Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique (1963): a Feminist Political Debate PDF

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BETTY FRIEDAN AND THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE (1963): A FEMINIST POLITICAL DEBATE CAROLINA TOPINI1 2013 had marked the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique‟s publication1, the famous book of American feminist Betty Friedan (1921-2006) which had an enormous success and influence on the American pu...

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Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique (1963): a Feminist Political Debate Carolina Topini

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BETTY FRIEDAN AND THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE (1963): A FEMINIST POLITICAL DEBATE CAROLINA TOPINI1 2013 had marked the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique‟s publication1, the famous book of American feminist Betty Friedan (1921-2006) which had an enormous success and influence on the American public opinion and academic context of the 1960s. My contribution wants to retrace Betty Friedan‟s fascinating biography and controversial reflection, adopting as starting and focal point the book that allows her to become a strong reference for the Liberal Women's Rights Movement of „60s and „70s, and at the same time made her an extremely discussed and criticized figure within the new Radical Feminist Reflection. In the reconstruction of the main passages of Friedan‟s life, I will dialectically use two sources: on the first part the provocative Friedan‟s biography published by historian Daniel Horowitz in 19982 – which remarks the denied importance which had Friedan‟s radical past, much more complex and politicized than she had always officially presented –, and on the other part, Friedan‟s autobiography published in 2000, which wanted to be a strong re-appropriation and response to Horowitz‟s provocations.3 I will move from the main criticisms to the structural limits of Friedan‟s political vision to rebuild the political debate which arose around her work and her later commitment within the National Organization for Women (NOW). The Feminine Mystique as Ideological Democratic Construction: the Modern Mothers of the American Nation The resurgence of domestic ideology in the „50s had complex roots. The Second World War had triggered a radical transformation within a social organization based on a rigid sexual division of labor: traditionally masculine activities suddenly became for women patriotic and civic duties, allowing them to acquire new professional skills and economic independence.4 After the war the State began to strive for veterans‟ reinsertion: what women were asked for – by forced dismissals and a persuasive public rhetoric – was to take care of the men returning from the front, eager to rebuild a reassuring life after the military trauma within a peaceful domestic core. Home and family acquired an even stronger centrality: the baby boom which took place in the United States between 1945 and 19645, and the general American post-war tendency to settle within the quiet middle-class suburban realities, were the immediately visible social consequences of this women‟s return inside domestic walls. A social revolution like that one had begun to occur in wartime was an eventuality to avoid, especially in a phase of geopolitical uncertainty such as that one USA were preparing to face in Cold War. The reaffirmation of domesticity was in fact historically essential to the construction of American national identity of 50s, which went increasingly to stiffen to cope with Soviet bloc – where an high proportion of women worked. The revival of a structural separation between a “masculine public sphere” and a “private female sphere” was the result of a process of ideological construction which saw the family as the best weapons to spend in the Cold War‟s battleground: domestic sphere strategically became integral part of the political and economic modernity.6 Politicians, experts, educators and columnists of the second post-war, by appealing to the old-tradition concept of "Republican Motherhood" – born during American Revolution as expression of feminine civic virtues7 – asked American women to embrace again domesticity in service to the Nation.8 Within a domestic space perceived as a refuge from social and political anxieties, women would have been able to act as protagonists in maintaining the family as an emotionally protected community, comforted by the new consumer goods9 and by the awareness of being the main vehicle of national values, as well as the symbol of the stability 1

University of Bologna, Paris Diderot – Paris 7 University (History Department)

