The Feminine Mystique

It is a decade now since the publication of The Feminine Mystique, and until I started writing the book, I wasn’t even conscious of the woman problem. Locked as we all were then in that mystique, which kept us passive and apart, and kept us from seeing our real problems and possibilities, I, like other women, thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor. I was a freak, writing that book—not that I waxed any floor, I must admit, in the throes of finishing it in 1963.

Each of us thought she was a freak ten years ago if she didn’t experience that mysterious orgastic fulfillment the commercials promised when waxing the kitchen floor. However much we enjoyed being Junior’s and Janey’s or Emily’s mother, or B.J.’s wife, if we still had ambitions, ideas about ourselves as people in our own right—well, we were simply freaks, neurotics, and we confessed our sin or neurosis to priest or psychoanalyst, and tried hard to adjust. We didn’t admit it to each other if we felt there should be more in life than peanut-butter sandwiches with the kids, if throwing powder into the washing machine didn’t make us relive our wedding night, if getting the socks or shirts pure white was not exactly a peak experience, even if we did feel guilty about the tattletale gray.

Some of us (in 1963, nearly half of all women in the United States) were already committing the unpardonable sin of working outside the home to help pay the mortgage or grocery bill. Those who did felt guilty, too—about betraying their femininity, undermining their husbands’ masculinity, and neglecting their children by daring to work for money at all, no matter how much it was needed. They couldn’t admit, even to themselves, that they resented being paid half what a man would have been paid for the job, or always being passed over for promotion, or writing the paper for which he got the degree and the raise.

A suburban neighbor of mine named Gertie was having coffee with me when the census taker came as I was writing The Feminine Mystique. “Occupation?” the census taker asked. “Housewife,” I said. Gertie, who had cheered me on in my efforts at writing and selling magazine articles, shook her head sadly. “You should take yourself more seriously,” she said. I hesitated, and then said to the census taker, “Actually, I’m a writer.” But, of course, I then was, and still am, like all married women in America, no matter what else we do between 9 and 5, a housewife. Of course single women didn’t put down “housewife” when the census taker came around, but even here society was less interested in what these women were doing as persons in the world than in asking, “Why isn’t a nice girl like you married?” And so they, too, were not encouraged to take themselves seriously.

It seems such a precarious accident that I ever wrote the book at all—but, in another way, my whole life had prepared me to write that book. All the pieces finally came together. In 1957, getting strangely bored with writing articles about breast feeding and the like for Redbook and the Ladies’ Home Journal, I put an unconscionable amount of time into a questionnaire for my fellow Smith graduates of the class of 1942, thinking I was going to disprove the current notion that education had fitted us ill for our role as women. But the questionnaire raised more questions than it answered for me—education had not exactly geared us to the role women were trying to play, it seemed. The suspicion arose as to whether it was the education or the role that was wrong. McCall’s commissioned an article based on my Smith alumnae questionnaire, but the then male publisher of McCall’s, during that great era of togetherness, turned the piece down in horror, despite underground efforts of female editors. The male McCall’s editors said it couldn’t be true.

I was next commissioned to do the article for Ladies’ Home Journal. That time I took it back, because they rewrote it to say just the opposite of what, in fact, I was trying to say. I tried it again for Redbook. Each time I was interviewing more women, psychologists, sociologists, marriage counselors, and the like and getting more and more sure I was on the track of something. But what? I needed a name for whatever it was that kept us from using our rights, that made us feel guilty about anything we did not as our husbands’ wives, our children’s mothers, but as people ourselves. I needed a name to describe that guilt. Unlike the guilt women used to feel about sexual needs, the guilt they felt now was about needs that didn’t fit the sexual definition of women, the mystique of feminine fulfillment—the feminine mystique.

The editor of Redbook told my agent, “Betty has gone off her rocker. She has always done a good job for us, but this time only the most neurotic housewife could identify.” I opened my agent’s letter on the subway as I was taking the kids to the pediatrician. I got off the subway to call my agent and told her, “I’ll have to write a book to get this into print.” What I was writing threatened the very foundations of the women’s magazine world—the feminine mystique.

When Norton contracted for the book, I thought it would take a year to finish it; it took five. I wouldn’t have even started it if the New York Public Library had not, at just the right time, opened the Frederick Lewis Allen Room, where writers working on a book could get a desk, six months at a time, rent free. I got a baby-sitter three days a week and took the bus from Rockland County to the city and somehow managed to prolong the six months to two years in the Allen Room, enduring much joking from other writers at lunch when it came out that I was writing a book about women. Then, somehow, the book took me over, obsessed me, wanted to write itself, and I took my papers home and wrote on the dining-room table, the living-room couch, on a neighbor’s dock on the river, and kept on writing it in my mind when I stopped to take the kids somewhere or make dinner, and went back to it after they were in bed.

I have never experienced anything as powerful, truly mystical, as the forces that seemed to take me over when I was writing The Feminine Mystique. The book came from somewhere deep within me and all my experience came together in it: my mother’s discontent, my own training in Gestalt and Freudian psychology, the fellowship I felt guilty about giving up, the stint as a reporter which taught me how to follow clues to the hidden economic underside of reality, my exodus to the suburbs and all the hours with other mothers shopping at supermarkets, taking the children swimming, coffee klatches. Even the years of writing for women’s magazines when it was unquestioned gospel that women could identify with nothing beyond the home—not politics, not art, not science, not events large or small, war or peace, in the United States or the world, unless it could be approached through female experience as a wife or mother or translated into domestic detail! I could no longer write within that framework. The book I was now writing challenged the very definition of that universe—what I chose to call the feminine mystique. Giving it a name, I knew that it was not the only possible universe for women at all but an unnatural confining of our energies and vision. But as I began following leads and clues from women’s words and my own feelings, across psychology, sociology, and recent history, tracing back—through the pages of the magazines for which I’d written—why and how it happened, what it was really doing to women, to their children, even to sex, the implications became apparent and they were fantastic. I was surprised myself at what I was writing, where it was leading. After I finished each chapter, a part of me would wonder, Am I crazy? But there was also a growing feeling of calm, strong, gut-sureness as the clues fitted together, which must be the same kind of feeling a scientist has when he or she zeroes in on a discovery in one of those true-science detective stories.

Only this was not just abstract and conceptual. It meant that I and every other woman I knew had been living a lie, and all the doctors who treated us and the experts who studied us were perpetuating that lie, and our homes and schools and churches and politics and professions were built around that lie. If women were really people—no more, no less—then all the things that kept them from being full people in our society would have to be changed. And women, once they broke through the feminine mystique and took themselves seriously as people, would see their place on a false pedestal, even their glorification as sexual objects, for the putdown it was.

Yet if I had realized how fantastically fast that would really happen—already in less than ten years’ time—maybe I would have been so scared I might have stopped writing. It’s frightening when you’re starting on a new road that no one has been on before. You don’t know how far it’s going to take you until you look back and realize how far, how very far you’ve gone. When the first woman asked me, in 1963, to autograph The Feminine Mystique, saying what by now hundreds—thousands, I guess—of women have said to me, “It changed my whole life,” I wrote, “Courage to us all on the new road.” Because there is no turning back on that road. It has to change your whole life; it certainly changed mine.

BETTY FRIEDAN

New York, 1973