The Feminine Mystique

“Just what was this problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say ‘I feel empty somehow…incomplete.’ Or she would say, ‘I feel as if I don’t exist.’ […] Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets. Or she stays inside her house and cries. Or her children tell her a joke, and she doesn’t laugh because she doesn’t hear it.” 

This passage describes conversations between Friedan and several interviewees in which she notices that they have no shared language to discuss their feelings of incompleteness. By naming the problem “the feminine mystique,” she offers women a common vocabulary that they can use to discuss their experiences. This vocabulary allows them to name the societal pressure that plagues them rather than putting all the blame on themselves. 

“The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity.”

Friedan offers many variations on a definition for “the feminine mystique” throughout the book, but this is one of the most basic. In successive chapters, she explains how “the fulfillment of [women’s] own femininity” is always supposed to involve having a husband and children and devoting oneself to housework; any other pursuits should be considered secondary. The ideal feminine figure de-prioritizes her own personal development.

“In an earlier time, the image of woman was also split in two—the good, pure woman on the pedestal, and the whore of the desires of the flesh. The split in the new image opens a different fissure—the feminine woman, whose goodness includes the desires of the flesh, and the career woman, whose evil includes every desire of the separate self.”

The “earlier time” Friedan refers to here is the Victorian era; she argues that mid-century America was not as far from Victorian ideology as many of her contemporaries would have liked to believe. Strictures around sex might have relaxed, but society still demanded that women fit a cultural role with strict limitations. Moreover, there was still a type of woman society demonized; that type merely changed from an overtly sexual woman to a career-pursuing woman. 

“But now that woman is seen only in terms of her sexual role, the barriers to the realization of her full potential, the prejudices which deny her full participation in the world, are no longer problems. The only problems now are those that might disturb her adjustment as a housewife. So career is a problem, education is a problem, political interest, even the very admission of women’s intelligence and individuality is a problem.” 

Friedan explains that her society needs to reframe the things it considers problems where women are concerned. Most institutions and prominent public figures start with the premise that women belong only in the domestic sphere and therefore conclude that anything that causes women unhappiness with that role should be eliminated from their lives. Instead, such commentators need to start with the premise that women have the same needs for self-realization as men. Society needs to adjust to women’s needs, not the other way around. 

“It is my thesis that as the Victorian culture did not permit women to accept or gratify their basic sexual needs, our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role.” 

The Victorian era demonized any public acknowledgment of sex and idealized virginal purity, particularly for women. In comparison, post-World War II American society demonized ambitions outside the home for women and idealized the happy housewife. Drawing this comparison highlights that the passage of time does not always result in social progress and suggests that Friedan’s contemporaries needed to assess whether societal expectations for women were improving or merely changing. 

“The fact is that to Freud, even more than to the magazine editor on Madison Avenue today, women were a strange, inferior, less-than-human species. He saw them as childlike dolls, who existed in terms only of man’s love, to love man and serve his needs.”

Although contemporary psychology and philosophy have dissected and critiqued Freud’s theories at length, he enjoyed near universal acceptance when Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique. Many laypeople and scholars alike considered his contributions to psychology so important that they imagined him virtually beyond reproof. To combat this notion, Friedan points out that Freud was not immune to the severe sexism of his time, so his theories about women are not simply the objective conclusions of an unbiased mind.

“After the depression, after the war, Freudian psychology became much more than a science of human behavior, a therapy for the suffering. It became an all-embracing American ideology, a new religion.”

One of Friedan’s primary contentions is that post-World War II society increasingly focused on personal problems and domestic life because the large social problems of the early 20th century had been traumatizing. Between the economic suffering of the Great Depression, the mass loss of life in World War II, and the terrifying realization of atomic warfare, mid-century Americans wanted a respite. Freud’s work, which focused on the individual psyche, found fertile ground in a society with this mindset; many people with no professional connection to the field of psychology still had a basic understanding of his most famous theories. 

“In all the concern for adjustment, one truth was forgotten: women were being adjusted to a state inferior to their full capabilities. The functionalists did not wholly accept the Freudian argument that ‘anatomy is destiny,’ but they accepted whole-heartedly an equally restrictive definition of woman: woman is what society says she is.” 

This passage comes from a chapter in which Friedan discusses functionalism, a branch of sociology that views all members of a society as fulfilling roles that add up to a working whole. As Friedan explains it, functionalism promotes the status quo. In functionalists’ view, women should stay tied to the home not because their biology demands it, but because that arrangement contributes to society’s continued functioning. To a feminist like Friedan, this distinction does not matter given that the result is still a prescription for women to avoid education, careers, or other forms of self-realization.

