Abbet Sébastien

Faculty of Arts – English Department

Spring Semester 2017
Prof. Valérie Cossy
Introduction to Gender, 20-21st Century Texts

On Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique: some problems

Betty Friedan’s (1921-2006) landmark book The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, identified a
“problem that has no name” among the “suburban housewives”. In a nutshell, Friedan considers
that women left careers opportunities in order to become “housewife” 1 . The “feminine
mystique” is the concept she coined to define how “society” (to use a general word, more
specifically: pundits, advertising campaigns, psychiatrists, etc.) imposes to women the idea that
the “feminine fulfilment” lies in becoming housewife: to find a husband, buy a house, and raise
children. The key for fulfilment is then to “secure” as quickly as possible a husband. The latter, as
a breadwinner, especially if he is moving upwardly, will provide the necessary means to buy a
house and bear children. To sustain this idea, Friedan mentions the sharp fall of the marriage age
after the war, the rapid reduced rate of women in college and various strategies used by women
to seduced men into marriage: to dye their hair blond, to try to reduce their size to resemble
models (p. 16)2. These behaviours are encouraged from childhood by advertisers. According to
the “feminine mystique”, as soon as women are married, mothers, and care a house, their dreams
should be fulfilled.
Freed from past needs, living in new suburban houses full of electronic appliances, at
least what they aspire becomes reality. Yet, an underlying dissatisfaction appears. Depressions,
feeling of incompleteness (if not a sense of inexistence), fatigue are all signs of a problem.
Women have everything they need and want, where does come this malaise? Does it arise from
their husband or their children or from themselves? To repress this inner voice, tranquilizer’s
consumption could be a solution, or was it not “that what she really needed was to redecorate her
house, or move to a better neighbourhood, or have an affair, or another baby” (p. 20)? Experts,
scientists, pundits look into the problem: is this unhappiness an expression of frustrations that
arise from the gap between education and housewifery (“the road from Freud to Frigidaire”) or
perhaps is this the product of the women’s suffrage right (p. 23). After all, as a woman should be
happy to be “her own boss”, to have “no time clock” or face “no junior executive gunning for
her job”, the problem that can not be named has perhaps no solution: “this is what being a
woman means” (p. 24). Though, the problem still remains and the “suburban housewife”
supresses ever more hardly her “dissatisfied voice within themselves because it does not fit the
pretty picture of femininity the experts have given them” (p. 27). It appears, according to one of
them, that they “want something more than [their] husband and [their] children and [their]
home” (p. 27).
This “problem that has no name” produces “sleepwalking” women: the suburban
housewives evade their own growth, fall into passivity; they decide nothing and accept a
“protected” status provided by their husbands. Friedan uses a range of negative words to define
what she calls the “progressive deshumanization process” of the suburban housewives who are
caught in this problem: sense of nothingness, not feeling alive, they have no interest, they are
bored. This process results in a lack of “stable sense of self” among housewives who transform

1“They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights”, p. 16.
2Quotations from The Feminine Mystique come from the two chapters of the course’s reading list. FRIEDAN, Betty,
The Feminine Mystique, New York: W. W. Norton, 2001 [1963].

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their children as receptacle of their frustrated desires (something Friedan calls a “vicarious”
behaviour; an other way out being “non-commitment”). This has devastating consequences on
various levels: whereas the housewives are passive persons, developing infantile behaviours, their
children are even more push out the path of becoming real individuals. Friedan does not hesitate
to conclude: “the women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a
housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the
concentration camps” (p. 305). Indeed, for her, the “deshumanization process” that she
describes, that loss of self, is similar to that experienced by prisoners in Nazi concentration
camps. Even though, there are strong differences between the two situations, the housewife’s
house is “in reality a comfortable concentration camp3”. In conclusion of her book, Friedan
proposes a “new life plan for women” as a solution to the “problem that has no name”. For her,
“a national education program, similar to the GI’s Bill”, careers, and real interests are needed in
order to put an end to the “feminine mystique”. To take care of the children and the house, the
very attributes of that mystique, Friedan is not stating clearly what could be a solution, opening
the door to “domestic work” and the “exploitation” of women by women.
Friedan’s book had a huge impact in the years that followed its publication. Often
credited to open the way to a new “feminist wave”, The Feminine Mystique suffers nevertheless bias
and if it identifies real problems regarding the condition of women in the American society, the
analysis it offers is quiet reduced. This essay will mention some of these aspects. Friedan
identifies, as already summarized, a “problem that has no name” that is proper to the “suburban
housewives”. In her book, Friedan presents herself as being one of these “suburban
housewives”. It is, however, only partly true4. Historian Daniel Horowitz dedicated a whole book
to trace Friedan’s trajectory before the publication of The Feminine Mystique. According to him,
Friedan’s

