’s manuscript, even leaving dinner parties to take Friedan’s dictation over the phone. But Friedan told Aleskovsky that she could not mention her in the acknowledgments for fear of exposing the book to red-baiting smears, because Pat’s husband had once been named as a suspected communist at a public HUAC hearing.
When Friedan learned that Daniel Horowitz was exploring her radical past for his book, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique, she denied him permission to quote anything from her unpublished papers, told confidantes that he was attacking her, and threatened to sue him. She viewed his research as an extension of the McCarthyism she had seen so many others subjected to. And just as Friedan feared, even almost forty years after her book’s publication, some social commentators used Horowitz’s findings about Friedan’s background to argue that feminism had been part of a communist plot.
Friedan’s ability to portray herself as an apolitical suburban housewife allowed her book to reach many women who shared her dissatisfactions but might never have bought the book had they known of her previous political associations. One woman wrote to tell Friedan that it had inspired her to become a Republican activist. Another wanted to start an Ayn Rand-Betty Friedan club, which goaded Friedan into replying that she had no desire to be associated with Rand’s views. (Rand was an ardent proponent of free market capitalism.) A woman who was reading the book with her minister husband reported that it had been recommended by the president of the Baptist Women’s Mission Society. Another noted that the book reinforced ideas she was already teaching in her church group for Mormon teens.
While Friedan’s silence about her left-wing associations during the 1940s might be understandable in the repressive political atmosphere in which she was writing, her refusal to fully acknowledge her intellectual and personal debts is more difficult to justify. Friedan had a pattern of building up her own achievements by downplaying aid from others and by exaggerating the hostility or disinterest with which her ideas were initially received. Although she usually cited her primary sources—interviews she had done, studies she had read—Friedan was less conscientious about secondary sources. For example, Friedan’s chapter on motivational research and “The Sexual Sell” is hugely indebted to Vance Packard’s 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders, but that chapter credits only the staff of the Institute for Motivational Research, a group she undoubtedly learned of from Packard.
In her book’s preface, Friedan argued, with considerable exaggeration, that feminism had died out completely after World War II, leaving the ideology of “the happy housewife” unchallenged. Therefore, in Friedan’s account, she was forced to “hunt down” the origins of the mystique and its effect on women. She “found a few pieces of the puzzle in previous studies of women,” she conceded, “but not many,” for previous writers had accepted the feminine mystique and used its tenets to analyze women. She acknowledged in passing that reading “Simone de Beauvoir’s insights into French women” and the work of American sociologist Mirra Komarovsky had been “provocative” for her. But this brief reference minimized the tremendous debt Friedan and her book owed to both those thinkers.
De Beauvoir’s 1949 book, The Second Sex, which appeared in translation in America in 1953, rigorously analyzed the consequences of a woman’s enforced domesticity, exploring how it deformed her individual personality and the institution of marriage itself. But more than a decade passed before Friedan acknowledged that she, “who had helped start women on the new road,” had herself been “started on that road by de Beauvoir.” Even then, Friedan claimed that she had been influenced by the book’s existentialism rather than by its feminism, which she dismissed as “depressing.” The Second Sex, she said, “just made me want to crawl in bed and pull the covers over my head. It did not lead to any action to change the lot of women, which somehow The Feminine Mystique did.”
Because de Beauvoir was a prominent left-wing French intellectual, she did not get much of a hearing in the mainstream press of 1950s America. Even the liberal magazine The Nation warned its readers that de Beauvoir had “certain political leanings.” So perhaps Friedan’s reluctance to admit the influence of The Second Sex was part of her desire to establish her political respectability.
But 1953 was also the year that Mirra Komarovsky, a thoroughly respectable academic, published Women in the Modern World: Their Education and Their Dilemmas. While more cautious in her conclusions than Friedan, Komarovsky pioneered the use of intensive life histories and interviews to explore the anxieties of modern housewives, especially those who had gone to college before marriage. She then proceeded to dismantle the arguments against women’s education by Freudian psychoanalysts and some family-life professionals.
Friedan never mentioned these aspects of Komarovsky’s work. Later in The Feminine Mystique she referred to Komarovsky’s “brilliant” analysis of how girls learn to play the womanly roles expected of them, but otherwise Friedan lumped Komarovsky with the antifeminists, unfairly charging her with “virtually endorsing the continued infantalizing of American women.”
Friedan also failed to acknowledge the work of Elizabeth Hawes, whom she had reviewed in the 1940s, or that of Eve Merriam, a poet and leftist activist who wrote a 1959 article “The Myth of the Necessary Housewife,” arguing that no society in history had wasted the talents of half its adult population the way America was doing. Merriam was known at the time to be at work on a book critiquing the ideology of domesticity. This came out in 1964 under the title When Nora Slammed the Door.
As The Feminine Mystique neared publication, Friedan and her publisher worried that it would be eclipsed by the many other books on women’s issues that were already out or scheduled to appear around the same time. A vice president at Norton, soliciting a cover blurb from best-selling author and American icon Pearl S. Buck, wrote: “One of our main problems is that much is being written these days about the plight (or whatever it is) of the educated American woman; therefore this one will have to fight its way out of a thicket.”
