The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [29]
I sat one night at a meeting of magazine writers, mostly men, who work for all kinds of magazines, including women’s magazines. The main speaker was a leader of the desegregation battle. Before he spoke, another man outlined the needs of the large women’s magazine he edited:
Our readers are housewives, full time. They’re not interested in the broad public issues of the day. They are not interested in national or international affairs. They are only interested in the family and the home. They aren’t interested in politics, unless it’s related to an immediate need in the home, like the price of coffee. Humor? Has to be gentle, they don’t get satire. Travel? We have almost completely dropped it. Education? That’s a problem. Their own education level is going up. They’ve generally all had a high-school education and many, college. They’re tremendously interested in education for their children—fourth-grade arithmetic. You just can’t write about ideas or broad issues of the day for women. That’s why we’re publishing 90 per cent service now and 10 per cent general interest.
Another editor agreed, adding plaintively: “Can’t you give us something else besides ‘there’s death in your medicine cabinet’? Can’t any of you dream up a new crisis for women? We’re always interested in sex, of course.”
At this point, the writers and editors spent an hour listening to Thurgood Marshall on the inside story of the desegregation battle, and its possible effect on the presidential election. “Too bad I can’t run that story,” one editor said. “But you just can’t link it to woman’s world.”
As I listened to them, a German phrase echoed in my mind—“Kinder, Kuche, Kirche,” the slogan by which the Nazis decreed that women must once again be confined to their biological role. But this was not Nazi Germany. This was America. The whole world lies open to American women. Why, then, does the image deny the world? Why does it limit women to “one passion, one role, one occupation?” Not long ago, women dreamed and fought for equality, their own place in the world. What happened to their dreams; when did women decide to give up the world and go back home?
A geologist brings up a core of mud from the bottom of the ocean and sees layers of sediment as sharp as a razor blade deposited over the years—clues to changes in the geological evolution of the earth so vast that they would go unnoticed during the lifespan of a single man. I sat for many days in the New York Public Library, going back through bound volumes of American women’s magazines for the last twenty years. I found a change in the image of the American woman, and in the boundaries of the woman’s world, as sharp and puzzling as the changes revealed in cores of ocean sediment.
In 1939, the heroines of women’s magazine stories were not always young, but in a certain sense they were younger than their fictional counterparts today. They were young in the same way that the American hero has always been young: they were New Women, creating with a gay determined spirit a new identity for women—a life of their own. There was an aura about them of becoming, of moving into a future that was going to be different from the past. The majority of heroines in the four major women’s magazines (then Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Home Companion) were career women—happily, proudly, adventurously, attractively career women—who loved and were loved by men. And the spirit, courage, independence, determination—the strength of character they showed in their work as nurses, teachers, artists, actresses, copywriters, saleswomen—were part of their charm. There was a definite aura that their individuality was something to be admired, not unattractive to men, that men were drawn to them as much for their spirit and character as for their looks.
These were the mass women’s magazines—in their heyday. The stories were conventional: girl-meets-boy