Reacting to the Feminine Mystique

The paper I started on Friday is done. Since it's brief, I figured, why not post it? So here it is:

The key argument in the opening chapter to Betty Friedan’s (1974) seminal liberal feminist book, The Feminine Mystique, is that women in the early to mid period of the 20th century were socialized to believe that biology was destiny (p.11). Inculcated into them was the idea that the pinnacle of fulfillment for a woman was to be a wife and mother (pp.11-13). Women threw themselves into their role, subsuming any personal individuality to the societal dictates of perfect womanhood (p.14). In women’s pursuit of the mystique of utter femininity, however, they found a vague, nameless, malaise that they could not speak of to others (p.14-15). Friedan named the problem (p.27), and later in her book suggested the solution was more education and greater choice. However, I argue that this combination has not yet brought about the ultimate goal of liberal feminism, which is the true freedom to achieve feminine self-fulfilment on our own terms.

Reading the book’s introduction, I was struck by the similarities between the behaviour, feelings and views of women of the 50s and 60s and of women today. The basic ideal of seeking self-fulfillment is still there, though now a plethora of seeming choice has been opened for women. But are they truly choices? While the ability to go to school and forge a career are now equally available as valid goals for women, there are still strong societal expectations that these will be pursued alongside the old goals. The techniques for achieving these goals of education, career, family and hearth are depressingly the same now as they were in Friedan’s time. Through family pressures, the media and the market, women are told to be smart and goal-oriented, yes, but also continue to be pretty and thin, busty and sexy. Go ahead and be successful in your career, certainly, but also remember that you have a moral duty to get married, keep a clean and attractive house and have a few well-adjusted, smart and active children.

As Friedan herself notes, the liberation women were supposed to have achieved as a result of the industrial revolution’s new inventions such as the electric washers and dryers is a myth (p.14-15) and women realized it, but internalized it as a “problem that has no name” (p.15) .

Today, partly as a result of Friedan’s book, we have a name for the problem – desire for self-fulfilment as women. Yet we are not necessarily any closer to being able to actualize that desire than women were in the time Friedan was writing. All that has happened is that we have more choices to make in how we live our lives and an apparent freedom to choose among them. The consumerist thrust of late modern life belies the freedom of such choices, however, reducing them to pseudo-choices of a stunted feminine agency. While women are certainly are no longer silenced and unable to talk about the problem, as evidenced by the proliferation of women’s magazines, daytime talk shows and self-help books, the problem itself is still there.

The old expectations of a specific housewife role for women, that almost mythical role which Friedan argues so eloquently was the stultifying straightjacket of perfect zombie femininity (p.24), has been merged into an additional role – that of a successful wage-earner. Thus, I posit that we have not moved beyond the ideal of the feminine mystique, but have rather merged it into a new ideal of femininity that incorporates most of the expectations and techniques of the old and has layered new ones on top of it.

In Friedan’s time, the “problem” was, as one woman put it, “always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife and never being myself” (p.23). This has not changed. The roles of mother and wife persist as prescribed and desirable goals on the path to feminine self-fulfillment. Layered on top of them now is the goal of successful careerist, consummate consumer, ageless beauty and socially-conscious citizen. While that liberal feminist goal, the ability to choose, has seemingly been obtained, I am left questioning how much better off women are today than they were in Friedan’s time. Despite the advances and expansive roster of choices, women today still often feel as if they are frantically treading water, filling their time with activity and obligation, but never able to stop long enough to concentrate (p.25). In looking for herself, she continues to lose herself. The problem may be named, but it is not yet solved.