The Feminine Mystique
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| Introduction Anna Quindlen M y mother is reading a paperback book at the kitchen table. This is odd. My mother is not a great reader, and usually she reads only before bed, hardcover books that come from the Book-of-the-Month Club, novels by Taylor Caldwell and Daphne du Maurier and Mary Stewart. But she is hunched over this paperback, frowning, twin divots between her dark brows. I cannot remember many of the specific details of my childhood, but I remember this moment well. I am twelve. This is how I first encountered Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. When I read the book myself, eight years later, as an assignment fora women’s studies class at Barnard, I immediately understand why my mother had become so engrossed that she found herself reading in the place usually reserved for cooking. I don’t believe she was particularly enthralled by Friedan’s systematic evisceration of the theories of Sigmund Freud, or the prescient indictment of American consumerism. I think it was probably the notion of seeing her own life therein the pages of that book, the endless, thankless cycle of dishes and vacuuming and meals and her husband’s ironing and her children’s laundry. I begin to feel I have no personality one woman told Friedan. “I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?” “Who am I my mother must have been asking herself at the table in the kitchen, and with her millions of others who would pore over this painstakingly reported, fiercely opinionated book. My mother had everything a woman after World War II was told she could want, told by the magazines and the movies and the television commercials: a husband with a good job, five healthy children, a lovely home in the suburbs, a patio and a powder room. But in the drawer of her bureau she kept a small portfolio of the drawings she had done in high school, the pages growing yellower year by year. My bag lunches for school sometimes included a hard-boiled egg, and on its shell she would paint in watercolors, the face of a princess, a seaside scene. I cracked those eggs without thinking twice. It has been almost forty years since The Feminine Mystique was first published in 1963, and since then so much has changed, and too little, too, so that rereading the book now feels both revolutionary and utterly contemporary. It changed my life. I am far from alone in this. Susan Brownmiller says the same in the opening pages of her memoir of the women’s movement. It changed Friedan’s life, too. She became a celebrity, a pariah, a standard bearer, a target. She founded the National Organization for Women and her name became synonymous with the Equal Rights Amendment and late-twentieth- century feminism. And it changed the lives of millions upon millions of other women who jettisoned empty hours of endless housework and found work, and meaning, outside of raising their children and feeding their husbands. Out of Friedan’s argument that women had been coaxed into selling out their intellect and their ambitions for the paltry price of anew washing machine—“A baked potato is not as big as the world she noted puckishly of their stunted aspirations—came a great wave of change in which women demanded equality and parity under the law and in the workplace. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, girls in Little League, women rabbis it is no exaggeration to say that The Feminine Mystique set the stage for them all. What Friedan gave to the world was the problem that has no name She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of laborsaving appliances, the development of the suburbs all had come together to offer women in the s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial. If a woman had a problem in the 1950’s and s, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself Friedan wrote, based on both her reporting and her own experience. This was preposterous, she argued. Instead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick. She reinforced her sense of what was wrong with studies showing diminished ambitions for students at women’s colleges like Vassar and Smith, increasing psychological treatment for young mothers in the suburbs, lower ages of marriage and childbirth as the mystique became the only goal in the lives of women. Those who think of the book as solely a feminist manifesto ought to revisit its pages to get a sense of the magnitude of the research and reporting Friedan undertook. It is an ambitious book in that way, a book wary of those many who will want to attack both the messenger and the message, a book carefully marshaling and buttressing its arguments. And it is an ambitious book in its scope, too. It might have been an important one simply on the basis of its early chapters detailing the vague malaise afflicting women who were thought to be a uniquely blessed and contented generation. But it is an enduring one because of the other related issues Friedan addresses. Her explication of the role of consumerism to reinforce American social strata is stunning, even now that we take the buying and the selling of ourselves for granted. In every great manifesto there are riveting moments of self- awareness. In The Feminine Mystique one of them is the rhetorical question Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more Download 2.16 Mb. Share with your friends:
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