Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique

1. Betty FriedanThe Feminine Mystique “That is the distinction between human and animal behavior, or between the human being and the machine.”

2. Freedom of Choice • Then-current goal of totalized motherhood counterproductive • Produced weak, dependent adults • Women are not forced to choose the life of a housewife, but how free is their choice to do so? • Freudian theory & functionalist approach to gender make homemaker mother central figure in child’s life • Examples: Autism, neuroses • Thwarted in efforts at education & career • Manipulated by marketing, mass media

3. Demographics • Research Conclusions: • “Since the Balanced Homemaker represents the market with the greatest future potential, it would be to the advantage of the appliance manufacturer to make more and more women aware of the desirability of belonging to this group.” • “Educate them through advertising that it is possible to have outside interests … (without becoming a Career Woman). The art of good homemaking should be the goal of every normal woman.”

4. “She’ll want them. She’s a real girl.” • Marketing should target very young teenage girls • “The young ones will want what the others want, even if their mothers don’t.” • Older, more independent women should be made to feel guilt • The product will enable you to give your husband and children the things you should, but aren’t. • “Suggest that it becomes truly a part of you, reflecting you.” (317) • Housework should be not a chore, but a joy. A chance for self-expression (by women. Men have better things to do.)

5. “You can be the woman you yearn to be with a Plymouth all your own” • “With increasing skill, the ads glorify [a woman’s] ‘role’ as an American housewife—knowing that her very lack of identity in that role will make her fall for whatever they are selling.” (327) • Abstracted, restrictive image of femininity and pressure to achieve it • Impossibility of this results in unhappiness, desperation • Products will help to close the gap!

6. False Consciousness • These qualities create a demand in the market for products that will help to achieve the feminine ideal • Ad for Ultima: “Dedicated to the woman who spends a lifetime living up to her potential!” • “The only totally integrated program of nutrient make-up and skin care—designed to lift a woman’s good looks to their absolute peak. The woman who uses Ultima feels a deep sense of fulfillment. A new kind of pride. For this luxurious Cosmetic Collection is the ultimate... Beyond it there is nothing.” (quoted on 328) • As in Marcuse, sincere desires may be tools of your own oppression

8. Totalized Housewifery • The glorification of “woman’s role,” then, seems to be in proportion to society’s reluctance to treat women as complete human beings; for the less real that function is, the more it is decorated with meaningless details to conceal its emptiness. (340) • Housewifery “had to become the very end of life [for women] to conceal the obvious fact that it is barely the beginning.” • Work expands to fill time: “labor saving” devices mean only that more unnecessary tasks have to be performed • Self-identification only as “wife and mother” leads to need for children in order to give life meaning • Constant worry, micromanaging child’s life due to mother’s identification with it • “In order to be a woman, I have to have children.” (375) • Constantly staying busy so as not to face crisis of meaning

9. Architecture of Power • Open layout of suburban ranch-style homes reinforces feminine mystique (348) • No doors, no privacy • Open space means that messes are continually visible, need cleaning • Never separated from children • Husband leaves, wife never does

10. Manipulation of the Narrative • In late 1950’s, depression & exhaustion among housewives widespread enough to be recognized by women’s magazines as ‘domestic boredom’ • ‘Always has been, always will be woman’s lot’ • Capturing history • Solution: “Honest enjoyment of some part of the job such as cooking or an incentive such as a party in the offing and, above all, male praise are good antidotes for domestic boredom” • Maintains dependence on household & husband for sense of meaning

11. Surely there are many women in America who are happy at the moment as housewives, and some whose abilities are fully used in the housewife role. But happiness is not the same thing as the aliveness of being fully used. Nor is human intelligence, human ability as static thing. • Grow or die • Among housewives, “the adjusted, or cured ones without conflict or anxiety in the confined world of the home have forfeited their own being; the others, the miserable, frustrated ones, still have some hope.” (423)

12. Dehumanization • Among prisoners at Dachau, “those who ‘adjusted’ to the conditions of the camps surrendered their human identity and went almost indifferently to their deaths.” • “Their capacity for self-determination, their ability to predict the future and to prepare for it, was systematically destroyed.” (423) • The world for women functions similarly (though much more safely and comfortably) • Among housewives, “the adjusted, or cured ones without conflict or anxiety in the confined world of the home have forfeited their own being; the others, the miserable, frustrated ones, still have some hope.”

