The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [14]
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