The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [28]
A lead article on “increasing baldness in women,” caused by too much brushing and dyeing.
A long poem in primer-size type about a child, called “A Boy Is A Boy.”
A short story about how a teenager who doesn’t go to college gets a man away from a bright college girl.
A short story about the minute sensations of a baby throwing his bottle out of the crib.
The first of a two-part intimate “up-to-date” account by the Duke of Windsor on “How the Duchess and I now live and spend our time. The influence of clothes on me and vice versa.”
A short story about a nineteen-year-old girl sent to a charm school to learn how to bat her eyelashes and lose at tennis. (“You’re nineteen, and by normal American standards, I now am entitled to have you taken off my hands, legally and financially, by some beardless youth who will spirit you away to a one-and-a-half-room apartment in the Village while he learns the chicanery of selling bonds. And no beardless youth is going to do that as long as you volley to his backhand.”)
The story of a honeymoon couple commuting between separate bedrooms after an argument over gambling at Las Vegas.
An article on “how to overcome an inferiority complex.”
A story called “Wedding Day.”
The story of a teenager’s mother who learns how to dance rock-and-roll.
Six pages of glamorous pictures of models in maternity clothes.
Four glamorous pages on “reduce the way the models do.”
An article on airline delays.
Patterns for home sewing.
Patterns with which to make “Folding Screens—Bewitching Magic.”
An article called “An Encyclopedic Approach to Finding a Second Husband.”
A “barbecue bonanza,” dedicated “to the Great American Mister who stands, chef’s cap on head, fork in hand, on terrace or back porch, in patio or backyard anywhere in the land, watching his roast turning on the spit. And to his wife, without whom (sometimes) the barbecue could never be the smashing summer success it undoubtedly is…”
There were also the regular front-of-the-book “service” columns on new drug and medicine developments, child-care facts, columns by Clare Luce and by Eleanor Roosevelt, and “Pats and Pans,” a column of readers’ letters.
The image of woman that emerges from this big, pretty magazine is young and frivolous, almost childlike; fluffy and feminine; passive; gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home. The magazine surely does not leave out sex; the only passion, the only pursuit, the only goal a woman is permitted is the pursuit of a man. It is crammed full of food, clothing, cosmetics, furniture, and the physical bodies of young women, but where is the world of thought and ideas, the life of the mind and spirit? In the magazine image, women do no work except housework and work to keep their bodies beautiful and to get and keep a man.
This was the image of the American woman in the year Castro led a revolution in Cuba and men were trained to travel into outer space; the year that the African continent brought forth new nations, and a plane whose speed is greater than the speed of sound broke up a Summit Conference; the year artists picketed a great museum in protest against the hegemony of abstract art; physicists explored the concept of anti-matter; astronomers, because of new radio telescopes, had to alter their concepts of the expanding universe; biologists made a breakthrough in the fundamental chemistry of life; and Negro youth in Southern schools forced the United States, for the first time since the Civil War, to face a moment of democratic truth. But this magazine, published for over 5,000,000 American women, almost all of whom have been through high school and nearly half to college, contained almost no mention of the world beyond the home. In the second half of the twentieth century in America, woman’s world was confined to her own body and beauty, the charming of man, the bearing