The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [3]
Metamorphosis
Two Generations Later
As we approach a new century—and a new millennium—it’s the men who have to break through to a new way of thinking about themselves and society. Too bad the women can’t do it for them, or go much further without them. Because it’s awesome to consider how women have changed the very possibilities of our lives and are changing the values of every part of our society since we broke through the feminine mystique only two generations ago. But it can’t go on in terms of women alone. There’s a new urgency coming from the changing situation of men, threatening to women unless men break through. Will women be forced to retreat from their empowered personhood, or will they join with men again in some new vision of human possibility, changing the man’s world which they fought so hard to enter?
Consider the terms of women’s new empowerment, the startling changes since that time I wrote about, only three decades ago, when women were defined only in sexual relation to men—man’s wife, sex object, mother, housewife—and never as persons defining themselves by their own actions in society. That image, which I called “the feminine mystique,” was so pervasive, coming at us from the women’s magazines, the movies, the television commercials, all the mass media and the textbooks of psychology and sociology, that each woman thought she was alone, it was her personal guilt, if she didn’t have an orgasm waxing the family-room floor. No matter how much she had wanted that husband, those children, that split-level suburban house and all the appliances thereof, which were supposed to be the limits of women’s dreams in those years after World War II, she sometimes felt a longing for something more.
I called it “the problem that had no name” because women were blamed then for a lot of problems—not getting the kitchen sink white enough, not pressing the husband’s shirt smooth enough, the children’s bedwetting, the husband’s ulcers, their own lack of orgasm. But there was no name for a problem that had nothing to do with husband, children, home, sex—the problem I heard from so many women after I served my own time as a suburban housewife, fired from a newspaper job for being pregnant, guilty anyway as women were made to feel then for working outside the home, that they were undermining their husband’s masculinity and their own femininity and neglecting their children. I was not quite able to suppress the writing itch, so, like secret drinking in the morning because no other mommy in my suburban world “worked,” I freelanced for women’s magazines, writing articles about women and their children, breast feeding, natural childbirth, their homes and fashions. If I tried to write about a woman artist, a political concern, “American women won’t identify,” the editors would say. Those editors of women’s magazines were men.
All the terms in every field and profession then were defined by men, who were virtually the only full professors, the law partners, the CEOs and company executives, the medical experts, the academicians, the hospital heads and clinic directors. There was no “woman’s vote” women voted as their husbands did. No pollster or political candidate talked about “women’s issues” women were not taken that seriously, women didn’t take themselves that seriously. Abortion was not a word printed in newspapers; it was a sleazy crime that shamed and terrified and often killed women, and whose practitioners could go to jail. It was only after we broke through the feminine mystique and said women are people, no more no less, and therefore demanded our human right to participate in the mainstream of society, to equal opportunity to earn and be trained and have our own voice in the big decisions of our destiny, that the problems of women themselves became visible, and women began to take their own experience seriously.
Consider, in the summer of 1996, that the women