A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (3 page)

Most of the women who wrote to Friedan after her book was published in 1963 and became a paperback best seller in 1964, and most of the nearly two hundred people who took part in my own surveys, were the wives and daughters of families that had lived through World War II. They—or their parents—were born between about 1915 and the late 1930s. Memories of the Great Depression were still vivid in their family culture. They—or their parents, older siblings, or husbands—had experienced the hardships and the solidarities of World War II. The older ones had raised their families in the 1940s or the 1950s and the younger ones had been teenagers in the 1950s.

In the ensuing years, some authors have labeled the older members of this group as “the greatest generation.” Others have called it the “silent generation.” Both these labels apply to the collective experiences of the men, as soldiers in World War II or as citizens during the Cold War and the Korean War; they have little relevance to the collective experiences of the women of that era.

The women who found solace in Friedan’s ideas would not have called themselves, or their mothers, members of the greatest generation. Most felt they were the beneficiaries of their fathers’ or husbands’ hard work, and many wondered whether they had done anything to deserve the gains their families made in the postwar era. When they did not feel fulfilled in those families, they blamed themselves for being ungrateful or inadequate.

It is not your fault, Friedan told them, that you feel trapped and discontented. The fault lies with the way society has denigrated and wasted your capacities. Not only will you be happier yourselves, but you will be better wives and mothers if you are recognized as individuals with your own social, intellectual, and creative needs. The title of Friedan’s 1960
Good Housekeeping
article that previewed her argument in
The Feminine Mystique
put it simply: “Women Are
People
Too.”

Strange though it may seem today, many women in the 1950s and early 1960s had never heard anyone say that out loud. Women were wives and mothers. A few, they knew, were also heroines, brave souls like the female spies who risked their lives for the Allies in World War II. But the idea that an ordinary woman could be a person in her own right, in addition to being a wife and mother, seemed completely new to many women.

Friedan told these women that their inability to imagine a fuller, more complete life was the product of a repressive postwar campaign to wipe out the memory of past feminist activism and to drive women back into the home. As a historian, I knew her argument ignored the challenges to the feminine mystique that already existed in the 1950s. But as I interviewed women for this book and read more about the cultural climate of that era, I came to believe that Friedan was correct in suggesting that there was something especially disorienting—“something paralyzing,” as one of the women I interviewed put it—about the situation confronting women at the dawn of the 1960s. Freudian pronouncements about the natural dependence and passivity of females and the “sickness” of women who were attracted to careers may have coexisted with sympathetic assurances
that women were in fact capable and did deserve equality. But such assurances only made it harder for women to figure out whether anyone besides themselves was to blame for their feelings of inadequacy.

Friedan captured a paradox that many women struggle with today. The elimination of the most blatant denials of one’s rights can be very disorienting if you don’t have the ability to exercise one right without giving up another. The lack of support for women’s ability to exercise both rights at once forces them to choose half of what they really want, and to blame themselves if that half fails to satisfy their needs. Today many women find this out when they try to balance motherhood and work. In Friedan’s time, many women discovered this problem when they fell in love with a man.

The choices women were forced to make in the 1950s were far more starkly posed than ours are today. Contemporary women may resent the pressure to be a superwoman and “do it all,” but in that era the prevailing wisdom was that
only
a superwoman could choose to do
anything
with her life in addition to marriage and motherhood, and that such super-women were few and far between. Yes, pundits admitted, a woman could sometimes achieve a brilliant career or create a great work of art. But before she tried, journalist Dorothy Thompson warned her readers in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, she had better make sure she was a “genius,” because if she ended up doing something only ordinary, or “second-rate,” she would be wasting the chance to raise a “first-rate” child. One of the most touching letters to Friedan that I read came from a woman who thanked Friedan for delivering her from the tremendous guilt she had felt because she enjoyed working “not in a big business, achieving miracles of economics or science” but at a mundane job that nevertheless made her feel “needed, able, and secure.”

So much has changed since Friedan wrote. At that time, many women felt they had too few challenges. Now most of us feel we have too many. At that time, many women believed their minds and talents were being wasted but felt guilty if they wanted to do more. Now we often feel
used
up
by the demands on our time and talents but feel guilty when we want to do
less
, either at work or at home.

And yet three themes still resonate today. One is Friedan’s forceful analysis of consumerism. “The sexual sell,” as she termed it, is even more powerful than in the 1950s, although it is now most destructive for girls and teens rather than for housewives. Second is Friedan’s defense of meaningful, socially responsible work—paid or unpaid—as a central part of women’s identity as well as men’s. And third is her insistence that when men and women share access to real meaning in their public lives, they can build happier relationships at home as well. In this respect, we now know that Friedan’s predictions came closer to capturing the reality of twenty-first-century marriage trends and gender relations than more pessimistic prophecies about the supposed “battle of the sexes” that would result if women gained equality.

We still haven’t fully figured out how to combine a loving family life with a rewarding work life. But
The Feminine Mystique
reminds us of the price women pay when we retreat from trying to resolve these dilemmas or fail to involve men in our attempts.

ON DECEMBER 22, 1962, ONE MONTH BEFORE
THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
hit the bookstores, the
Saturday Evening Post
published a cover article purporting to offer a portrait of the typical American woman. The opening page featured a photo of “Mrs. Charles Johnson,” surrounded by her husband and children. “I just want to take care of Charlie and the children,” the caption explained, summing up what the reader soon learned was the collective attitude of “American women,
in toto
.”