“It was, perhaps, not her [Margaret Mead’s] fault that she was taken so literally that procreation became a cult, a career, to the exclusion of every other kind of creative endeavor, until women kept on having babies because they knew no other way to create.” 

Margaret Mead’s work studying cultures in the South Pacific made her a hero to many mid-century feminists; because she found cultures in which women were dominant and men subservient, her work seemed to show that gender roles originate at least as much from socialization as they do from biology. However, Friedan objects to her suggestion that women should pride themselves on their ability to bear children. Friedan feels that women need respect for more than their ability to have children in order to develop full human identities. 

“One might ask: if an education geared to the growth of the human mind weakens femininity, will an education geared to femininity weaken the growth of the human mind? What is femininity, if it can be destroyed by an education which makes the mind grow, or induced by not letting the mind grow?” 

Throughout the book, Friedan addresses concerns about higher education interfering with “feminine” development. Some social commentators of the time claimed that education made women dissatisfied with the life of a housewife and that it therefore should be discouraged; others claimed that it interfered with women’s sexual satisfaction. Many colleges and universities themselves sent this message by offering women courses in home management, as if to say that no matter their other intellectual interests, their futures lay in the domestic sphere. Here, Friedan argues that “femininity” must not be as potent as many commentators claim if a good education can erode it. 

“It was easier, safer, to think about love and sex than about communism, McCarthy, and the uncontrolled bomb. It was easier to look for Freudian sexual roots in man’s behavior, his ideas, and his wars than to look critically at his society and act constructively to right its wrongs. There was a kind of personal retreat, even on the part of the most far-sighted, the most spirited; we lowered our eyes from the horizon, and steadily contemplated our own navels.” 

While Friedan describes mid-century America’s turn to personal concerns over social concerns as understandable given the traumas of the early part of the century, she does not concede that the turn is therefore right or good. By describing this turn as a “retreat” and using the denigrating description “contemplated our own navels,” she shows that she considers this tendency cowardly. By participating in it, women themselves, she suggests, bear some responsibility for their own status as prisoners of the feminine mystique. 

“If a culture does not expect human maturity from its women, it does not see its lack as a waste, or as a possible cause of neurosis or conflict. The insult, the real reflection on our culture’s definition of the role of women, is that as a nation we only noticed something was wrong with women when we saw its effects on their sons.” 

In this passage, Friedan is talking about American psychologists’ growing awareness of male children with mental health problems. She condemns her society for only noticing an epidemic of depressed housewives when problems emerged in their male children. This bears resemblance to the contemporary feminist complaint that many men understand the seriousness of problems like rape by imagining their own female relatives as victims rather than by grasping the inherent human dignity of all women. 

“Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives.” 

When she discusses the advertising industry’s participation in promoting the feminine mystique, Friedan concedes that such industries do not purposely get together and plan ways to keep women subjugated to men. However, by pursuing unlimited financial growth, they often end up at this result. At the time Friedan published the book, women comprised the vast majority of the consumer market because they had more time in the day to go shopping. Manufacturers of household products therefore had a vested interest in perpetuating a society in which most women were housewives. 

“In a free enterprise economy […] we have to develop the need for new products. And to do that we have to liberate women to desire these new products. We help them rediscover that homemaking is more creative than to compete with men. This can be manipulated. We sell them what they ought to want, speed up the unconscious, move it along.” 

This quote comes from an anonymous advertising executive that Friedan interviews. His diction betrays a strange contradiction; in the space of three sentences, he refers to his work as both “liberating” women and “manipulating” them. His interview shows women readers that the barrage of new household products constantly being advertised to them are not necessary for a well-maintained house; manufacturers could not continue to grow their profits if they did not invent unnecessary variations on products. 

“The manipulators and their clients in American business can hardly be accused of creating the feminine mystique. But they are the most powerful of its perpetuators […] If they are not solely responsible for sending women home, they are surely responsible for keeping them there.” 

Because Friedan surveys a number of institutions that perpetuate the feminine mystique, her charge that the advertising industry is the worst offender marks a grave indictment. While other institutions play their own destructive roles, the advertising industry is the one that most blatantly lies to women about having something to fill their emptiness. Although indictments of American consumerism existed before this book and continue today, the economic prosperity of mid-century America made this time period a particularly ripe one for consumers to binge on unnecessary purchases.