In a review in the August 1963 issue of Marriage and Family Living, prominent sociologist Jessie Bernard mentioned that The Feminine Mystique had arrived on her desk just one day after she had sent off her own manuscript discussing educated women’s retreat into the home. But, she said generously, Friedan has analyzed the same topic “in far greater detail and far more passionately.”
Several women wrote to tell Friedan that they had been planning to write a book on the same topic. Said one: “It is amusing to think that the title of my proposed book was ‘Somebody spit on the stove.’ Now, Miss Friedan has!” Another woman mused that “I ought to have hated that book and you,” because she had proposed a book on the same topic six years earlier and had never written it, even though several publishers had expressed interest. “But I don’t hate either the book or you because you’ve done an infinitely better and more important job than I would have.”
It in no way disparages Friedan’s accomplishments to point out that The Feminine Mystique was not ahead of its time. Books don’t become best sellers because they are ahead of their time. They become best sellers when they tap into concerns that people are already mulling over, pull together ideas and data that have not yet spread beyond specialists and experts, and bring these all together in a way that is easy to understand and explain to others.
The Feminine Mystique synthesized a wide range of scholarly research and contemporary social criticism. It translated important sociological and psychological findings into accessible language and personalized such research by combining it with the stories of individual housewives. Friedan also produced a dramatic journalistic exposé of the advertisers who tried to sell to women, the psychiatric community that tried to pacify them, and the educators who patronized them. The resulting account melded riveting personal stories with challenging intellectual criticism. And the title was brilliant in its own right, a striking catchphrase that provided a simple summary of how women were constrained by prevailing social expectations.
IN THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE AND IN HER LATER AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING, Friedan claimed that the book’s origins lay in the hostile reception she received from women’s magazines when she first argued that women’s frustration was caused by the narrow roles they were forced into rather than by exposure to an education that diverted them from their proper feminine aspirations. Friedan reported that when she used the questionnaire for her 1957 survey of her Smith College classmates as the basis of an article titled “Are Women Wasting Their Time in College?” McCall’s rejected it, the Ladies’ Home Journal rewrote it to say the opposite of what she intended, and the editor of Redbook declared that Friedan had “gone off her rocker.”
In her 2000 book, Life So Far, Friedan stated that these adamant rejections made her realize that her article “would never get printed in one of those big women’s magazines,” because it “threatened the whole firmament they stood on . . . the whole amorphous, vague, invisible miasma around ‘the role of women,’ ‘feminine fulfillment’ as it was then defined by men and psychological followers of Freud, and taken for granted by everyone as true.” That day, she recounted, she phoned her agent “and told her not to send that article to any more magazines. I was going to write a book.”
Once again, Friedan’s narrative is gripping but does not accord with the evidence. When I examined Friedan’s papers at the Schlesinger Library and the records of her publisher, the W. W. Norton Company, at Columbia University, I found no independent confirmation of Friedan’s claims that editors had reacted with outrage to this article. A letter by Friedan herself noted that after the Ladies’ Home Journal decided not to publish the article, several other women’s magazines had expressed interest but wanted it to be more broad than the Smith survey. Friedan wrote that this interest was what made her begin “to realize there was a book here.”
Actually, Friedan had no lack of supporters in the women’s magazines. The public affairs editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal in the 1950s and 1960s was Margaret Hickey, a longtime feminist, daughter of a suffragist, and, starting in 1961, member of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. And Friedan’s correspondence shows that several editors were sympathetic to her views.
Of course, some editors vehemently opposed Friedan’s arguments, and others agreed with her but were reluctant to publish anything that might offend advertisers who used the feminine mystique to pitch their wares. In some cases, Horowitz shows, various women’s magazines seem to have pressured Friedan to revise articles she wrote during the 1950s, toning down points that might be considered feminist. In at least one case, they removed favorable references to struggles against religious and racial prejudice.
Still, as early as 1955, Charm accepted the article “I Went Back to Work,” about Friedan’s own experience returning to paid employment after having a child. She had done so, she told readers, “both from economic necessity and from personal choice.” In the next few years, Friedan was able to publish several laudatory articles about women who successfully combined marriage and careers, and by 1959 she had a book contract for what became The Feminine Mystique.
On December 18, 1959, her editor, George Brockwell, wrote to Reader’s Digest that “Good Housekeeping has just signed up one Betty Friedan to do the leading article in their anniversary issue next May. This article will be on women’s search for identity . . . and will be so good that your magazine people may be tempted. I know it will be good, for it will in effect be an abridgement of the prospectus of the book Mrs. Friedan is doing for us. We are very high on this project and expect it to be a big one. I therefore hope that your magazine people can be persuaded to wait for the book rather than jumping at the Good Housekeeping article.”