13. “The only thing that made her feel alive” • Sex brings a feeling of being wanted and needed, providing this feeling when the household no longer does • “Sex is the only frontier open to women who have always lived within the confines of the feminine mystique.” • Identification of the individual with the body • She boasted of the intellectual prowess, the professional distinction, of the man who, she hinted, wanted to sleep with her. “It makes you feel proud, like an achievement. You don’t want to hide it. You want everyone to know, when it’s a man of his stature.” (364) • In search of meaning & rebellion, still only a body • Still defining identity through a man • “Sex without self, sex for lack of self.” (387)

14. What is it to be human? • For an individual to “take his existence seriously enough to make his own commitment to life, and to the future; he forfeits his existence by failing to fulfill his entire being. (430) • The “unique mark of the human being” is “the capacity to transcend the present and to act in the light of the possible, the mysterious capacity to shape the future.” • This is a shared quality of nearly every author in this course.

15. “It is precisely this unique human capacity to transcend the present, to lives one’s life by purposes stretching into the future—to live not at the mercy of the world, but as a builder and designer of that world—that is the distinction between human and animal behavior, or between the human being and the machine.” (432)

16. “There is something less than fully human in those who have never known commitment to an idea, who have never risked an exploration of the unknown, who have never attempted the kind of creativity of which men and women are potentially capable.” (437) • But women are neither expected nor encouraged to live to their full capacities. They are reduced from human beings to creatures of pure biology.

17. What will it take to end oppression by the feminine mystique? • Money • Organization • Legal efforts • Political action & protest • Personal resolve

18. Money • Not only for the women’s movement (though that too) but for women themselves • Employment • Not just jobs, but work • Independence • No longer entirely reliant on husband for either identity or funding • Reproductive rights • Contraception • Abortion

19. Organization • Strong, hierarchical political organization to deploy resources and organize efforts • Vs. then-fashionable egalitarian model • Engage at all levels of politics, from Senate to the street • Core group of highly committed individuals around which to structure the greater organization

20. Political Action & Protest • Lawsuits to compel the enforcement of existing anti-discrimination laws • Mobilize to elect feminist-friendly candidates, create pressure for laws advancing cause of women’s rights • Mass demonstrations & protest • Pressures individuals to change their own views • Friedan sees women’s liberation as a part of same struggle as civil rights, anti-war, other movements for equality

21. Personal Resolve • High possible social cost • Women who still embrace feminine mystique may ostracize the woman who rejects it, neighborhoods may exclude the family • High possible personal cost • Many husbands will be glad to no longer be the only real person in their families, many others will not • What price is a woman willing to pay to be free?

22. Gender Issues Q: Does having a liberated mother make you gay? A: No, having a needy housewife for a mom makes you gay. • “The love of men masks his forbidden excessive love for his mother; his hatred and revulsion for all women is a reaction to the one woman who kept him from becoming a man.” (384) • Freud here used uncritically. Why? • Homosexuals for Friedan not-men

23. Friedan demonstrates same essentialism re: homosexuals that she attacks when it is applied to women • “Male homosexuals… are Peter Pans, forever childlike, afraid of age, grasping at youth in their continual search for some reassurance in sexual magic.” (384) • “The shallow unreality, immaturity, promiscuity, lack of lasting human satisfaction that characterize the homosexual’s sex life usually characterize all his life and interests.” (385) • If this was true of homosexuality in the 1960’s, why might that be?

24. Homosexuality: the Creeping Menace! • “The homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene is…ominous…” (385) • Though she attacks the imbalance of power between genders, Friedan does not look to challenge basic concepts of gender • This is the space in which the Third Wave of feminism launches its critique. Why can you not be gay and a man? Does attributing essential nature to men & women necessarily reflect an exercise of power?