3 Friedan relies on Bruno Bettelheim’s analysis. To read today this comparison, whatever the destructive
characteristics of the “suburban housewives” lives, provokes discomfort. It would need another essay to analysis this
aspect. Without entering in a discussion of Bettelheim’s own problematic book(s), it is worth mentioning Kirsten
Fermaglich’s article “The ‘Comfortable Concentration Camp’: The Significance of Nazi Imagery in Betty Friedan’s
Feminine Mystique” in American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957-1965,
Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2006, p. 58-82. Instead of condemning without further examination Friedan’s
use of this comparison or to be satisfied that the latter recognized that it was an error, Fermaglich discusses it in
details. For her, there are strong parallels between Friedan’s analysis of the psychological consequences of the
“suburban housewives’ condition” and the work of a psychologist with whom she works in 1940 at the University of
Iowa, Kurt Lewin, regarding Jews and “Jewish self-hatred” (p. 63). Friedan’s “description was similar to Lewin’s
analysis of the ‘frustrated marginal’ Jew, who internalized the negative attitudes toward Jews in the dominant society
and then ‘turned against [his] own group or against [him] self’ because he could not improve his status in society, nor
could he fight the dominant group.” According to Fermaglich, Friedan’s mother concentrated the “self-hatred” and a
dominant character. Another interesting fact is that Friedan registers in the same notebook her reading notes on
Bettelheim’s book and, on the opposite page, remarks on her life as housewife. Here is an example: on one side of
the notebook, one can read: “‘In the early 1950’s, when the pregnancy of my second child plus other chaotic
changes-forced me to define myself as [a housewife], as a great many educated women did… I suffered, for a time,
the reactions of terror-no future-feelings I had no personality, that I have heard described by so many other women,’
while the opposing page, with page references to The Informed Heart, reads, No ‘spark’ in senseless tasks. (These
degrading) Psychological fatigue because No ‘anticipation of advancement’… no planning of time-no end- might fill
thinking ?” (p. 68). Finally, for Fermaglich: “it is important to note that Friedan’s decision to link the camps to her
own contemporary suburban life was guided by Bruno Bettelheim himself who, in The Informed Heart, used his
experience in the concentration camps to comment on the dangers of technology, consumption, dehumanization,
conformity, and the loss of autonomy in contemporary American society” (p. 70). Karen Fermaglich considers,
moreover, that “Friedan’s description of American suburban homes as ‘comfortable concentration camps’ also
offered a subtle, yet powerful, dissent from the Cold War liberalism that had glorified women’s domesticity as a
means of protecting the US from the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. Unlike the Truman and Eisenhower
administrations’ portraits of suburban homes replete with well-stocked air-raid shelters in the face of a communist
atomic attack, Betty Friedan offered an image of the suburban home as a site of totalitarian mass destruction itself”
(p. 72).
4 As shown in the preceding footnote, Friedan really shared the experiences of a middle-class suburban housewife

during part of the 1950’s. Her trajectory was, nevertheless, uncommon to the large majority of these women.

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 claim that she came to political consciousness out of a disillusionment with her life as a suburban
housewife was part of her reinvention of herself as she wrote and promoted [her book]. Friedan’s
version of her life, which historians and journalists readily accepted, hid from view the connection
between her union activity of the 1940s and early 1950s and the feminism she articulated in the
1960s. Her story made it possible for white suburban women readers to identify with its author
and thereby enhanced the book’s appeal. The narrative she offered also reflected shifts in
Friedan’s political commitments that involved some repudiation of her radical past. Friedan’s
knowledge of the dangers of McCarthyism of the 1950s prompted her to minimize her work as a
labor journalist5.

Whatever the reasons of Friedan’s political evolution, in the context of a strong ideological
repression from the right-wing, her past led Friedan to deal with social and racial issues that she
put aside in her 1963’s book. Moreover, her choice to present herself as a middle-class suburban
housewife certainly corresponded to a “marketing” strategy to reach a specific audience and,
more important, reflects a political orientation that its grounded in a “liberal” approach far from
her “radical”.
Describing the psychological effects of “suburban life” on women, that is the will to
achieve an “ideal” of motherhood and housewifery, Friedan limits her diagnosis to one single
social layer: a middle-class one. As black feminist theorist bell hooks wrote in 1984,

[Friedan] did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the
home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with
white men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without
children, whitout homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white
women. She did not tell reads whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory
worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife6.