In 1960, Good Housekeeping duly published that abridgement, titled “Women Are People Too.” In May 1961, Mademoiselle published a Friedan piece that became “The Crisis in Women’s Identity” in the final version of her book. And in 1962, Friedan’s publisher pushed back the publication date by a month to allow both the Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s to publish excerpts before the book was in stores.
As Norton’s prepublicity memos enthused, it was unprecedented for two competing mass-circulation magazines to excerpt the same book. Having these appear in the two largest English-language magazines in the world gave The Feminine Mystique a huge boost and partially offset the bad luck that the book came out during a 114-day strike of all the New York newspapers, which made it impossible to get reviews or place ads in that important market during the critical first months.
For the rest of her life, Friedan insisted that her publisher had done nothing to promote the book until she browbeat him into hiring an independent publicist. But by the end of 1962, Norton had already sold the book club rights to Book Find for $5,000 (the equivalent of more than $36,000 in 2010 dollars), collected endorsements from many prominent individuals, and was projecting that The Feminine Mystique would be a best seller backed by “national advertising and other promotions.”
The newspaper strike was a huge blow to publicity plans for the book’s launch, but by the time Friedan’s new publicist came onboard in April, supposedly to rescue the book from oblivion, it was already in its fifth printing, and Norton had taken out ads in several major newspapers. In a note to Norton about plans for West Coast promotions, the publicist pointed out that Friedan had already made about twenty television and radio appearances before she took on the campaign. The Feminine Mystique sold approximately 60,000 copies in hardback, a large amount even nowadays, and nearly 1.5 million copies in paperback.
Friedan was a lively and sought-after lecturer, with a knack for fanning controversy and stimulating buzz. Even her ferocious ego helped get the book talked about. Once, while on the television show Girl Talk, Friedan warned host Virginia Graham during the break that if she wasn’t given more time to make her points, she would chant the word “orgasm” ten times.
Some of Friedan’s more outrageous or acerbic statements to the press made her sound like the 1960s counterpart of the incendiary Ann Coulter, only with less leg and more brain. But unlike Coulter, Friedan did more than pander to her audience’s prejudices. The Feminine Mystiquechallenged its readers to expand their horizons intellectually as well as emotionally and to channel the indignation that her argument produced into constructive change in their own lives.
The book did not, however, transform women’s societal role. In 1965, women’s legal status still had more in common with the 1920s than the 1970s, and the political agenda of women’s rights activists remained extremely modest. Almost no one was raising the demands that would become central to the women’s movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s—establishment of preschool and child care centers; the right to contraception and abortion; criminalization of sexual harassment and marital rape; protection against domestic abuse or sexual violence; abolition of laws penalizing unwed mothers or reinforcing a husband’s authority over his wife. It was even hard to find anyone suggesting that husbands share child care and housework.
The specific agenda Friedan presented in The Feminine Mystique broke no new ground in this regard. She mentioned that the work of the President’s Commission might mitigate discrimination and made a passing reference to the need for maternity leave and child care, but most of her concluding chapter focused on women’s need to get an education and to make sure their life plan included developing the capacity to engage in creative work. She did not advocate that women organize to oppose the multitude of laws and practices that relegated women to second-class citizenship, restricted their access to many jobs, and gave husbands the final say over family decisions and finances. When such a movement did emerge, it was not as a direct result of The Feminine Mystique, although that book brought Friedan the fame that allowed her to play a major leadership role.
SOME THREE YEARS AFTER SHE PUBLISHED THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, Friedan was instrumental in founding the National Organization for Women. She became its first president, a position she held until 1970. The immensely successful Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970 was Friedan’s idea, and she helped organize the Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. She was a towering figure in the second wave of the women’s movement. But here, too, Friedan is often given—and sometimes claimed for herself—too much individual credit.
In Friedan’s account, after she gained national attention with The Feminine Mystique, she was approached by an “underground” group of women who shared her ideas but couldn’t risk their jobs or reputations by seeming too militant. They begged her to put aside the new book she was writing and build a new women’s movement. The decisive moment, she explained to a New York Times reporter in 1970, came when a female attorney who worked for the recently formed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission pulled Friedan into her office.
Closing her door and breaking down in tears, the woman begged the writer to do something: “‘Mrs. Friedan,’ she said, ‘You’re the only one who can do it. You have to start an NAACP for women.’” Such incidents, Friedan told the reporter, made her realize that “women needed a movement. So, I guess I started it.”
Since then, many accounts of Friedan’s life have claimed that the feminist movement was moribund in the early 1960s and that Friedan “single-handedly” revived it. In fact, however, a core group of activists had been building feminist networks during the previous two decades, and by the early 1960s they had been joined by significant numbers of female government appointees who were chafing at the slow pace of change and already discussing the possibility of building an independent women’s rights movement.
It is certainly true that when Friedan was honing her ideas in the 1950s and early 1960s, the National Woman’s Party and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs were nothing like the powerful movement that had organized to win women the vote in the first two decades of the twentieth century. But feminists were networking behind the scenes and had achieved some successes. In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, responding to their pressure, urged Congress to pass a measure requiring equal pay for equal work, pointing out that women had cast a majority of ballots in the previous election. Congress did not act on his request, but Eisenhower did appoint more women to government posts.
