The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [0]
“Written with a passionate drive…it will leave you with some haunting facts as well as a few hair-raising stories. That The Feminine Mystique is at the same time a scholarly work, appropriate for serious study, only adds to its usefulness.”
—Lillian Smith, Saturday Review
“A highly readable, provocative book.”
—Lucy Freeman, New York Times Book Review
“The most important book of the twentieth century is The Feminine Mystique. Betty Friedan is to women what Martin Luther King, Jr., was to blacks.”
—Barbara Seaman, author of Free and Female
“The Feminine Mystique stated the trouble with women so clearly that every woman could recognize herself in the diagnosis…. Things are different between men and women because we now have words for the trouble. Betty gave them to us.”
—Caroline Bird, author of Lives of Our Own
The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan
The Feminine Mystique
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York London
Copyright © 1997, 1991, 1974, 1963 by Betty Friedan
Introduction by Anna Quindlen copyright © 2001 by Anna Quindlen
First published as a Norton paperback 2001
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Friedan, Betty.
The feminine mystique/by Betty Friedan; with a new introduction.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-33932-1
1. Feminism—United States. 2. Women—United States—Social conditions. 3.
Women—Psychology. I. Title.
HQ1426.F844 1997
305.42’0973—DC21
97–8877
CIP
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
For all the new women,
and the new men
Contents
Introduction by Anna Quindlen
Metamorphosis: Two Generations Later
Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition
Preface and Acknowledgments
1 The Problem That Has No Name
2 The Happy Housewife Heroine
3 The Crisis in Woman’s Identity
4 The Passionate Journey
5 The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud
6 The Functional Freeze, the Feminine Protest, and Margaret Mead
7 The Sex-Directed Educators
8 The Mistaken Choice
9 The Sexual Sell
10 Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available
11 The Sex-Seekers
12 Progressive Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp
13 The Forfeited Self
14 A New Life Plan for Women
Epilogue
Notes
Reading Group Guide
Introduction
Anna Quindlen
My mother is reading a paperback book at the kitchen table. This is odd. My mother is not a great reader, and usually she reads only before bed, hardcover books that come from the Book-of-the-Month Club, novels by Taylor Caldwell and Daphne du Maurier and Mary Stewart. But she is hunched over this paperback, frowning, twin divots between her dark brows. I cannot remember many of the specific details of my childhood, but I remember this moment well. I am twelve.
This is how I first encountered Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. When I read the book myself, eight years later, as an assignment for a women’s studies class at Barnard, I immediately understand why my mother had become so engrossed that she found herself reading in the place usually reserved for cooking. I don’t believe she was particularly enthralled by Friedan’s systematic evisceration of the theories of Sigmund Freud, or the prescient indictment of American consumerism.
I think it was probably the notion of seeing her own life there in the pages of that book, the endless, thankless cycle of dishes and vacuuming and meals and her husband’s ironing and her children’s laundry. “I begin to feel I have no personality,” one woman told Friedan. “I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something.