The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [13]
The research I explored for my 1993 book The Fountain of Age showed two things crucial for living vital long lives: purposes and projects that use one’s abilities, structure one’s days, and keep one moving as a part of our changing society; and bonds of intimacy. But for men whose project was laid out in that no-longer-to-be-relied-on lifetime career, there’s chaos now. They need the flexibility women were forced to develop, raising kids, fitting profession, job, and family together somehow, inventing a changing pattern for life as it came along. For that long lifetime, men desperately need now the ease in creating and sustaining bonds of intimacy and sharing feelings that used to be relegated as women’s business. For, let’s face it finally, what used to be accepted—man-as-measure-of-all-things—must now be reconsidered. Women and men are now both occupying the mainstream of society and defining the terms. The standards, the definitions, the very measures we live by, have to change, are changing, as women’s and men’s shared new reality sweeps aside the obsolete remnants of the feminine mystique and its machismo counterpart.
And so, in a politics where women’s newly conscious voting power now exceeds men’s, life concerns—care of young and old, sickness and health, the choice when and whether to have a baby, family values—now define the agenda more than the old abstractions of deficit and the missiles of death. In August 1996, the New York Times reports a fashion crisis: Women are no longer buying high-style clothes, men are. Ads and commercials sell “dad’s night to cook,” perfume, and face-lifts for men. That baby in the backpack makes young men now strong enough to be tender. They may grow up, those men, out of the child-man that has defined masculinity until now. And those women athletes, taking the spotlight at the ’96 Olympics, what standards will they change? The ads and the fashion magazines may still feature American prepubescent child-women, or push silicone-stuffed breasts that can’t even respond to human touch—but young girls growing up now are also sold the training shoes and the new ideals of strength. Will new women no longer need men to be taller, stronger, earn more?
Grown-up men and women, no longer obsessed with youth, outgrowing finally children’s games, and obsolete rituals of power and sex, become more and more authentically themselves. And they do not pretend that men are from Mars or women are from Venus. They even share each other’s interests, talk a common shorthand of work, love, play, kids, politics. We may now begin to glimpse the new human possibilities when women and men are finally free to be themselves, know each other for who they really are, and define the terms and measures of success, failure, joy, triumph, power, and the common good, together.
BETTY FRIEDAN
Washington, D.C.
April 1997
Introduction
to the Tenth Anniversary Edition
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