The
Post
’s story was based on more than 1,800 interviews and extensive polling by the Gallup organization. According to the author, George Gallup, it was not intended to examine “the extremes” among American women. “Old maids,” divorced women, childless women, and working mothers certainly existed in America, he acknowledged, but they were of concern mainly to sociologists, “because they are unusual” and exist “in a society that is not geared for them.” The article’s aim was to portray how “most” American women lived and thought.

As depicted in the
Post
article, the typical American woman—the one for whom American society was “geared”—was thirty-five years old, had two children (but was hoping for a third), and was a full-time homemaker. She had completed slightly more than three years of high school and had been happily married for fourteen years. And unstated though this was, she was white.

These demographic details meant that the woman they were describing had been born in 1927, just seven years after women won the vote.
As a young child, she would have experienced the Great Depression and almost certainly been aware of the tensions in the household as her parents struggled to get by. She had lived through World War II in her teen years, married a few years after the war’s end, and was now taking care of her husband and raising children. But of course the
Post
survey included many slightly older women who had married before or during World War II as well as some who had started their families more recently.

Other publications and commentators, the
Post
editors wrote in the teaser for the article, had variously described American housewives “as lonely, bored, lazy, sexually inept, frigid, superficial, harried, militant, [and] overworked,” but the truth was that they were doing fine. While 40 percent of housewives admitted they sometimes wondered whether they would have been better off as a single career woman, only 7 percent said they were “sorry they chose marriage over career.” As one put it, “I’m my own boss.... My only deadline is when my husband comes home. I’m much more free than when I was single and working. A married woman has it made.”

Not surprisingly, given the contrast between their experience as housewives in the newly prosperous 1950s and their still vivid memories of the hardships of the Depression and World War II, three out of four women felt that they got more “fun out of life” than their parents. Almost 90 percent of the married women said that homemaking tasks were easier for them than they’d been for their mothers, and 60 percent believed that their marriages were happier than those of their parents. The typical housewife, the
Post
reported, spent several hours each day cleaning house and taking care of children, but also had time for telephone chats, personal visits, and hobbies such as sewing, reading, or gardening. In fact, observed Gallup, “few people are as happy as a housewife.”

American housewives are content, asserted Gallup, because they “know precisely why they’re here on earth.” Unlike men, women do not need to “search for a meaning in life.... Practically every one of the 1813 married women in this survey said that the chief purpose of her life was to be either a good mother or a good wife.”

The housewives expressed deep satisfaction about motherhood and often described childbirth as the high point of their lives. But, the pollsters observed, “it takes more than motherhood to make a woman completely happy; it also takes a man.” And not just any man. He “must be the leader; he cannot be subservient to the female.”

Women “repeatedly” told the interviewers that “the man should be number one.” One woman who had worked at a paid job for ten years before quitting to get married commented that “a woman needs a master-slave relationship whether it’s husband and wife or boss-secretary.” Another explained that “being subordinate to men is a part of being feminine.” A third wife declared that what made her “feel equal” was that she always put her husband first and spent her spare time broadening her interests “so I won’t bore” him.

One (unmarried) female newspaper reporter did comment that “a woman need not feel inferior while she makes her husband feel superior.” But what strikes the modern reader is the degree to which both the women and the pollsters took it for granted that a wife should defer to her husband. Gallup even noted that the task of interviewing so many women had been challenging because some husbands wouldn’t allow their wives to participate. One husband “was so angry that his wife had ‘talked to strangers’ that he refused to speak to her for three days after her interview.” Another remarked to the interviewers, “You talk to my wife as if you thought she knew what she was talking about.”

Yet neither Gallup nor the women portrayed in the article had any serious complaints about women’s status in society. “Apparently,” commented Gallup, “the American woman has all the rights she wants.... She’s content to know that
if
she wants to do [other] things, she can; no one is telling her she can’t, and she has made her choice—not business or politics, but marriage.”

Gallup found only two small imperfections in the lives of American housewives. One was what he described as the “rather plaintive” desire of wives for more praise from their husbands and children. One woman explained: “A man gets his satisfactions from his paycheck and from being
asked advice by others. A woman’s prestige comes from her husband’s opinions of her.”

Still, women assured the pollsters that it wouldn’t take much praise to make them happy because, all in all, they were “easily satisfied.” “The female doesn’t really expect a lot from life,” explained one mother. “She’s here as someone’s keeper—her husband’s or her children’s.”

Gallup’s second concern was about what these women, now so focused on marriage and motherhood, would do in “the empty years” after the children were grown. None of the respondents he interviewed mentioned this as a problem, but Gallup was troubled by their lack of forethought. “With early weddings and extended longevity, marriage is now a part-time career for women, and unless they prepare themselves for the freer years, this period will be a loss. American society will hardly accept millions of ladies of leisure—or female drones—in their 40s.”

For the time being, however, his report concluded, “the typical American female” is “serene, secure and happy.” She loves being a woman and is “well satisfied” with her achievements in life. How odd, then, that just a month later, two of the most influential women’s magazines in the country would feature excerpts from a forthcoming book claiming that millions of housewives were in fact desperately unhappy.

A careful reader of the
Post
article might have noted a few signs that not all women the pollsters interviewed were feeling as serene as Gallup suggested. Even though 60 percent of the wives said their marriages were happier than those of their parents, and almost all felt their housework was easier, two-thirds of them did not believe they were doing a better job of child rearing than their mothers had. And 90 percent of them did not want their daughters to follow in their own footsteps, expressing the hope their daughters would get more education and marry later than they had. Furthermore, about half the “single girls,” as the
Post
referred to all unmarried women no matter their age, and a third of the married ones “complained about inferior female status.”