John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960 by a very narrow margin, and like Eisenhower, he recognized the importance of securing women’s support. In 1961, on the advice of Esther Peterson, head of the Women’s Bureau and assistant secretary of labor, Kennedy created the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, to “develop plans for fostering the full partnership of men and women in our national life.” In 1962, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women began a campaign, with the president’s approval, to get similar state commissions established across America. Such commissions were a key precursor to NOW, because they brought together women activists who had not been in regular touch, allowing them to compare notes, develop collective strategies, and often broaden their goals.
Another important development was the gradual abating of the sharp conflicts that had divided feminists since the 1920s over whether to press for an Equal Rights Amendment or try to preserve and expand protective legislation. In 1961, Eleanor Roosevelt remarked that the spread of unionization had extended many needed work protections to men as well as women, so that special protective legislation was becoming less necessary and the ERA might soon become a desirable goal. Esther Peterson and most of the members of the President’s Commission continued to oppose the ERA, but the commission’s Committee on Civil and Political Rights was co-chaired by an ERA proponent, and Pauli Murray, by then a noted civil rights lawyer, proposed a way to move beyond the debate. She suggested that sex-based discrimination be attacked, just as was being done with racial discrimination, as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
There was progress on other fronts as well. In July 1962, Kennedy ordered all federal agencies to disregard gender in hiring, training, and promoting employees. A year later, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act. In October 1963 the President’s Commission on the Status of Women issued its final report, documenting the extent of sex discrimination and recommending reforms such as making marriage an economic partnership in which property was seen as belonging to both spouses. In addition to proposing this new protection for housewives, the committee also called for paid maternity leave for working women and for making child care available to families.
Although the report was published eight months after Friedan’s book, she knew it was in the works and referred to it in her book as an encouraging sign of the potential for change. Within a year the commission had distributed more than 80,000 copies of the report, which was also translated into Swedish, Italian, and Japanese. In 1965, the report was published as a commercial book, edited by Margaret Mead, and sold extremely well.
Clearly a new movement to expand women’s rights was already on the horizon by 1963. In addition to the core group of feminists who had long been working behind the scenes, economic and political trends had gradually been undermining some of the opposition to incorporating women more fully into America’s economic and political life. Indeed, Robert Jackson has argued that women were by this time, as his book title claims, Destined for Equality.
As the booming postwar economy created a growing demand for new workers, especially in the expanding service and retail sectors, industry increasingly put out the welcome mat for women, despite objections from some male workers and pundits who decried the “feminization” of the workplace. The Cold War and the Korean War also raised fears that the United States might lose out to the Soviet Union unless it trained women in needed defense fields such as engineering. By the beginning of the 1960s, politicians and employers agreed that both the economy and the political system needed more “woman power.”
Most of the opinion-makers who supported expanding women’s participation in the economy expected that men would continue to organize and direct that woman power. Few envisioned an equal partnership at work or in government, much less at home. But the trend toward assigning status based on individual merit and educational achievement was eroding the assumption that one group, be it whites or men, was automatically entitled to monopolize positions of power and prestige. And these economic and social changes were encouraging many young women, even without reading Friedan, to direct more attention to getting an education or preparing themselves for a career.
IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 1960s, HOWEVER, MOST MASS ORGANIZATION and public debate continued to focus on the civil rights movement. There were no actions by women comparable to the sit-ins in the South or the picket lines in the North, much less anything on the scale of the 1963 March on Washington. In fact, the wedge that feminists would later use to organize their own movement was an almost accidental by-product of struggles between southern segregationists and civil rights leaders.
Federal officials had initially been reluctant to enforce integration. But the pressure of almost ten years of demonstrations for equal rights, combined with dramatic television coverage of white southerners’ violent resistance, created a powerful sentiment for justice in the United States and put America under intense pressure abroad. Finally, in 1963, President Kennedy introduced the Civil Rights Bill. After Kennedy’s assassination later that year, the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, urged Congress to enact a more comprehensive law to protect blacks’ voting rights; ban racial discrimination in jobs, housing, and schools; and put the Justice Department on the side of plaintiffs who argued that their rights were being violated. Title VII of the bill outlawed discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin.
The bill faced strong resistance, especially from southern members of Congress. Adding sex to the list of categories of prohibited discrimination was part of the convoluted maneuvering that surrounded this battle, which produced what historian Ruth Rosen calls “a bizarre coalition” of southern congressmen and supporters of women’s rights.
It began when a few members of the National Woman’s Party approached Congressman Howard Smith, the southern chairman of the House Rules Committee, and pointed out that if the bill passed in its present form, black men would have protections that were denied to white women. They urged him to present an amendment adding “sex” to the bill. Smith agreed, although he later admitted that his main motive had been to stir up trouble in the bill’s supporters, many of whom opposed women’s rights and might therefore join the southerners in voting against the bill.
