The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [38]
The one “career woman” who was always welcome in the pages of the women’s magazines was the actress. But her image also underwent a remarkable change: from a complex individual of fiery temper, inner depth, and a mysterious blend of spirit and sexuality, to a sexual object, a babyface bride, or a housewife. Think of Greta Garbo, for instance, and Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Katherine Hepburn. Then think of Marilyn Monroe, Debbie Reynolds, Brigitte Bardot, and “I Love Lucy.”
When you wrote about an actress for a women’s magazine, you wrote about her as a housewife. You never showed her doing or enjoying her work as an actress, unless she eventually paid for it by losing her husband or her child, or otherwise admitting failure as a woman. A Redbook profile of Judy Holliday (June, 1957) described how “a brilliant woman begins to find in her work the joy she never found in life.” On the screen, we are told, she plays “with warmth and conviction the part of a mature, intelligent wife and expectant mother, a role unlike anything she had previously attempted.” She must find fulfillment in her career because she is divorced from her husband, has “strong feelings of inadequacy as a woman…. It is a frustrating irony of Judy’s life, that as an actress she has succeeded almost without trying, although, as a woman, she has failed…”
Strangely enough, as the feminine mystique spread, denying women careers or any commitment outside the home, the proportion of American women working outside the home increased to one out of three. True, two out of three were still housewives, but why, at the moment when the doors of the world were finally open to all women, should the mystique deny the very dreams that had stirred women for a century?
I found a clue one morning, sitting in the office of a women’s magazine editor—a woman who, older than I, remembers the days when the old image was being created, and who had watched it being displaced. The old image of the spirited career girl was largely created by writers and editors who were women, she told me. The new image of woman as housewife-mother has been largely created by writers and editors who are men.
“Most of the material used to come from women writers,” she said, almost nostalgically. “As the young men returned from the war, a great many women writers dropped out of the field. The young women started having a lot of children, and stopped writing. The new writers were all men, back from the war, who had been dreaming about home, and a cozy domestic life.” One by one, the creators of the gay “career girl” heroines of the thirties began to retire. By the end of the forties, the writers who couldn’t get the knack of writing in the new housewife image had left the women’s magazine field. The new magazine pros were men, and a few women who could write comfortably according to the housewife formula. Other people began to assemble backstage at the women’s magazines: there was a new kind of woman writer who lived in the housewife image, or pretended to; and there was a new kind of woman’s editor or publisher, less interested in ideas to reach women’s minds and hearts, than in selling them the things that interest advertisers—appliances, detergents, lipstick. Today, the deciding voice on most of these magazines is cast by men. Women often carry out the formulas, women edit the housewife “service” departments, but the formulas themselves, which have dictated the new housewife image, are the product of men’s minds.
Also during the forties and fifties, serious fiction writers of either sex disappeared from the mass-circulation women’s magazines. In fact, fiction of any quality was almost completely replaced by a different kind of article. No longer the old article about issues or ideas, but the new “service” feature. Sometimes these articles lavished the artistry of a poet and the honesty of a crusading reporter on baking chiffon pies, or buying washing machines, or the miracles paint