Introduction
Betty Friedan’s work, titled The Feminine Mystique, is a captivating masterpiece that speaks about a fifteen-year period between the 1950s and 1960s when America sought to redefine femininity all over again. The author’s audience is the woman who had been viewed as an object whose only job was to take care of household jobs. According to Friedan, “Women no longer left their homes, except to shop, chauffeur their children or attend a social engagement with their husbands”.
However, the 19th century was marked by a rise in women’s assertiveness and the need to gain valuable steps toward attaining equality with men. For the first time in history, women could attend college and even attained political rights early into the twentieth century. However, these achievements were reversed by an increasing desire by women to be feminine by denouncing everything that appeared unfeminine. They were now content with being housewives and mothers, regardless of their degree of education. Indeed, most of the women were now going to college to seek husbands among fellow students. This paper analyzes Friedan’s arguments, how she supports them, and the issues she overlooks in her book.
Analysis
Friedan successfully delivers her main point of showing how the reversion of the age-old definition of tradition resulted in a crisis among women who felt dissatisfied with their new role as homemakers and mothers. They were yearning for something more, although they did not understand what it was.
The middle of the twentieth century was a dark era for women as far as gender equality goes. Women had fought for and attained equality toward the late nineteenth century. According to Friedan, indicators of this victory and hence the mark of revolution in the book included education for women, voting rights, and women being able to take up careers. Initially, getting married and having many children had become the new occupation were going to school to earn education was no longer a priority. Friedan’s work may not be welcome by many schooling women of today, especially based on her argument that females went to college to look for companions.
However, her argument is in line with the 1960s’ state of affairs since getting married became more important in the 1960s, the age for marriage dropped to the extent that girls as young as thirteen were seeking men for a hand in marriage. It did not escape the notion that a lot of brainpower was going to waste since women shunned the path of academics to embrace the family. When half the country’s population is not using their intellect to build the nation, economic advancement must be affected.
Friedan seeks to address various structural issues that bedeviled women in the pre-feminist era. The issues range from societal/cultural to corporate. The oppressed women could only wake up to prepare their husbands for work and the children for school. During the day, they would jostle between feeding the babies and taking the household laundry to the cleaner. Meanwhile, she had resigned from doing any other jobs to giving birth.
According to Friedan, the average woman was having about five children, a situation that was very different from the average of two children for mothers of the post-feminism period. Birth control movements expressed concern but were hushed by the mothers who were ever determined to live up to the idea of truly submissive women who only gave their male counterparts the freedom to rule them. However, according to Friedan, these women were suffering silently as evidenced by their words, “I feel empty somehow…incomplete, or…as if I don’t exist”. Meanwhile, female professionals were viewed as sad and unable to keep a family.
Single and widowed women under the age of fifty years were always looking for a man to complete their image. The American society was simply not welcoming for a woman without a man she could call her own.
When a Frenchwoman attempted to voice the dissatisfaction that women were enduring having to live every day as homemakers, she was dismissed. Clearly, she was not referring to the American woman who must be happy to have everything she needed such as a beautiful house, loving husband, and lovely children. A woman’s joy had to come out of the completeness of her family. Activities such as scrubbing the kitchen floor with the new vacuum cleaner and making her own bread were supposed to keep her contented. If she ever needed a pastime when the children were not around, she could get it, although the move could not quench her inner thirst for yearning for satisfaction.
To substantiate this claim, Friedan reveals the sentiments of a 23-year-old woman who said, “I ask myself why I am so dissatisfied, I’ve got my health, fine children, a lovely new home, and enough money”. The evenings were bright too as she could meet her friends or fellow housewives in the committees to discuss their children and husbands. Therefore, society did not expect women to complain about this structural issue. After all, their husbands would not understand what they were complaining about. They had everything they needed. The 1960s women were even treated as equal to their husbands, a privilege that their grandmothers had not enjoyed.
The society’s conservativeness was keeping women from voicing their dissatisfaction. It had lured them into the trap of housewifery where they (women) were suppressed to the extent that they could not complain about the situation. However, it is ironic that Friedan ignores the many women movements that arose during the same period where women were complaining after being denied many rights such as assuming some job positions or participating in political affairs. Television commercials were showing pretty wives doing chores and looking contented with their lives.
How then did some women, however few, not wish to conform to this graceful image that society had coined for them? This question introduces the other structural issue, namely, the need for women to join the corporate world. Perhaps they were bored with the daily routine that entailed being a woman. However, according to Friedan, “more money, a bigger house, a second car, or moving to a better suburb” could not be the solution to the problem.
