Feminist Fatale
Betty Friedan and the book that changed women's lives
The housewife in Grandview, N.Y., was busy doing what so many women were doing in 1957: hustling three kids to school, running the Cub Scout meetings, cooking hamburgers for dinner. When Sputnik flew overhead, Betty Friedan woke up her son and carried him outside to see it tracing its way across the sky.
But Friedan, then 36, still had time to become annoyed over a popular new book, Modern Women: The Lost Sex. The authors, Freudian psychoanalysts, said that American women were over educated and not properly "adjusting to their role as women." Friedan, who had reveled in debates over politics and economics at Smith College, didn't buy it, and she set out to prove that the academic experiences of her fellow alumnae had made them better mothers. "I knew my Smith classmates were doing great things in their own communities, and having a great time, as I was, fixing up their houses, getting their kids educated," she later wrote.
The rest, as they say, is history. Friedan polled her peers about their marriages, their sex lives, their children. Two hundred women responded. The ones who were focused solely on home and family seemed depressed and frustrated. Those with other interests seemed to be enjoying their children and marriages.
Maybe it wasn't education that was making women frustrated, Friedan thought, but the limited role that women were asked to play. A conversation with current Smith students convinced Friedan that something had changed since she had been there. She asked a few seniors which courses they were excited about. They weren't interested in things like that, they said. They were going to get married and have kids.
She wrote up her thesis in an article called "Are Women Wasting Their Time in College?" "If a woman had a problem...she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself," Friedan wrote. "What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never knew how many women shared it."
Rejected. McCall's turned the article down. The Redbook editor wrote that Friedan "must be going off her rocker." The Ladies' Home Journal rewrote the article to arrive at the opposite conclusion, so Friedan snatched it back and started writing a book. She called it The Feminine Mystique.
Anger fueled Friedan, but so did her fierce intelligence and curiosity. She researched how heroines in women's magazines had morphed from the self-reliant pilots and geologists of the 1930s to the housewives of the 1950s. She probed how new psychological concepts, such as Erik Erikson's "identity crisis" and Abraham Maslow's "self-realization," might apply to women.
She wrote while the kids were at school, storing the manuscript in a china cabinet. Unsure of how to end, she wrote that women should use their abilities as men did, in ways that fit with marriage and children.
The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963 and quickly became a sensation. Friedan, who died in 2006, went on to found the National Organization for Women and become an international advocate for women's rights. Now, when the majority of students in college are female, it's easy to forget that when Friedan was writing, 60 percent of women were dropping out of college to get married.
But if women's roles have changed greatly, the struggle has not. A recent Pew survey said that 60 percent of mothers would like to work part time but that most could not find such family-friendly jobs. Fifty-five percent of mothers with infants are working, and one third of mothers with children under 5 are employed full time. "There is still unfinished business of the women's movement," says Kim Gandy, current president of now. "We'd all be better off societally if parents could have a more balanced work life, so they could have a more balanced family life." And that, she says, is just the kind of thing that Friedan had in mind.
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