Moreover, whereas Friedan describes women who massively quite a professional career under the
charm of the “feminine mystique” and despite a huge pressure to do so, one third of the women
had a salaried employment at the time. More specifically, as Sharon Smith notes in her book
Women and Socialism, contrary to Friedan’s prognostic, the proportion of married women who
were entering the job market grew steadily: “in 1950, only 12 percent of women with children
under age six worked outside the home. That number doubled between 1950 and 1965, and then
doubled again between 1965 and 1985 7 .” Considering only the middle-class “suburban
housewife”, Friedan is losing track of the overall picture. Moreover, as already stated, the
solutions she proposes against the effects of the “feminine mystique” contains a “racial bias”
since she does not specify how and who will look after the “care work” (to use a concept that is
not her). Yet, Black women’s domestic employment was not new and unknown when she
published her book. Clear “racial” differences existed on that respect: “Black women’s labor
force participation has been historically higher than white women’s. In 1960, 47 percent of Black
women were in the labor force, compared with 36 of white women8.” Friedan’s focus on the
white middle-class women is all the more remarkable that her book was published a few months
before the landmark March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, in the middle of the civil
right’s movement.
The Feminine Mystique is rooted in a growing critique of the “consumption society”,
coming from both conservative and progressive intellectuals (among the latter, the most famous

5 HOROWITZ, Daniel, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2000 [1998], p. 4.
6 Cited in FETTERS, Ashley, “4 Big Problems With ‘The Feminine Mystique’”, www.theatlantic.com, 02.12.2013.

bell hooks’ quote is taken from From Margin to Center.

7 SMITH, Sharon, Women and Socialism. Class, Race, and Capital, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015, p. 71.
8 Ibid., p. 71-72.

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is certainly Herbert Marcuse). Friedan, as other critics, shows the disastrous effects of the so-
called “mass society”. Instead of focusing on technology, mass entertainment, conformism and
other common themes among these intellectuals, she describes how white women from a
middle-class background suffer from social and psychological isolation in the new suburbs.
Doing so, she insists almost exclusively on the psychological dimensions. In addition to the
aspects mentioned above, her book discusses critically Freud, borrows analysis from Bettelheim
or Abraham Masslow. This insistence on psychology is no hazard. Apart of her past studies in
psychology (see the third footnote), it corresponds to an orientation that will shape the so-called
mainstream feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. According to Horowitz, this feminism “grounded
in middle-class experience, humanistic psychology, and a celebration of the ability of the heroic
and isolated self to discover truth is more personal than political or at least not political in terms
set by socialist feminists9.” Beyond this dimension, Friedan’s book does not offer a proper
understanding of American society at the time. Whereas she describes in details and with strong
words the psychological effects of the “suburban housewives’” condition, she never questions
the process that made possible the creation of huge suburbs. She only, rightly, insists that a
situation of affluence should not lead to set aside the “problem that has no name”. For her
women are now free from “age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold.
The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill.” As already mentioned,
aside from the legitimacy to struggle against the “suburban” condition, this conception is blind to
the fact that many women (and men) were not free from the very problems she lists, even in the
United States. Rooted in a psychological analysis, Friedan is not questioning the whole
functioning of the American society of the time. Yet, if the US suburbs really created new social
relationships, new behaviours, and expectation and imposes a huge psychological burden on
housewives, this reality does not come from nowhere. Historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-
Baptiste Fressoz offer a summary of the main aspects that underpinned the “suburbs” dynamic10:
C’est [pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale] que se construit le rêve de l’american way of life fondé
sur la maison individuelle en banlieue avec tout son équipement électrique.
Au sortir de [la guerre], les Etats-Unis connaissent de nouveau une grande vague de grèves. La loi
sur l’emploi de 1946 et la loi Taft-Hartley sur les relations industrielles établissent un nouvel ordre
souvent qualifié de ‘keynésianisme de guerre froide’. La première stipule que le gouvernement doit
promouvoir le plein emploi, maximiser la production et le pouvoir d’achat. La seconde restreint le
droit de grève. Les syndicats renoncent à la réduction du temps de travail en échange d’une
augmentation de la consommation. Dorénavant, leur principale revendication concerne l’indexation
des salaires sur les prix. En contrepartie, les capitalistes obtiennent la stabilité sociale requise pour
leurs investissements. Ils acceptent également l’intervention de l’Etat dans l’économie à condition
que celle-ci garantisse des opportunités de profit. D’où le choix de la dépense militaire qui alimente
les carnets de commandes, celui de l’autoroute plutôt que des transports collectifs, celui de la
maison individuelle plutôt que du logement public, les prêts aux vétérans (G.I. Bill) et les retraites
privées plutôt que le financement de l’éducation publique et de la couverture santé universelle.
[…] en 1957, les deux tiers des Américains sont endettés.
Une bonne part de ce dynamisme économique reposait sur la périurbanisation et la motorisation.
Le retour des 14 millions de GI’s et le baby-boom accentuent la crise du logement. Pour stimuler
l’offre, le promoteur immobilier William Levitt propose d’appliquer au secteur de la construction
les méthodes de production des industries d’armement: production de masse pour négocier des
tarifs auprès des fournisseurs, division des tâches (26 pour construire une maison), spécialisation de

