The Feminine Mystique

When The Feminine Mystique was being prepared for publication, Friedan decided that she would go back to school to earn her PhD, despite having been out of graduate school for twenty years.

Friedan got letters from other women who wanted to escape the feminine mystique and pursue their own ambitions, outside of the home. Though it was no longer possible to live as “just a housewife,” women wondered how else they could live.

After The Feminine Mystique was released, Friedan became a pariah in her own neighborhood. She realized that she had exposed a problem that women thought they were suffering alone and that reminded them of feelings, in regard to the problem that has no name, which they did not wish to face. Friedan understood that fear because she, too, had experienced her own years of playing “the helpless little housewife” and staying in a bad marriage out of fear of being alone.

Conferences were soon held and entire journals were devoted to the subject of “women and their options.” A few “exceptional” professional women had encouraged other women to go into continuing-education programs, for they could not really expect to get “real jobs” after fifteen years as homemakers.

In 1965, the President’s Commission on the Status of Women released a report that detailed wage discrimination and recommended childcare services to make it easier for women to combine work and motherhood. 

Noted anthropologist Margaret Mead opposed women going to work, asking, who was going “to stay home and bandage the child’s knee” and “listen to the husbands’ troubles” after he returned home from work? Friedan argues that Mead was committed to other women remaining at home so that she could maintain her status as an “exceptional” woman.

Friedan argued that women (particularly, white, middle-class women) needed a political and social movement like the Civil Rights Movement for black people. Friedan went to Washington, DC after Title VII, which banned sex discrimination in employment, had been passed. The man in charge of enforcing it did not take the legislation seriously. A number of women in government, the press, and labor unions worried that the law would be sabotaged.

A private conversation between Friedan and a young female lawyer who worked for the agency that would do nothing to enforce Title VII led to the idea to start the National Organization for Women. Friedan co-founded the group with Pauli Murray, a prominent black female lawyer, several female union leaders, and Aileen Hernandez, a member of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission.

Friedan saw the women’s movement as a revolution in sex roles, not as a struggle for race or class equality. She also wanted men to be equal members of the movement, “though women would have to take the lead in the first stage.”

Though radicals disliked the capitalist aspects of Friedan’s message, she insisted that equality and human dignity would not be possible for women who were incapable of earning income. Women also had to confront their sexual nature, which required them to have access to birth control and safe access to abortion.

Friedan did not see men as the enemies of women but as fellow victims, “suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique” that had isolated them. Men and women would never really come to know and love each other as long as each remained trapped in their roles.

Though the women who started NOW were middle-class, they did not have easy access to money. Housewives could not get money “to fly to board meetings” and women who worked could not get time off from their jobs and did not want to spend time away from their families on the weekend.

Friedan testified before a judge in 1966 regarding a sex discrimination lawsuit against airlines who were forcing flight attendants to resign at age thirty. The underlying reason was that the airlines saved a lot of money by firing the women before they could collect pay increases, vacation time, and pension rights. The flight attendants won the case and hugged Friedan in gratitude for being able to remain in the airline industry past thirty, even after marrying and having children.

Friedan “felt a certain urgency of history” which encouraged her to pursue the issue of abortion and to push for adding the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to end officially discrimination in employment opportunities.

Friedan spent the 1960s giving lectures and talks all over the country in a variety of settings: colleges of home economics, Harvard and Yale Universities, lunch at the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel with fifty members of NOW demanding service from the wait staff, testifying before the Senate against the nomination of a sexist justice, a “rap session” with the National Student Congress, and meetings with women in SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society, who were afraid to speak at meetings out of a fear of turning off men and not getting husbands.

Friedan appreciated bold moves from young radicals, such as protesting the Miss America pageant. However, she opposed those who encouraged man-hating and class warfare. They threatened to take over the New York chapter of NOW and drive out women who wanted “equality but who also wanted to keep on loving their husbands and children.”

It became clear to Friedan that “someone’ was trying to take over the movement or splinter it. The radicals’ focus on sexual politics struck Friedan as absurd. She did not think that “clitoral orgasms” would liberate women by making them less dependent on men sexually.

Some of the “disrupters,” she observed, came from extreme left groups looking to “proselytize lesbianism” and others promoted sex and class “warfare” which Friedan believed was based on “obsolete or irrelevant analogies of class warfare or race separatism.”

On August 26, 1970, NOW organized a march to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote. The purpose was to unite women around what Friedan considered to be the most important causes: equal opportunity for jobs and education, the right of abortion and childcare, and women’s share of political power.

When Senator Eugene McCarthy, the chief sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment announced his campaign for the presidency, Friedan contacted New York Congresswoman and activist Bella Abzug to ask how she could help McCarthy’s campaign.

In 1970, she argued that women had a responsibility to help end the war in Vietnam. They had to convince young men going to war that they did not need “to napalm all the children in Vietnam and Cambodia to prove they were men.”

In Miami in 1972, women played a major role in political conventions for the first time. Feminists won commitments from both parties “on child-care, preschool, and after-school programs.” Furthermore, Shirley Chisholm, a Congresswoman from New York, stayed in the race as a presidential candidate “until the end.” Friedan predicated that, by 1976, a woman will run for vice-president or president, possibly even on the Republican ticket.

The agenda for what Friedan called “Stage 1 of the sex-role revolution” had been accomplished. The ERA had passed Congress, the Supreme Court had ruled that no state had the right to refuse a woman an abortion, and companies had to “take affirmative action” to end sex discrimination” and other issues that kept women out of leadership positions.

Friedan had also been asked to organize groups in Europe, South America, and Asia. She was hoping to have the first world conference of feminists in Sweden in 1974. Friedan believed that “the man-hating” element of the feminist movement would evaporate and did not exclude the possibility that they were “a planned diversion.”

Just as liquor sellers had lobbied against the Nineteenth Amendment, Friedan believed that there was a campaign to ‘block the ERA.” Employers in Ohio gave women a week off to cross the Kentucky border and protest against the amendment to pressure the Kentucky state legislature. Friedan did not see this as a conspiracy of men, but a manipulation of “the fears and impotent rage of passive women” by profiteers.

Friedan realized that she could not encourage others’ freedom without realizing her own, so she got divorced in May 1969. She became a visiting professor of sociology at Temple University and continued to write.