Even today, the problem of lack of femininity persists, despite women having been granted equal rights with men, including education. Psychiatrists advised women to get out of their routine occasionally. Others thought that women were just exhausted having to do numerous chores every day. Therefore, the problem was deeply rooted. It was beyond the assumed exhaustion or boredom. The reader may question Friedan’s move to address a problem, which she does not explicitly reveal in her work. She ignores the fact that the reader is curious about knowing what ailed women during the 15 years. Love had been thought to be the cure to this yearning, but clearly, it had failed to restore the situation.
It is interesting to note that most of the commentators in these magazines and newspapers were men. All over again, men were designing solutions for problems in women; problems they did not understand. Perhaps, it was because women themselves had chosen to remain silent about their problem.
Clearly, women’s emancipation was being viewed as the cause of the dissatisfaction that women battled within their role as homemakers. Ironically, Friedan asserts that college education was blamed for having made women yearn for more. The reader would expect education to result in civilization and the need for women to be satisfied with the things the society had offered. However, Friedan argues that education taught women that being a mother and a wife was not enough.
They needed to do something more with their life. Therefore, education was regarded as the issue that was making women unfeminine and hence dissatisfied. Even women themselves believed this claim to be true, perhaps regretting ever having gone to school. The educated housewife became the subject of constant discussions across the country. Education was seen as giving women ideas about what an ideal life should be for them. The educated housewife was now the subject of pity, being as seen as suffering from some form of mental disorder.
Friedan’s work ignores the fact that many women’s movements yielded fruits where they could vote and assume job positions that were previously a preserve of men. In fact, Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, which was authored in the early 1960s, is an illustration that women had been granted the freedom to air their issues, including publishing books. They were no longer confined to the houses. Hence, the reader may find it ironical when Friedan depicts the 1960s situation as having been worse when the reality reveals the dawn of ‘the second-wave feminism’ during this time where the author (Friedan) among other women sought to clarify that restricting women to household duties undermined their potential to do other chores that had been set aside for men.
From birth, women were subjected to the feeling that someone would be there to take care of them. Friedan successfully emphasizes the role of submission that formed part of being a woman. However, she ignores the fact such submission was silently viewed as a form of torture since women were only treated as “sex creatures…who had no identity other than being wives and mothers”. The problem with this arrangement was that it failed to recognize women as individuals who needed to exist independently and experience the thrill of life without carrying the society’s weight on the back.
While Friedan is not blaming society for the role it had assigned women at the time, she should acknowledge that women had been disenfranchised. If not, why would educated women who had probably performed as well as their husbands in college are assigned the role of homemakers? In the past, women had assumed the role of homemakers only.
They never complained about it. Should the reader associate this situation with their (women) lack of education? Friedan’s work ignores the answer to these questions. For most of civilization’s history, women remained uneducated while men went ahead to earn an education. The reader may conclude that society has always been shaped to suppress women’s spirit of individual advancement.
Friedan also ignores the role of science in defining women’s roles. This brutal form of disenfranchisement succeeded and even outlived the era of scientific advancement. Scientists played a role in keeping women away from attempting to be anything other than homemakers. The ambition was a masculine trait. Hence, women were not to engage in pursuance of goals outside keeping their families satisfied. Modern education gave women enough knowledge.
However, it fell short of teaching them their self-worth. The society did not stop women from pursuing goals outside the family setup. Nothing was in place to motivate women to want to pursue careers. Instead, housewifery was glorified and even recognized as a more satisfying occupation compared to any other career. Some experts even suggested post-high school courses to prepare women for the inevitable ‘career’ as homemakers.
Conclusion
Conclusively, the fifteen years between the 1950s and 1960s marked a decline in the success that had been achieved in earlier decades regarding women’s emancipation. For instance, fewer women received a college education. The reason was that femininity had received a new meaning where educated women were just happy being homemakers and mothers. True feminine fulfillment required women to be married and nurturing several children of their own.
Friedan writes about an era when women were going to college simply to find a husband. The age of marriage also dropped considerably from mid-twenties to early teenage. However, women were realizing that simply being a homemaker only created a yearning to be something more. Was the society to blame? Could women in the 1960s be blamed for allowing an unknown problem to influence their lives? Friedan’s work does not clarify the above issues. Hence, the reader is left with more questions unanswered after reading the book. Otherwise, the author’s study is recommendable since it sheds light on the situation that ensued during the specified era.
Bibliography
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique, New York: W.W. Norton, 1963.