The Feminine Mystique

dressing to welcome their husbands home from work, the covert messages the culture sends to women today are still pernicious. So the chapters that describe the overinvestment of mothers in their children, the cult of the child still resonate both with women who have chosen not to work outside the home and those who have, both of whom feel under cultural fire. And the description of children who never grow up might as well have been written yesterday. Behind the senseless vandalism, the riots in Florida at spring vacation, the promiscuity, the rise in teenage venereal disease and illegitimate pregnancies, the alarming dropouts from high school and college,
was this new passivity. For those bored, lazy, gimme kids, kicks was the only way to kill the monotony of vacant time Forty years ago those words appeared. It seems scarcely possible.
In those forty years The Feminine Mystique has sometimes been devalued. Friedan the author became inextricably intertwined with
Friedan the public figure, the latter often identified with internecine squabbles with other feminist leaders and a combative public persona. In hindsight the shortcomings of the book become clear. Too much attention is paid to the role of institutions and publications in the reinforcement of female passivity, too little to the role of individual men who have enjoyed the services of a servant class and still resent its loss. Friedan’s own revisiting of the material in The
Second Stage (1981) was not as rigorous or well-researched as The
Feminine Mystique had been. While she attempted to make valid points about why some women have chosen to embrace childrearing and a domestic life, the revisionist message of this second book appeared to bean apologia for the ferocity of her first.
Perhaps there also has come to be a certain feeling among the smug overachievers of the post-Mystique generation that time had passed, and passed the book by, that we had moved away from the primer into the advanced course in seizing control of our own lives. I
plead guilty on this count. I expected to revisit this book as I would a period piece, interesting, worthy of notice and of homage, yet a little dated and obvious as well. The daughter of a quiet and contained housewife, I had become an opinion columnist in the onslaught of change that this book began, and I expected to be properly grateful.
Which is to say, slightly condescending.
As casually as I once cracked those painstakingly painted eggs as a girl, I cracked the spine of this book. And, as my mother had been,
in a different world, at a different time, under hugely different

circumstances, I was enrapt. Four decades later, millions of individual transformations later, there is still so much to learn from this book about how sex and home and work and norms are used to twist the lives of women into weird and unnatural shapes. It set off asocial and political explosion, yet it also speaks to the incomplete rebuilding of the leveled landscape. Giving a name to the problem that had no name was the necessary first step Friedan concludes in the epilogue. But it wasn’t enough Much, much more was necessary to change our lives. But as a first step, this one is extraordinary. As a writer, I say, “Brava!” As a beneficiary of the greatest social revolution in twentieth-century America, the resurgence of feminism that began with The Feminine Mystique, I am obliged to add, Many, many thanks.”

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