The amendment delighted most of the female members of the House of Representatives but worried many supporters of civil rights. Esther Peterson of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women declared that she “was not willing to risk advancing the rights of all women at the expense of the redress due black men and women.” Representative Edith Green decided to vote against the amendment, which she supported in principle, because she feared that linking the two issues would jeopardize the chance of winning this important piece of legislation for racial equality. Some male politicians voted for the sex amendment for the same reason, hoping its inclusion would kill the entire bill.
The amendment to add the category of sex to Title VII passed the House by a vote of 168-133. Two days later, the entire bill passed the House by a vote of 290-130.
Next the bill went to the Senate, where southern senators immediately began a filibuster that brought everything else to a halt for fifty-four days. Behind the scenes, several senators talked about amending Title VII to strike the word “sex.” At this point feminist legislators such as Representative Martha Griffiths and Senator Margaret Chase Smith, both supporters of the entire bill, mobilized their networks to oppose dropping the sex discrimination clause. Ultimately the White House, fearing the loss of even one sincere women’s rights supporter in the Senate in what might be a very close vote, threw its support behind the bill as it had passed the House, and the Senate finally voted 73-27 in its favor.
The inclusion of a woman’s plank in such a sweeping piece of democratic legislation in the absence of an organized women’s movement, points out historian Cynthia Harrison, was an anomaly. It resulted more from the tremendous sense of urgency produced by the civil rights struggle than from any grassroots pressure that women’s rights advocates were able to mobilize. But getting the ban on sex discrimination enforced in the absence of a mass movement was another matter.
Almost immediately, working women began to deluge the commission with complaints of discrimination, but the agency set up to enforce the new law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), refused to outlaw sex segregation in employment ads. After all, said the director of the EEOC dismissively, the sex clause in Title VII was “a fluke . . . conceived out of wedlock.”
Many in the media agreed that the clause should not be taken seriously. “Why,” demanded a writer in the New Republic, “should the mischievous joke perpetrated on the floor of the House of Representatives” be treated seriously by responsible administrators?
If businesses could no longer designate some jobs by sex, pundits asked, would Playboy Clubs, for example, be forced to employ male bunnies to serve drinks and show off their bodies? The Wall Street Journal enjoined its readers to picture “a shapeless, knobby-kneed male ‘bunny’ serving drinks to a group of stunned businessmen in a Playboy Club” and raised the hilarious prospect of “a matronly vice-president” chasing a male secretary around her desk. The manager of an electronics company that employed only women told a journalist that if opponents of sex segregation got their way, “we’ll have to advertise for people with small, nimble fingers and hire the first male midget with unusual dexterity [who] shows up.”
A New York Times editorial warned that if employers were not allowed to specify that only men could apply for certain jobs there would be “no more milkman, iceman, serviceman, foreman or pressman. . . . The Rockettes may become bi-sexual, and a pity too.... Bunny problem indeed! This is revolution, chaos. You can’t even safely advertise for a wife any more.” And the personnel officer of a major airline raised the horrifying prospect of what might happen “when a gal walks into our office, demands a job as an airline pilot and has the credentials to qualify.”
The EEOC’s blatant disregard of the new law angered feminists in government service, who had thought until then that their patient work through official channels was paying off. In October 1965, at the usually placid conference of the National Council of Women of the United States, Pauli Murray publicly chastised the EEOC chair, saying that the committee’s policy of permitting sex-segregated ads violated Title VII. “If it becomes necessary to march on Washington to assure equal job opportunities for all,” said Murray, “I hope women will not flinch from the thought.”
After reading newspaper accounts of these comments, Betty Friedan sought out Murray, who had done some typing for her several years earlier, and Murray in turn introduced her to what Friedan later called “the feminist underground” in government circles. Many of these women were already convinced that women needed an independent national civil rights organization, comparable to the NAACP. In fact, the original idea has been variously credited to Addie Wyatt, Aileen Hernandez, Pauli Murray, Muriel Fox, Dollie Lowther Robinson, Richard Graham, and Friedan herself, which suggests that many individuals were coming to a similar conclusion.
Whoever came up with the idea, the government feminists saw Friedan as someone who could be especially effective in pressing the issue forward, both because of her high profile since the publication of The Feminine Mystique and because she was not a government employee who could be fired if she alienated higher-up administrators. They took pains to include Friedan in their discussions, urging her to get involved in political organizing.
They also invited her to attend the third national meeting of state women’s commissions in June 1966, which many hoped would compel the EEOC to start enforcing the law. Shortly before that conference, Representative Martha Griffiths lambasted the EEOC on the floor of Congress for its “arbitrary arrogance, disregard of law, and . . . flat hostility to the human rights of women.” Catherine East of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor arranged to get copies of Griffiths’s speech to all the conference delegates. A showdown was brewing.
At the conference, Friedan participated in behind-the scenes discussions with fifteen to twenty women who were determined to move beyond the polite lobbying tactics of their superiors. Her room was the site of a late-night meeting where they heatedly debated the next step in pushing forward their grievances.