and superiority of American political, economic and cultural system. But women‟s lives could no longer be encompassed by the older definitions of “woman‟s place”, the feminine mystique‟s promise of “fulfillment” had inevitably raised the expectations of many middle-class women: «Young Wives with Brains: Babies, Yes – But What Else?» entitled for example a special Newsweek‟s report on March 1960.10 Their pervasive unhappiness couldn‟t remain hidden and the conflicts could no longer be contained: the illusion of the “happy housewife” began in fact to crack. More visibly, American women began to express their discontent. Both seriously and superficially, most articles of The New York Times, Newsweek, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan and McCall’s, began to treat women‟s problem. The mass media suddenly discovered the “trapped housewife”. This raising public attention to suburban women‟s issues generated a manifestly feminist position in the suburban free-lance writer Betty Friedan, who published in 1963 The Feminine Mystique, a devastating and brilliant critique of this complex resurgence of domesticity. Looking deeper under the surface: naming “the problem that has no name” Treating the topic with journalistic method – through interviews with young housewives, students, family life educators, psychiatrists, directors of women's magazines, advertising experts – Friedan set out to investigate the origins of the feminine mystique, and its effects. At the end of the 50s the average marrying age for American women had fallen under twenty, a good proportion of them left the study before the end of the course because they feared that too much education was an impediment to marriage, making in this way the giving birth a real profession. In the words that these women used to describe their everyday, Friedan found "the problem that has no name", a sense of frustration and incompleteness. There was something that made insufferable their adjustment to the model of uncompetitive femininity proposed. Frequently education was pointed by experts as the main cause, because – they said – it pushed women to want new rights, and was a strong deterrent to their sexual satisfaction. The professional woman, a fatal error promulgated by feminism, was presented as neurotic and masculine. The ideal to which they conformed themselves was shaped and channeled by advertising, television, women's magazines, movies and romance novels. In particular, the content of women's magazines suggested them especially articles of practical and domestic interest, ignoring the big issues of national and international public interest. Experts at that time claimed that the fullest expression of a woman‟s sexuality was motherhood. «The participation of modern women in politics passes through their roles as wives and mothers» affirmed in 1955 the president of Smith College Adlai Stevenson, during a speech for the conferral of degrees, «I don‟t think I can wish you a better destiny». Moreover, thanks to the rampant manipulation advertising – which made women the protagonists of the new consumer society – housework had paradoxically been expanded, until became the main activity of the day. These programmed strategies of persuasion couldn‟t be accidental. The feminine mystique – Friedan noted – was the modern attempt to re-establish those gender borders between public and private which women‟s activism between 19th and 20th century had strongly jeopardized, representing the needs‟ projection of middle-class men unable to accept their own changing roles, a veritable reassurance that their manhood wouldn‟t been changed.11 The old prejudices that remained unhurt by the old feminist struggles soon took scientific dignity. Examining the theoretical production strategies of the feminine mystique, Friedan identified in particular two polemical references: the Freud's psychoanalytic heritage, and the structural-functionalist sociological thought. In 1947, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, two Freudian psychologists, wrote a best-selling book about women‟s sexuality: The Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. They argued that the goal of female sexuality is «receptivity and passiveness, a willingness to accept dependence without fear or resentment, with a deep inwardness and readiness for the final goal of sexual life – impregnation». Thanks to the new sex-directed educators within schools and college – who based their educational program on the texts of

these two scientific branches – women learned that their passive and receptive anatomy was a kind of destiny, and that it was necessary, as well natural, to adapt to the role that society reserved. In the last part of her book, Friedan tried to find a solution, suggesting a new life plan for American women: they should had to get out of social isolation of their “comfortable concentration camps” and look for professional fulfillment, remembering that preserving family, motherhood and professional life was not only possible, but also the right way for their own liberation. A radical biography, a controversial choice Since the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan has constantly argued that her political consciousness of women's issues, have emerged not before the late „50s from her own personal experience as “alienated suburban housewife”, presenting herself as «a sort of naive and apolitical suburban housewife who stumbles onto a startling discovery».12 In 1998 historian Daniel Horowitz showed that Friedan‟s feminism had much deeper roots. In rebuilding Friedan‟s past – through interviews and researches, also in private sections of Friedan‟s archives – Horowitz became convinced that this freelance journalist had deliberately omitted and hidden her radical militancy as labor journalist and Popular Front Feminism for two reasons: the first one specifically political: protecting herself from the ideological persecution of McCarthyism and Red-baiting, which marginalized the most extreme tips of political radicalism; the second one linked instead to a specific will to gain a large middleclass female public, ager to identify itself into an accessible feminist model.13 Can we really affirm that Betty Friedan had consciously removed part of her young radical engagement to embrace a more comfortable liberal feminist discourse? Who really was the author of The Feminine Mystique? Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born on the 4th of February 1921, in Peoria (Illinois), from a middle-class Jewish family. Between 1938 and 1942 she attended the Smith College in Northampton, where she began to develop a progressive and radical social vision and a feminist sensibility, turning from a provincial outsider into an advocate of trade unions, labor movement, and Marxist theory; particularly attentive to the racial and wage discriminations among working class women. In 1942 she moved to Berkeley (California) to attend a graduate course in psychology where she began to master the Freudian theory. At Berkeley Goldstein began to be controlled by the FBI for her relation with a communist Jew, involved in nuclear energy research. The lack of political activism in Berkeley‟s context, drove her to move in 1943 to New York, where she began to work for the Federated Press, the most important press agency of the American left, where she continued to support political radical activities, celebrating in particular in 1946 the birth of the Congress of American Women, a progressive organization involved in the fight against racism, and in favor of the “equal pay for equal work” and the social protection for the working mothers. After being fired for her feminist enthusiasm and for promoting the reinsertion of a wealthy veteran, Goldstein found a job as reporter at «UE News», the official publication of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, one of the most radical unions of the 40s. In these years became even more central the commitment to promote the rights of working women, thanks in particular to her rapprochement to the most important figures of progressive-labor feminism, as Betty Millard, Elizabeth Hawes and Sylvia Cohen Scribner. After some interviews in the factories of New Jersey, she published in 1952 an extremely strong pamphlet – which focused especially on double oppression of black women, and influenced the famous work of the radical Eleonor Flexner: Century of Struggle (1959). In the same year she was fired because of her second pregnancy. After a so radical journalistic experience, Betty Goldstein get married with the theatrical producer Carl Friedan, and moved into suburban reality, where she began to work as free-lance journalist for women's magazines, leaving the old political passions and obliterated her past. The regret of being discriminated, and the rampant anti-radical and anti-feminist climate, determined in these years a turning point.

