The Feminine Mystique

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1963

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-9

Chapters 10-11

Chapters 12-13

Chapter 14

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Chapters 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 10 Summary: “Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available”

Friedan explains that housework is not actually demanding enough to take up the majority of anyone’s day. Housewives who find it difficult to complete their domestic tasks are experiencing a common and well-known psychological phenomenon: Humans will find ways to draw out even simple tasks if they know they have a long amount of time to fill. The same thing often happens to men who work in undemanding jobs; the phenomenon is not unique to housewives or to women.

Some men fail to understand how women can do housework all day long and still struggle to complete it; attempting the same tasks themselves and finding them not particularly difficult or time-consuming, they assume their wives must be incompetent. In reality, women merely find ways to lengthen their tasks so that their days will not be empty. Those who do not do this must find other ways of filling their time, such as community events, playing cards with other wives, or drinking. Although the misconception that housework demands all their time keeps many women from making a change and starting a career outside the home, their household would not actually fall apart from were they to try this.

Chapter 11 Summary: “The Sex Seekers”

Drawing the reader’s attention to the high number of books and movies about sexually voracious women in her contemporary moment, Friedan analyzes women’s turn to sex as an identity. In the absence of other sources of identity formation and steeped in an ideology that makes their reproductive capacities the most important thing about them, many housewives naturally turn to sex as a possible center for their identities. However, this attempt usually does not work; many men cannot keep up with their wives’ seemingly limitless sexual appetite, which leads to bitterness and resentment. This dynamic likely contributes to the high numbers of extramarital affairs that the Kinsey Report found both husbands and wives engaged in.

Friedan also argues that women who are overly concerned with their own femininity are more likely to raise sons who grow up to be gay. Drawing on Freud’s work on this topic, she associates gay men with traits like immaturity, passivity, and timidity; she suggests that because these traits also characterize femininity under the feminine mystique, mothers who are particularly concerned with embodying femininity are more likely to have sons who mimic such behavior. Friedan portrays being gay as an undesirable quality that the prevalence of the feminine mystique threatens to “spread” (329).

Chapters 10-11 Analysis

Chapter 10 segues from Chapter 9 as Friedan shows that consumerism and the seemingly all-consuming nature of housework are two interrelated phenomena. Advertisers need consumers to never feel that they have enough products, so they introduce new products to fill needs that often do not exist. The barrage of advertisements claiming that housework constantly demands new cleaning products and appliances supports the idea that housework is a full-time job.

By insisting that keeping a clean house should not require a full-time commitment from women and that women who insist otherwise are making excuses, Friedan risks turning some readers off. Much like the part of Chapter 8 where she suggests that women bear some responsibility for their current status, she demonstrates here that she is more concerned with communicating difficult truths than with protecting women’s feelings or glorifying women while demonizing men. Though she refutes the sexist idea that some women spend so much time at housework because of their own incompetence, she does maintain that such women labor under a delusion.

Chapter 11 contains one of the most controversial moments in the book. While Friedan does not explicitly state that being gay is wrong or undesirable in this chapter, the text upholds this opinion since she describes it as a potential problem of over-involved mothers. Friedan’s position on being gay caused rifts between her and other prominent members of the feminist movement throughout the 1960s and 70s. Famously, she referred to lesbians in the feminist movement as “the lavender menace” during her time as president of the National Organization for Women, and she worried that their presence in the movement would bring accusations that all feminists were “man-haters.” She did eventually reverse course on this, however; in 1977, she announced her support for lesbian rights at a Houston conference.

The fact that Friedan relies on Freud’s theories about sexual orientation in this chapter despite her sharp dissection of his opinions about women in Chapter 5 shows how pervasive Freud’s influence was at the time of the book’s publication. Even after carefully explaining why Freud’s perspective as a Victorian-era man interfered with his objectivity toward women, she accepts his position on being gay uncritically, seemingly without recognizing that it too might reflect the constraints of his era’s norms. Likewise, the fact that Friedan assumes readers will take it as a given that being gay is wrong speaks to the cultural dominance of heteronormativity at the time.