The following day, when they were told they could not offer resolutions critical of the Johnson administration, the women decided it was time to step outside government channels and start a new women’s association—the National Organization for Women. Friedan came up with the name, writing it on a napkin at the table where the dissidents huddled. The women agreed with Friedan that this should not be an organization “of” women, but one “for” women, welcoming sympathetic men as well.
Friedan played a central role in founding NOW and, with Pauli Murray, helped develop a statement of purpose that addressed a far wider constituency and range of issues than had The Feminine Mystique. Of special note, given later claims that NOW dealt only with white middle-class concerns, the statement pointed out that black women were “victims of the double discrimination of race and sex” and pledged “active support to the common cause of equal rights for all those who suffer discrimination and deprivation.”
Under Friedan’s leadership, NOW established task forces on equalizing employment opportunities, education, and political rights; improving the image of women; and fighting female poverty. Friedan quickly became a national leader, working energetically to publicize and expand the movement’s reach. The Feminine Mystique continued to sell well, and in combination with Friedan’s activities in NOW, she was in great demand as a speaker and lecturer around the country.
Things did not always run smoothly in the new organization. Initially, Friedan tried to exclude lesbians from public roles and vehemently opposed addressing their concerns. Even after this issue was resolved, her criticisms of other feminist leaders were sometimes divisive. But she continued to win recruits to the cause, and her audacious call for a National Strike for Equality in 1970, when the movement had begun to flag, was a brilliant move that helped unite the more mainstream NOW leaders with younger women who had been independently exploring feminist issues and forming what they called “women’s liberation” groups throughout the country.
Many of these young women came to their views by very different routes than either the traditional feminists or the women influenced by The Feminine Mystique. For the younger women who energized the early 1970s women’s movement, The Feminine Mystique was less likely to provide a “click” moment than it was for the slightly older group of women who first discovered it. Some read Friedan’s book after they became activists, seeking validation for their views, but others skipped right over Friedan’s book to read the more radical pamphlets and books being published by the early 1970s.
Some young women had already turned against the prevailing gender ideology of the 1950s and early 1960s simply by seeing the damage that ideology had done to their mothers. Noted author and columnist Anna Quindlen comments that for many young women who had observed the lives of their mother’s generation, motherhood appeared to be “a kind of cage.... You stayed home and felt your mind turn to the stuff that you put in little bowls and tried to spoon into little mouths and eventually wound up wiping off of little floors.”
In fact, many mothers had already encouraged their daughters to make different choices than they had made. Studying the archives of the Institute for Human Development from the 1950s, historian Jessica Weiss found women expressing new hopes for their daughters long before The Feminine Mystique. “I sure don’t want [them] to turn out to be just a housewife like myself” (a 1957 interview). “I want them to have something, to be more independent than I was” (1958). “I’d like to see them make a living so the house isn’t the end of all things” (1959). So some young activists of the 1960s were not rebelling against their mothers but simply taking their mothers’ advice a little further than their moms had perhaps anticipated.
Other young women had so fully absorbed the postwar rhetoric about equality and self-fulfillment that they reacted with shock and indignation when they discovered there were unspoken exceptions when it came to women. As a girl, Sherry Bogartz grew up playing baseball with her brothers in an old cow pasture by her parents’ chicken farm. She was furious when she found out they could join Little League but she could not. As a college freshman in 1963, never having heard of feminism or The Feminine Mystique, Bogartz circulated a petition demanding an end to special curfews and dress codes for female students. She later became a leader of the women’s liberation movement in San Diego, then moved to New York to work for the Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition.
Many other women of Bogartz’s age group reported developing, on their own, a powerful sense that it was unfair of society to bar women from so many new opportunities. “I totally believed the propaganda that America was the shining light of ‘the free world,’” said Jolene J. “So I was totally angry when those freedoms were denied to me.”
A large group of young women had their gender consciousness raised by their experiences in the civil rights movement, something that, unbeknownst to them, had also happened to their foremothers in the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement. In the 1840s and 1850s, idealistic women had flocked to the abolitionist cause, outraged by the horrors of slavery, but they often became frustrated when men refused to allow them to speak at meetings or vote on important strategy decisions, and some eventually began to organize on behalf of women’s rights as well.
When Angelina Grimke’s future husband, also an abolitionist, suggested that she focus on the antislavery cause rather than dividing her energies between that and women’s rights, she responded: “Can you not see that woman could do, and would do, a hundred times more for the slave if she were not fettered?” Abolitionist and feminist Abby Kelley remarked that women “have good cause to be grateful to the slave for the benefits we have received to ourselves, in working for him. In striving to strike his irons off, we found most surely, that we were manacled ourselves.”
