The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [39]
But here is a curious thing. Within their narrow range, these women’s magazine articles, whether straight service to the housewife or a documentary report about the housewife, were almost always superior in quality to women’s magazine fiction. They were better written, more honest, more sophisticated. This observation was made over and over again by intelligent readers and puzzled editors, and by writers themselves. “The serious fiction writers have become too internal. They’re inaccessible to our readers, so we’re left with the formula writers,” an editor of Redbook said. And yet, in the old days, serious writers like Nancy Hale, even William Faulkner, wrote for the women’s magazines and were not considered inaccessible. Perhaps the new image of woman did not permit the internal honesty, the depth of perception, and the human truth essential to good fiction.
At the very least, fiction requires a hero or, understandably for women’s magazines, a heroine, who is an “I” in pursuit of some human goal or dream. There is a limit to the number of stories that can be written about a girl in pursuit of a boy, or a housewife in pursuit of a ball of dust under the sofa. Thus the service article takes over, replacing the internal honesty and truth needed in fiction with a richness of honest, objective, concrete, realistic domestic detail—the color of walls or lipstick, the exact temperature of the oven.
Judging from the women’s magazines today, it would seem that the concrete details of women’s lives are more interesting than their thoughts, their ideas, their dreams. Or does the richness and realism of the detail, the careful description of small events, mask the lack of dreams, the vacuum of ideas, the terrible boredom that has settled over the American housewife?
I sat in the office of another old-timer, one of the few women editors left in the women’s magazine world, now so largely dominated by men. She explained her share in creating the feminine mystique. “Many of us were psychoanalyzed,” she recalled. “And we began to feel embarrassed about being career women ourselves. There was this terrible fear that we were losing our femininity. We kept looking for ways to help women accept their feminine role.”
If the real women editors were not, somehow, able to give up their own careers, all the more reason to “help” other women fulfill themselves as wives and mothers. The few women who still sit in editorial conferences do not bow to the feminine mystique in their own lives. But such is the power of the image they have helped create that many of them feel guilty. And if they have missed out somewhere on love or children, they wonder if their careers were to blame.
Behind her cluttered desk, a Mademoiselle editor said uneasily, “The girls we bring in now as college guest editors seem almost to pity us. Because we are career women, I suppose. At a luncheon session with the last bunch, we asked them to go round the table, telling us their own career plans. Not one of the twenty raised her hand. When I remember how I worked to learn this job and loved it—were we all crazy then?”
Coupled with the women editors who sold themselves their own bill of goods, a new breed of women writers began to write about themselves as if they were “just housewives,” reveling in a comic world of children’s pranks and eccentric washing machines and Parents’ Night at the PTA. “After making the bed of a twelve-year-old boy week after