Starting from this moment, Friedan began in some public interviews to circumscribe the importance of her radical past, affirming for example: «we had considered ourselves part of the vanguard of the working-class revolution, even if we still read Vogue under the hair dryer, and spent all our salaries on black cashmere clothes and Gucci gloves »14, and also: «I probably would have been much happier as a society reporter on the women‟s page of The New York Times than covering worker‟s strikes for UE News. But I learned a lot […] The labor newspaper jobs I didn‟t consider career at all. They were just something I could do, liked doing».15 The interpretation offered by Horowitz has always been rejected by the author, representing an unauthorized biography but at the same time an essential resource for better understanding the political trajectory of Betty Friedan‟s life. «I never intended to write a memoir about my so-called life», affirmed Friedan in the opening of her autobiography, «but my hand was forced when my family and my friends told me a few years ago that they were being contacted for interviews for books other people were writing about my life».16

To provoke such strong words, Daniel Horowitz had undoubtedly succeeded in touching some hot spots. Certainly Friedan wanted to avoid the extremely concrete danger to be involved in McCarthyism repression, shifting her feminist commitment on a less risky and politicized ground, and picking up the analytical legacy of American social critics like David Riesman, Vance Packard and William H. Whyte. Focusing on themes like the working conformism, the social eterodirection, the effects of mass society and the psychological alienation, Friedan interpreted the «problem that has no name» as a sort of identity and maturity crisis. Was feminism to be realized through individual transformation (and consequent sociopolitical change) or through a sociopolitical struggle that creates the conditions for individual transformation? The tension between the individual transformation and the sociopolitical dimension wasn‟t questioned by Friedan. Leaving a Marxist and racial based analysis – particularly attentive to the superstructures of power and exploitation, and thus to the conditions of working-class women and black women – Friedan decided to focus on the life of suburban white educated middle-class women. The Challenges of the New Radical and Multiracial Feminisms: Betty Friedan’s liberal discourse under accusation Choosing an elitist subject, probably more close to her social class and cultural backgrounds, Friedan confirmed in somehow what she had always stated in interviews: her point of view has always been that of a white bourgeois intellectual, a sympathizer of radical struggles whose political reflection was never been integrated with a direct radical action. Can we actually consider The Feminine Mystique «the revolutionary manifesto of women's liberation», as it was by many defined? 17 Was Friedan‟s liberal analysis deliberately based on a primary exclusion according to class, race and sexual orientation, and so purified from the discomforts which the evaluation of these critical factors would have involved? Feminist thinking has grown and developed enormously since 1963. Issues of working class women and women of color – African-American, Native-American, Asian-American, and Hispanic women – were raised by their own movements. Differences erupted.18 The challenge of the new Radical and Multiracial Feminisms of „70s put powerfully under accusation Betty Friedan‟s feminist discourse, stressing the limits of her liberal political vision.19 The Feminine Mystique was strongly contested on a historiographical ground through a new feminist epistemology, which considered the intersectionality of race, class and sex an essential analytical starting point. The political order which in '50s was redrawing the boundaries of the feminine mystique − a white political order which wanted to expel any conflict of class, race, ethnicity and gender − was paradoxically saved by Friedan, whose analysis didn‟t question the roots of the American liberal-democratic system. Trying to solve the contradiction of women‟s

exclusion within a liberal political discourse – of which she partly shared language and values – and trying to reconcile a new proposal for feminine subjectivity, Friedan failed to unsettle the production and reproduction of those power dynamics that she was putting under accusation, not bringing to extreme consequences the fact that the deconstruction of the model of the feminine mystique would have necessarily to conflict with the process of ideological construction at the base of the liberal-democratic order. The criticism that she developed remained within a mainstream context, which gave visibility to a few privileged women. Moreover, in The Feminine Mystique Friedan still kept in high regard the institutions of marriage, motherhood and family, not considering other possible choices. After the publication of The feminine Mystique, the American Historian Gerda Lerner wrote to Friedan to congratulate, regretting however for the focus on white middle-class women, remembering how this narrow perspective had been for a long time one of the limits of the suffragist movement; the working women, especially black, could not be ignored because of their number, economic strength and double experience of oppression. What Friedan had instead done, was marginalizing a foreground reality in full political ferment. While much of white America retreated to the suburbs, conformed to the consumer, corporate way of life, and avoided political activism at time when anti-Communist crusaders could easily destroy the lives of political dissenters, black America was busy marshaling the most important grass-roots political movement of the century.20 The Civil Rights Movement – who captured the attention of the nation in 1955 with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott – symbolically began when an African-American woman, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a white person on a bus. According to bell hooks21 and Angela Davis22 – the two leading exponents of black feminism – Friedan ignored the existence of all non-white and poor women, representing paradigmatically the more general tendency of western white liberal conservative feminism – perceived by African-American women and by the new radical feminists as extremely racist, classist and heterosexist. It‟s possible to recognize other limitations of Friedan‟s analysis. One issue she never raised, for example, was the question of why women alone should have been held responsible for housework and child care, perpetuating in this way a lasting stereotype. The interpretation extremely victimizing of the condition of suburban women in „50s offered by The Feminine Mystique – which crystallized the image of a non political period, w...