The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [37]
Maybe they hadn’t heard of them. Ideas are not like instincts of the blood that spring into the mind intact. They are communicated by education, by the printed word. The new young housewives, who leave high school or college to marry, do not read books, the psychological surveys say. They only read magazines. Magazines today assume women are not interested in ideas. But going back to the bound volumes in the library, I found in the thirties and forties that the mass-circulation magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal carried hundreds of articles about the world outside the home. “The first inside story of American diplomatic relations preceding declared war” “Can the U. S. Have Peace After This War?” by Walter Lippman; “Stalin at Midnight,” by Harold Stassen; “General Stilwell Reports on China” articles about the last days of Czechoslovakia by Vincent Sheean; the persecution of Jews in Germany; the New Deal; Carl Sandburg’s account of Lincoln’s assassination; Faulkner’s stories of Mississippi, and Margaret Sanger’s battle for birth control.
In the 1950’s they printed virtually no articles except those that serviced women as housewives, or described women as housewives, or permitted a purely feminine identification like the Duchess of Windsor or Princess Margaret. “If we get an article about a woman who does anything adventurous, out of the way, something by herself, you know, we figure she must be terribly aggressive, neurotic,” a Ladies’ Home Journal editor told me. Margaret Sanger would never get in today.
In 1960, I saw statistics that showed that women under thirty-five could not identify with a spirited heroine of a story who worked in an ad agency and persuaded the boy to stay and fight for his principles in the big city instead of running home to the security of a family business. Nor could these new young housewives identify with a young minister, acting on his belief in defiance of convention. But they had no trouble at all identifying with a young man paralyzed at eighteen. (“I regained consciousness to discover that I could not move or even speak. I could wiggle only one finger of one hand.” With help from faith and a psychiatrist, “I am now finding reasons to live as fully as possible.”)
Does it say something about the new housewife readers that, as any editor can testify, they can identify completely with the victims of blindness, deafness, physical maiming, cerebral palsy, paralysis, cancer, or approaching death? Such articles about people who cannot see or speak or move have been an enduring staple of the women’s magazines in the era of “Occupation: housewife.” They are told with infinitely realistic detail over and over again, replacing the articles about the nation, the world, ideas, issues, art and science; replacing the stories about adventurous spirited women. And whether the victim is man, woman or child, whether the living death is incurable cancer or creeping paralysis, the housewife reader can identify.
Writing for these magazines, I was continually reminded by editors “that women have to identify.” Once I wanted to write an article about an artist. So I wrote about her cooking and marketing and falling in love with her husband, and painting a crib for her baby. I had to leave out the hours she spent painting pictures, her serious work—and the way she felt about it. You could sometimes get away with writing about a woman who was not really a housewife, if you made her sound like a housewife, if you left out her commitment to the world outside the home, or the private vision of mind or spirit that she pursued. In February, 1949, the Ladies’ Home Journal ran a feature, “Poet’s Kitchen,” showing Edna St. Vincent Millay cooking. “Now I expect to hear no more about housework’s being beneath anyone, for if one of the greatest poets of our day, and