A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

Table of Contents

 

 

 

“As was written about
The Feminine Mystique
,
A Strange Stirring
is ‘a journalistic tour de force, combining scholarship, investigative reporting and a compelling personal voice.’ Stephanie Coontz has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the most transformative movement of our lifetimes. Much of what Coontz reports regarding the prevailing ethos of the 1950s as a time of conformity, cultural conservatism and social repressiveness will be fascinating and eye-opening for younger readers.

This book is a must read for men as well as for women. And the transformational desire for a work/family balance in life is now reflected not just by gender, but by generation, as both men and women ‘need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings,’ as Friedan wrote almost a half a century ago.”

—
Christie Hefner, former chairman and chief executive officer of Playboy Enterprises and longest serving female C.E.O. of a U.S. public company

 

 

“
It Changed My Life
was the title of the book Betty Friedan wrote after her transformative 1963
The Feminine Mystique
. And change she did the lives of American women. Now in her biography of a classic, Stephanie Coontz imaginatively explores the impact of Friedan’s book. Weaving a rich fabric from what women said in letters and interviews, from articles in popular magazines, current scholarship, and her own astute reading of the 1963 work, Coontz compellingly reveals how generations of women—from the flappers of the 1920s to the bloggers and helicopter moms of today—have responded to the challenges modern women face.”

—Daniel Horowitz, author of
Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique

 

“This book offers a nuanced perspective on the women’s movement by ending the invisibility of African-American women.”

—
Donna L. Franklin, author of
Ensuring Inequality: The Structural Transformation of the African-American Family

 

 

 

 

CONSTANCE AHRONS dropped out of college to have a child, and as a young wife and mother in the early 1960s was seeing a psychiatrist for depression. Halfway through
The Feminine Mystique
she got up and flushed her tranquilizers down the toilet.

KATHY HESKIN’S severely depressed mother wrote her a passionate but “bewildering” six-page letter about
The Feminine Mystique
when Kathy was a teenager. Only years later did she read the book herself.

ROSE GARRITY married at age fifteen, dropped out of school after just one week in the tenth grade, had her first child at age seventeen, and then had four more in the next five and a half years. She was being regularly beaten by her husband when she read the book, “and it was like the curtain was thrown back on the ‘wizard’!”

CAM STIVERS was a twenty-five-year-old wife and mother who thought her life “was over” until she read the book in 1963.

WHEN I FIRST AGREED TO WRITE ABOUT THE IMPACT OF THE 1963 BEST seller
The Feminine Mystique
, I wasn’t sure of my ultimate focus. Would the book be about Betty Friedan, the author? Would it be about the feminist movement she helped to organize? Would it be about the ideas of
The Feminine Mystique
itself?

But as I read and reread Friedan’s book and other works on the 1950s and 1960s, and especially when I began to interview women who bought the book at the time, the answer emerged. I wanted to tell the story of the generation of women who responded most fervently to what Friedan had to say—a group of women whose experiences and emotions are poorly understood today, even by their own daughters and granddaughters.

Many books have been written and movies made about “the greatest generation.” But the subjects of these stories are almost invariably men—the army, navy, and air force men of WWII (only 2 percent of the military in that era were female); the “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue who pioneered America’s mass consumer culture in the days of Eisenhower and Kennedy; the ordinary husbands and fathers who created a middle-class life for their families after the privations of the Depression and the war.

What do we know about those men’s wives and daughters? As their husbands and fathers moved into a new era, many women felt suspended between the constraints of the old sphere of female existence and the promise of a future whose outline they could barely make out. They were, as one of the women I interviewed told me, “a generation of intelligent women, sidelined from the world.” Some were content to provide love and comfort when the men came home. But others felt that something was missing from their lives, though they could seldom put their finger on it.

These women—mostly white, mostly middle class—were at the eye of a hurricane. They knew that powerful new forces were gathering all around them, but they felt strangely, uneasily becalmed. They knew they occupied safer ground than their African-American, Latina, and white working-class counterparts, but knowing that only made them feel all the more guilty about their fears and discontents.

To modern generations, these women’s lives seem as outmoded as the white gloves and pert hats they wore when they left the shelter of their homes. Yet even today, their experiences and anxieties shape the choices modern women debate and the way feminism has been defined by both its supporters and its opponents.

Tracing the history of these women and discovering why, despite their privileges, they felt so anxious about their femininity and so guilty about their aspirations was a revelation to me. I came to see how their struggles with their roles and self-images as wives and mothers helped pave the way for succeeding generations of women to have a greater range of choices—choices not free of cost, but requiring far less sacrifice of personal identity and sense of self-worth. And uncovering the pain so many of these women felt was a vivid reminder of what can happen—and still does happen—when their granddaughters and great-granddaughters give up on the dream of combining meaningful work with a fulfilling family life.