The Feminine Mystique

Many American housewives believed that they suffered alone from dissatisfaction and were relieved to discover that there were women all over the country who reported similar feelings. They took comfort in talking to Friedan instead of continuing to live in silence. Though the popularity of Freudian psychoanalytic theory had led some to believe that the problem was about sex, it was not. Friedan also noted that women had more difficulty describing the problem that has no name than they did talking about sex.

American women lived their lives according to a popular image that left something out. For Victorian women, that missing element was sex. Friedan looked to women’s magazines to find out what that missing element was for American women. Friedan examines “a typical issue” of McCall’s magazine, the fastest-growing magazine in the Eisenhower era, from July 1960. In it, she finds articles on courtship and marriage, motherhood, dieting tips, sewing patterns, and a guide on how to find a second husband. Friedan contrasts the prevalence of these articles with the current events of the day, including the Cuban Revolution, the Civil Rights Movement, and breakthroughs in visual art and the sciences.

Friedan reports attending a meeting of magazine editors, most of whom were men. They claimed that housewives were not interested in world affairs, “unless it’s related to an immediate need in the home.” Their discussion reminded Friedan of the Nazi era slogan, “Children, Kitchen, Church,” which decreed that women should only be concerned with domestic life and not with what goes on outside of the home.

Friedan contrasts contemporary short fiction with short fiction from the 1930s, which told stories of spirited career women. These women were adventurous, independent, determined, and still loved by men. They were less aggressive in their pursuit of men and very engaged with what went on in the world. Men loved them for their spirits and their looks.

The New Women of 1930s fiction were almost never housewives. They were also not always young. Those who were young tended to be ambitious and defiant of convention. There was usually some conflict between the protagonist’s work and her love of a man—a conflict that she usually resolved by keeping her commitment to herself, since the right man would support her goals.

By 1949, editors began to publish more stories that promoted the feminine mystique. These stories encouraged women to use their talents inside of the home instead of pursuing jobs. Social scientists warned that the pursuit of careers and higher education could lead to the “masculinization” of women.

The feminine mystique, according to Friedan, “says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of her own femininity.” It classifies femininity as “mysterious” and “intuitive” and possibly “superior” to the nature of men. The root of women’s unhappiness was in trying to deny their natures and be like men. It suggests that women can only find fulfillment “in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.”

The “happy housewife heroines” had no vision of the future beyond having babies. Any ambition they exhibited was quickly extinguished by their primary “job” as mothers. Friedan uses the example of “The Sandwich Maker,” a short story from an April 1959 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal. to illustrate the point. In the story, a housewife starts a lunch service to earn her own income, becomes overwhelmed by the work, then quits when she learns that she is pregnant. She decides to let her husband be the “boss” who concerns himself with money.

Previous archetypes of women had included the pure, virginal woman on the pedestal and the sinful woman of the flesh. By the postwar era, the new contrast was between the career woman and “the child-bride heroine.” The new sin to exorcise was the pursuit of a separate self.

For a time, the concept of “togetherness,” initially promoted by McCall’s magazine suggested that women have no independent self but live for and through their husbands and children. However, some male critics of the idea of “togetherness” resented the idea of becoming a part of the world of women, for men had more important things to do in society.

Once, in a moment of editorial boredom, McCall’s ran an article in 1956 called “The Mother Who Ran Away.” To their surprise, the article brought the highest readership of any other printed article. They realized that many of their readers were unhappy, but were, by then, paralyzed by the feminine mystique that magazines like McCall’s had promoted.

When women’s magazines ran political stories, they were about Mamie Eisenhower’s wardrobe or improvements in education and children’s recreational spaces. An article about the prospect of nuclear war brought it “down to the feminine level” by reporting on the distress of “a wife whose husband sailed into a contaminated area.”

The belief among magazine editors was that their readers could only identify with women whose lives were rooted in domestic concerns. Friedan recalls wanting to write an article about an artist. To ensure that the readership could “identify,” she focused on the artist’s cooking, how she fell in love with her husband, and painting a crib for her baby—rather than the hours the artist spent working on her craft.

The only career woman who was welcome in the magazines was the image of actresses. However, even by the 1950s, her image had changed. Popular actresses from the 1930s and 1940s were spirited, driven, and complex, while those from the 1950s had a child-like sexuality and often played roles as child-like brides and housewives. Even in writing about an actress, the focus was on her role as a housewife. If she were single, divorced, or childless, Friedan recalls that writers focused on how her career had cost her feminine fulfillment.

Friedan recalls meeting the editor of a women’s magazine, a woman older than she, who recalled how the stories about spirited career women had been written by women, while men who had returned home from the war wrote the stories about the happy housewife heroine. They had channeled their longing for the comforts of home into these stories.

Some female magazine editors acknowledged the role they played in validating the feminine mystique. One blamed it on psychoanalysis, which had made them “feel embarrassed about being career women” and made them objects of pity among “college guest editors.” Some female writers wrote fiction based on their lives as housewives and identified themselves as “just housewives.”

Popular images of white, middle-class American women splintered into three parts. The first was the “masculinized” career woman who makes the same amount of money as her husband and sees a psychiatrist to discuss how her career has emasculated her husband and made him impotent and alcoholic. The second was the discontented suburban housewife who was envious of her husband’s career. The third was “the housewife-mother” who rejoiced in her feminine role.

The new image of women, according to Friedan, was based on “mindlessness” and materialism: "two cars, two TVs, two fireplaces.” It was an image that insisted that women were not individuals. They were, “by definition,” excluded from forming their own identity and from adding their voices to humanity.