In the 1960s, some women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the youth section of the southern civil rights movement, underwent a similar evolution. In 1964, Mary King and Casey Hayden, two white women who had spent many nights discussing Simone de Beauvoir’sThe Second Sex and Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel about women’s struggle for independence, The Golden Notebook, circulated an anonymous paper pointing out that “much talent and experience are being wasted by this movement when women are not given jobs commensurate with their ability.” In 1965, they signed their names to a more extensive article, “Sex and Caste: A Kind of a Memo,” arguing that the movement needed to improve women’s status.
Some young people came to believe that racism, war, and social inequality were deeply embedded in America’s fundamental political and economic institutions. Many of them joined various groups of the New Left, where male chauvinism was in some ways more blatant than in places where it was still disguised as a chivalrous concern for women’s delicate nature. Young men in this movement rejected middle-class conventions about the sanctity of premarital chastity, marriage, and the male-breadwinner role, but in repudiating traditional forms of male obligation, they did not renounce male entitlement. And when they talked about sexual liberation, they often meant that a woman had the duty to say yes rather than the right to say yes or no.
Leaders of organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society often cultivated an aggressive style that turned contemptuous if their female comrades challenged them. Women who attempted to raise the issue of male-female equality in these groups were sometimes shouted down and sexually insulted at raucous meetings. Disillusioned and angry, many came to embrace a far more militant version of feminism than Friedan espoused.
For women from these different backgrounds, The Feminine Mystique was less often a revelation than a welcome vindication of decisions they had already reached. Lorraine Dusky recalls reading the book in 1964, as a college senior. “Heated arguments with my Midwestern, middle-class parents over my career choice had given way to their grudging acceptance.... I was a journalism major and managing editor of Wayne State University’s Daily Collegian, hell-bent on a career to rival Brenda Starr’s with or without the Mystery Man.” The book, she remembers, “pumped high octane gas into my resolve.”
But by the time others read it, they felt they had already gone beyond the issues Friedan addressed. Judith Lorber, who became a professor of sociology and women’s studies in 1972, notes that although she still has her paperback copy of The Feminine Mystique, there is no underlining in it and she did not write anything in the margins because she “was not a homemaker and had been determined since the age of fourteen never to be ‘just a housewife.’” Lorber’s underlining and enthusiasm were saved for Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolutionand Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics.
Like Lorber, younger women were often more influenced by books that raised a sharper critique of male privilege than was found in The Feminine Mystique. Such women often cite Simone de Beauvoir, as well as the works of Firestone, Millett, Germaine Greer, Juliet Mitchell, Robin Morgan, and Marilyn French as their inspiration.
THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT CERTAINLY WOULD HAVE TAKEN OFF WITHOUT Friedan’s book, but acknowledging this only makes what the book did achieve all the more powerful and moving. The Feminine Mystique electrified a layer of women “in between,” women who might otherwise have been lost entirely, to themselves and to the women’s movement.
This generation of women was just beginning to be caught up in the societal sea change that was drawing more women into the workplace, increasing the economic and cultural importance of education, making the labor of a full-time housewife less essential to families, and raising aspirations for personal growth and equal opportunity. They longed, however inarticulately, to participate in these social changes, but they had few resources to help them resist the cultural insistence that their longings were unnatural and illegitimate.
Having little or no access to the support systems and alternative messages about women’s capabilities the suffrage struggle had spawned and that would return to the fore in the late 1960s, these women reacted with self-doubt and guilt rather than outrage to the frustrations they were experiencing. Isolated as they were in their individual families, they might well have wasted their lives mired in depression—or even, some believe, lost their very sanity—if Friedan had not reached into their homes, using the same language as the women’s magazines that were their main sources of information, in a way that encouraged them to embrace rather than repudiate their aspirations for a life beyond the home. Many of them were inspired to do exactly what Friedan urged—use their education and talents in meaningful work that served a higher purpose.
Lifting so many women out of such deep self-doubt and despair was a tremendous accomplishment. And even after the revival of the women’s movement, The Feminine Mystique remained especially powerful for women whose families or communities had kept them isolated from new ideas and possibilities. I talked to women—and some men—who, long after the 1950s, had been raised to follow that decade’s patterns in their values and lives—people in small communities in Utah, Idaho, California, and Georgia who found themselves just as miserable in the 1980s or 1990s as the women who had embraced Friedan in 1963. They described stumbling upon the book almost accidentally—in one case having a librarian whisper that she might want to read it—and finding it as much a revelation as did Friedan’s original readers.
One unexpected testimony to the book’s continued power to reach people trapped in personal dependence came from a prominent gay historian I interviewed. In the 1990s he had a stay-at-home boyfriend “who suffered from the same anxieties as the housewives Friedan profiled.” At his advice, his partner read the book, taking comfort from the idea that the depression he had at first experienced as a personal inadequacy was an understandable reaction to the lack of independent meaning in his life.
A few years later, the historian picked up Friedan’s book himself and was “astounded” by its power. “Her diatribes against homosexuals were repellent. I was shocked to see that she reflected uncritically the biases of the 1950s. . . . But the book still spoke to me, a gay man of the twenty-first century.”