“That housewifery can, must, expand to fill the time available when there is no other purpose in life seems fairly evident. After all, with no other purpose in her life, if the housework were done in an hour, and the children off to school, the bright, energetic housewife would find the emptiness of her days unbearable.”

Friedan realized that many women might read her book and respond that if they stopped being full-time housewives their houses would become pigsties. To combat this idea, she includes a chapter explaining that housework does not need to be a full-time job in order for a family to live in a clean, respectable house. The only reason so many housewives assume it is a full-time job is because they unconsciously find ways to prolong it to fill their days. Those with part-time or full-time jobs find that their houses do not descend into chaos.

“And as American women have turned their attention to the exclusive, explicit, and aggressive pursuit of sexual fulfillment, or the acting-out of sexual phantasy, the sexual disinterest of American men and their hostility toward women, have also increased.” 

Stereotypes about male and female sexuality usually portray men as the sexual aggressors with unquenchable sexual appetites. However, Friedan explains that women who struggle to develop a sense of identity as housewives often try to find an identity in sex. As a result, they want sex more often than their husbands do, which annoys or upsets their husbands. This phenomenon can lead to serious problems in a marriage, including infidelity by one or both spouses.

“Noncommitment and vicarious living are […] at the very heart of our conventional definition of femininity. This is the way the feminine mystique teaches girls to seek ‘fulfillment as women’; this is the way most American women live today. But if the human organism has an innate urge to grow, to expand and become all it can be, it is not surprising that the bodies and the minds of healthy women begin to rebel as they try to adjust to a role that does not permit this growth.” 

Friedan relates the feminine mystique to the work of psychiatrist Andras Angyal. Angyal suggests that all organisms, including people, need to grow, but that some evade their own growth, usually out of fear. Friedan’s point is that while Angyal describes methods of evading growth as neurotic divergences from nature’s necessary course, the feminine mystique actually encourages women to evade their own growth. In other words, women learn to behave in a way that a prominent psychiatrist describes as harmful to any living organism. 

“It is time to stop exhorting mothers to ‘love’ their children more, and face the paradox between the mystique’s demand that women devote themselves completely to their home and their children, and the fact that most of the problems now being treated in child-guidance clinics are solved only when the mothers are helped to develop autonomous interests of their own, and no longer need to fulfill their emotional needs through their children.” 

Friedan spends much of the book describing the negative effects bored, depressed mothers have on their children. Mothers who feel they lack their own identity often seek to establish one through their children. The result is too much involvement in children’s lives, which contrasts sharply with the fear that many social commentators express about mothers who do not spend enough time with their children. The solution to this overinvolvement is to give mothers more opportunities to develop their personalities outside the home.

“In a sense that is not as far-fetched as it sounds, 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—and the millions more who refused to believe that the concentration camps existed.” 

The comparison that Friedan makes between unfulfilled housewives and concentration camp victims stands as one of the boldest claims in the book. Many critics find it too bold, arguing that no matter how lamentable the state of the mid-century housewife’s life, her situation could not compare to the cruelty of Nazi concentration camps. Along with passages about being gay and the absence of commentary on poor women or women of color, this passage has drawn criticism in the decades since the book’s publication. 

“Despite the glorification of ‘Occupation: housewife,’ if that occupation does not demand, or permit, the realization of woman’s full abilities, it cannot provide adequate self-esteem, much less pave the way to a higher level of self-realization.” 

In this passage, Friedan expands on the concept of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. According to Maslow, all human beings develop increasingly abstract needs, such as self-esteem and self-actualization, after their basic survival needs are met. Friedan’s point is that men have free rein to pursue these higher-order needs, but women do not enjoy the same opportunities. Women feel a sense of incompleteness when they cannot explore their own identities outside the context of the home.

“As the early feminists foresaw, women’s rights did indeed promote greater sexual fulfillment, for men and women.”

Famous sexologist Alfred Kinsey published a report on human sexuality in 1948, and this report showed that educated women experienced less sexual fulfillment than their less-educated counterparts. However, in a later version of the report, Kinsey explained that his earlier data was flawed and the exact opposite was true: The more educated a woman was, the greater her sexual fulfillment. Friedan discusses this switch but explains that unfortunately many Americans absorbed the first report’s conclusions and either did not know about or ignored the reversal. 

“The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.”

Friedan emphasizes the positive opportunities that accompany careers frequently throughout the book, but she spends even more time advocating higher education for women. To her, the benefits of education—from engaging women in social issues to helping them identify their own interests—were unparalleled. She felt that far too many women settled into the role of housewife at so young an age that they did not yet know who they were when they married, and that the best route to self-discovery was through a comprehensive education.