9 HOROWITZ, Daniel, op. cit., p. X. This essay will not discuss the participation of Friedan in the creation and
leadership of the National Organization of Women (NOW) and its long (and failed) struggle for an Equality
Ammendment, nor the 1970’s women’s strike or, more generally, the importants discussions among feminists at the
time on many issues (theoritical, strategical,…). On these aspects, among many others, see SMITH, Sharon, op. cit.
10 BONNEUIL, Christophe; FRESSOZ, Jean-Baptiste, L’événement anthropocène. La Terre, l’histoire et nous, Paris: Le

Seuil, 2013, p. 192-194. Verso published in 2017 an English version of this book: The Shock of the Anthropocene: The
Earth, History and Us.

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 la main-d’œuvre, usage massif du préfabriqué, intégration verticale et simplification de la
construction avec le recours au tout électrique. Avant la guerre, on construisait aux Etats-Unis entre
200'000 et 300'000 maisons par an; en 1949, 1 million […].
La périurbanisation encourage l’achat de biens durables: réfrigérateurs, cuisinières, machines à laver,
télévisions, d’autant plus que ces équipements sont souvent intégrés à la maison elle-même. En
1965, aux Etats-Unis, la production de voitures atteint son maximum historique à 11,1 millions
d’unités par an. Un emploi sur six est lié à la construction automobile.
Pour solvabiliser la demande, l’Etat garantit les prêts immobiliers. Les prêts à trente ans rendent
accessible le rêve périurbain pour moins de 60 dollars par mois, soit trois jours de salaire ouvrier.
Soudainement, pour des millions d’Américains, acheter en banlieue devient moins cher que louer en
ville. L’investissement public dans les infrastructures routières accompagne ce mouvement de
périurbanisation. Dans la décennie 1950, 80% des nouvelles maisons sont construites dans les
banlieues. Entre 1947 et 1953, les banlieues américaines gagnent 30 millions d’habitants. En 1960,
les banlieusards dépassent les urbains et les ruraux réunis. A ce moment, la moitié des personnes
actives et les trois quarts des moins de quarante ans vivent en banlieue.

This long extract shows what kind of heavy trends was at work. If Friedan is certainly right to
stress the psychological burden of the “suburban housewifes’” condition (even if many aspects
are debatable), the latter could not be separated from the larger social currents that condition its
existence. Psychology is related in many ways to society (especially if we refuse a narrow
“essentialist” approach of psychology). This is central when it comes to diagnose a problem and
to determine the axis of a “remedy”. On that respect, it is worth noting that one of the solution
Friedan set out is precisely a “GI Bill” for women whereas her model was precisely developed
and implemented to avoid social troubles similar to those of the 1930’s and clear the way to a
huge capitalist development as described by Bonneuil and Fressoz. An approach that could take
into account all these aspects, as well as the “racial” ones, can only be elaborated in terms of
“social relationship” of “race”, gender, class, and power. Nevertheless, it would be unfair not to
signal that Friedan herself see some limits in the “suburban dynamic”. For her, the “problem that
has no name” is effectively “not caused by lack of material advantages”, which is only a partial
reality as noted above, but “it will be solved by more money, a bigger house, a second care,
moving to a better suburb, often discover it gets worse” (p. 26).
The Feminine Mystique is a book that contains serious limits in terms of its class and “race”
analysis. Focusing on the “suburban housewives”, Friedan discard social and “racial” dimensions
though she was familiar with them in her past as a left activist in the 1940’s and 1950’s. She also
choose to stress the psychological consequences on women instead of including this “suburban”
condition in a larger approach that articulate psychology with larger social trends. Friedan’s
choices fall clearly within a “liberal” approach of society and of social change. More than half a
century later, it is of course easier to identify these aspects. Her book remains however a strong
critique of the effects on middle-class women of the so-called consumption society. As a work
that stands in a turning point (which led to conflate the book with larger trends already present in
the American society instead of studying the relation between the book and these trends), it
remains however a testimony of a time and a crucial point of departure to identify what changed
and what still remain in our present societies. Scholar Stephanie Coontz indicated in an interview
the particular place of Friedan’s book: “historians have shown that many thinkers were already
analysing the dilemmas of homemakers in the 1950s, while feminism had never died out, and
many activists were working in government and business to press for more equality. But Friedan
combined sociological research and good reporting skills with the confessional style of the
women’s magazines to reach people who were isolated in their own homes, really hurting, and
convince them their problems were social, not personal, in origin11.”

11“Puncturing Betty Friedan, but Not the Mystique: An Interview with Stephanie Coontz, History News Network,
January 24, 2011, http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article59.htm

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