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

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Key Figures

Betty Friedan

With the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan became the most prominent and famous feminist of the 1960s. Though other feminist icons like Gloria Steinem would eventually rival her fame, the book made Friedan’s name synonymous with what many scholars refer to as the “second wave” of the feminist movement. While the first wave of the 19th and early 20th centuries focused primarily on women’s suffrage, the second wave focused on a broader array of issues. Second wave leaders pushed for legislation that would expand women’s rights, such as contraception and abortion access, but also pushed for changes in public attitudes toward women, such as acceptance of their sexuality and recognition of their leadership capabilities in the workplace.

In 1966, Friedan became the founder and first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), an organization still active today. NOW was active in politics, often publicizing its agenda at political conventions and sometimes supporting specific candidates. In many ways, its efforts were successful, such as in securing contraceptive and abortion rights for all American women. Some of its goals remain unmet, however; the Equal Rights Amendment, designed to ensure that women have equal rights in areas such as property ownership and employment, remains unpassed today.

While Friedan’s role in energizing second wave feminism is largely uncontested, many consider her record mixed, with various forms of prejudice clouding her achievements. Critics accuse her of either not vocally supporting or outright rejecting poor women, women of color, and lesbian women. Before her death in 2006, she did publicly attempt to address some of these concerns. She welcomed lesbians into the feminist movement in the 1970s, for instance, whereas earlier she had questioned their place and worried they would give the movement a bad name. In an afterword she wrote in 1997 for a new edition of The Feminine Mystique, she demonstrated increased class consciousness and recognition of the plight of the country’s poor. Before her death, she received multiple honorary doctorates and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

Sigmund Freud

As the father of psychoanalysis, Austrian-born theorist Sigmund Freud was by far the best-known psychological expert in the US at the time of The Feminine Mystique’s publication. His legacy is often invoked alongside other prominent 19th-century theorists, such as Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, as instigating an enormous cultural paradigm shift. His most lasting contributions to the field of psychology were his belief in the importance of childhood in personal development and his explorations of the unconscious mind.

Friedan’s most emphatic point of disagreement with Freud involves both these ideas. She devotes the entirety of Chapter 5 to explaining why Freud’s best-known theory about women is fundamentally wrong and unnecessarily complicated. Freud believed that women experience “penis envy” as young girls; when they first realize that males have penises, he suggested, they consider their own lack of penis a shortcoming and feel envious. Friedan finds this ridiculous: She contends that if women envy men, it is because of “the freedom, the status and the pleasures that men enjoy […]” rather than their penises (128), and that the desire to attain such things is normal, not neurotic.

Despite this, Friedan later cites Freud’s theories on sexual development to support a point of her own in Chapter 11. This willingness to cite Freud as an expert even after devoting a full chapter to excoriating his theories reveals the reach of his reputation at the time of the book’s publication. Psychoanalysis, his method of therapy for those with mental illness, was extremely popular in the 1960s, particularly among the kind of depressed and anxious housewives Friedan describes. Although Freud’s theories enjoy less reverence today and psychoanalysis is no longer the most popular technique among professional therapists, some of his most influential ideas—especially the significance of the unconscious mind—have become so commonplace that even those who know little about Freud himself may understand and recognize them.

Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead worked as a cultural anthropologist in the early and mid-19th century and studied societies in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. Her work contributed major insights to the question of whether biology or socialization was more determinative of a person’s life. By studying cultures whose norms differed widely from Western society’s, Mead lent support to the idea that socialization is at least as important as biology in structuring identity.

Many prominent feminists both during Friedan’s time and now consider Mead’s work an important contribution to the feminist movement. One of her books discussed a New Guinea society where women were dominant, thereby demonstrating that gender roles are socially constructed rather than biologically determined. However, Chapter 6 of The Feminine Mystique outlines why Friedan finds Mead an unhelpful figure for feminists. Friedan explains that Mead encouraged Western women to take pride in their ability to bear children because that very ability was what gave them their status in other societies. According to Friedan, this idea merely leads to giving “the difference in reproductive role increasing importance in the determination of woman’s personality” (156), which does not help the feminist movement. Moreover, Friedan charges Mead with hypocrisy; Mead herself enjoyed a satisfying, challenging career while encouraging other women to embrace their sexual identity rather than their intellectual capabilities.

Today, Mead’s reputation among anthropologists is mixed. After her death, anthropologist Derek Freeman wrote two books describing various flaws in Mead’s research. In one, he even found a woman Mead had interviewed who told him that she and some of her peers had lied to Mead about their culture as a joke. As a result of Freeman’s work, some now consider many of Mead’s conclusions debunked. Others, however, feel that the bulk of her methodology was sound even if she did make some mistakes, and that therefore much of her work still stands. She won many awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and is still widely considered an important contributor to second wave feminism despite criticism from feminists such as Friedan.

Alfred Kinsey

Biologist and sexologist Alfred Kinsey studied sexual behavior in men and women in the mid-20th century. He is best known for two products of his research that bear his name: the Kinsey Reports and the Kinsey scale. The Kinsey Reports were eventually published as two separate books: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Despite their academic origins, these books caused a stir among the American public because some of the sexual topics covered in the books were considered taboo. The Kinsey scale refers to a tool Kinsey developed that could assign a numerical value to a person’s sexual orientation. This scale suggests that sexuality is not a binary in which individuals are completely “straight” or completely “gay,” but that all people instead lie somewhere on a spectrum of sexuality.

Some of Kinsey’s core insights were considered radical at the time he published his work. However, Friedan does not concern herself with his most controversial conclusions in The Feminine Mystique. She instead focuses on his conclusions about the link between education and sexual fulfillment in women. Kinsey’s reports appear a few times throughout the book, most notably in Chapter 8. Here, Friedan explains that an early version of the Kinsey Report showed that the more educated a woman was, the less sexual fulfillment she experienced. A later version “completely contradicted those earlier findings” (226); Kinsey and his colleagues found that their sample was not representative, and an improved sample size reversed their earlier data. However, by that time, the narrative from the first report had become entrenched in the American public’s imagination.

Friedan was not the only person who expressed frustration with inaccuracies that resulted from Kinsey’s research methodology. Some of Kinsey’s prominent contemporaries as well as more recent researchers have warned that his sampling was not representative of the US population and therefore should not be treated as definitive. Others maintain that Kinsey improved his research methods as he worked, resulting in more accurate statistics in his later publications.

Before his death in 1956, Kinsey founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, which still exists and produces research today. While much of his work now exists as a snapshot of the norms, behaviors, and attitudes of an earlier era, some of his work continues to exert influence. In the contemporary world, many people consider the Kinsey scale and his ideas about sexual fluidity pivotal to changing public opinion about what counts as “normal” in the realm of human sexuality.