AFTER STRIPPING AWAY THE GRANDIOSE CLAIMS ABOUT THE IMPACT OF THE Feminine Mystique, its achievements are still impressive. The book was a journalistic tour de force, combining scholarship, investigative reporting, and a compelling personal voice. And for an important layer of women, reading the book was a life-changing experience.
Friedan exposed her readers to a rigorous criticism of mainstream psychiatry and social sciences, introducing them to the progressive ideas embedded in the new humanistic psychology. To modern readers, Friedan’s acceptance of many 1950s shibboleths about controlling mothers, weak men, and the “ominous” growth of homosexuality seems particularly dated, but at the time, Friedan was highly effective in exposing the contradictions in this ideology. As historian James Gilbert points out, she repeated the Freudians’ indictment of mom-ism “only to sabotage their arguments, turning them upside down to plea for the liberation of women from cultural stereotypes.” If you want men to be free of controlling wives and mothers, she argued, you must free women from the compulsion to focus all their energy on marriage and motherhood.
For an older generation of educators who already disliked the anti-intellectual trends in women’s education, Friedan’s book was a godsend. “I assigned it to every class I could get away with,” one midwestern professor told me. “And it really helped my female students understand the need to take their education seriously.”
Linda Barker read The Feminine Mystique in 1963, at age eighteen, when the book was chosen as the summer reading for the entire incoming freshman class at Connecticut College for Women. She did not experience the wave of relief reported by so many housewives who read the book in the early 1960s, but she believes Friedan’s arguments helped inoculate her against going down the same path. She remembers, “We certainly had more choices with all the new conveniences” of modern society. But “what was I going to do with those choices? I didn’t want to expand housewifery to the full time available.”
Rebecca Adams recalls that during her senior year in college, all the women were required to attend an evening meeting on The Feminine Mystique hosted by the dean of women. The discussion had little impact on her at the time. She and her friends went back to their dorm and spent more time making fun of the dean than talking about Friedan’s ideas. Adams graduated, married, and went to work as a social welfare case-worker. In her eighth month of pregnancy, she quit her job to stay home. But a few years later, having just finished playing with her daughter, she began to vacuum the carpet. “All of a sudden, I heard this voice that said, ‘there’s more to life than this,’ and that meeting with the dean of women popped into my mind along with Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique .” Soon afterward she began taking classes at a nearby university.
Even before these young women began to act on ideas that they got from the book, the older women Friedan had inspired to go back to school or seek meaningful work were swelling the ranks of profeminist educators and mentors. They founded domestic violence shelters, inaugurated classes for displaced homemakers, and started women’s centers. A disproportionate number of the early women’s studies programs and women’s centers in America were established by women who entered this line of work after reading Friedan and going back to school.
The Feminine Mystique also built personal and political bridges between the generations: an older woman who sent the book to her young niece; a housewife who got it from her teenage babysitter; daughters who belatedly learned to sympathize with their mothers’ depression or anger by reading the book.
Heather Booth’s mother read the book shortly after it was published, when Heather was still in her teens. “She thought it was very important and tried to engage me in a conversation about women’s role,” Booth reports, but Heather couldn’t really understand the “problem without a name.” Like many other socially aware young people, Booth was more concerned about the civil rights struggle. She worked with the Congress of Racial Equality and with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and went to Mississippi to organize during the summer of 1964.
Only after she returned did Booth get drawn into the discussions of women’s roles that were beginning to take place on campuses in 1965 and 1966. She helped conduct a study that revealed the tremendous disparity in how male and female students were treated in class, and she read Friedan for herself about the same time. “It was a bolt of lightning—there is a problem and we need to name it and address it. And the people who have the problem need to lead that fight to correct the problem.”
The very title of Friedan’s book made an enormous contribution to the movement, capturing and concentrating many women’s feeling that they were being sold a bill of goods. The genius of the phrase was that it could stand in for many types of discontent in many facets of women’s lives. Melinda Rice, who never read the book, “used the phrase all the time. But to me it didn’t have anything to do with the problems of housewives. It was the laws and social customs that kept women second-class citizens and discriminated against us in pay and promotions. Later I came to call those laws and customs ‘sexist.’ But at first, ‘the feminine mystique’ was the only phrase I had to explain what I hated without reciting a whole litany of grievances.”
Later, the phrase also became a way to acknowledge, in Terry M.’s words, that “even those of us who strongly believed in the principles of gender equality had internalized a pattern of deferring to men and doubting our own capacities.” The phrase captured the two-sided nature of the struggle that unfolded in the late 1960s and early 1970s: against the external barriers that kept women from achieving their goals and realizing their potential, and against the internal voices that led women to doubt that potential and pre-shrink their aspirations.
Whatever the limits of Friedan’s book for today’s readers, her insistence on the need to break down prevailing assumptions about women, work, and family and to look for the societal origins of dilemmas that are often experienced as purely personal remains extremely relevant. This is especially true when it comes to figuring out how to balance the need for meaningful work and meaningful relationships, for creative fulfillment and for love.