The feminine mystique by Betty Friedan
- Angela
- 6 de nov. de 2020
- 3 min de leitura
Atualizado: 14 de dez. de 2020
(excerpt from the text)
To recognize a problem that has been deemed as the norm, while it’s happening, is a prestige. But Betty Friedan went one step further and actually wrote a book defying every moral internalized by families in the 60’s. “The feminine mystique” was released in 1963 and received mixed and intense reactions, being today considered one of the most important books of the 20th century. It even received the great honour of being included in “10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th century”, a list made by an extremely conservative magazine. To understand the path of women in America from Doris Day to Buffy the Vampire slayer, this book is a must read. “The Feminine Mystique” was one of many catalysts for the second-wave feminist movement
You might be asking yourself “What is the feminine mystique?”. Betty Friedan coined this term as being society’s belief that all women should and could find fulfilment through domestic shores, kids, and a stable marriage. It strengthened the notion that true femininity could never be associated with a career or a political voice, instead it was set solely on the domestic level. It reduced being a woman to being a housewife. However, some women could not live up to the feminine mystique, others did not want to. It denied them of their basic human need to grow. And to the unhappiness and frustration that this caused, Friedan called it “the problem that has no name”.
The feminine mystique is not something straight out of Friedan’s mind, it was confirmed by multiple statistics. By the end of 1950, 14 million women were getting engaged by seventeen, and the average age of marriage had dropped to 20. The number of women in college dropped from 47% in 1920 to 35% in 1958. During the mid-1950s, 60 percent of female students dropped out of college to get married
The American housewife who properly performed her domestic duties was deemed by the American media to be the envy of women throughout the world. And American corporations knew how to take advantage of this, by making women believe that if they bought certain things, they could achieve true femeninity and reach satisfaction. The chapter “The sexual sell” addressed this subject and remains relevant to this day. Stephanie Coontz writes that her students “responded viscerally” to that chapter that spoke to their own feelings of being under pressure to buy consumer goods and “to present themselves as objects to be consumed.”
Despite the progressive ideas it defended, there were some problems with this book, being deemed as homophobic, racist and classist in later years. Friedan wrote the book only from her perspective, the perspective of a rich white woman, not considering or addressing the problems of African American women, low-income households, and many more. Another issue is the fact that she manages to write an entire book shaming society for their views towards women without discussing its laws, like how it was legal to discriminate based on sex when hiring.
However, in a strange way, these faults were what made the book so great. Its personal level is what gives the book such a gut-punching power. At his core, it is a cry of rage about how women were seen in society, how they were kept out from the mainstream American professional life, about how they were held to impossible high standards, that they didn’t even want to achieve in the first place, but were led to think they had to. This authority defying book was about frustration, ambition, dedication, fighting injustices, but above all it was about feminism.
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