The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [44]
“’I love my home,’ she says…. The pale gray paint in her L-shaped living and dining room is five years old, but still in perfect condition…. The pale peach and yellow and aqua damask upholstery looks spotless after eight years’ wear. ‘Sometimes, I feel I’m too passive, too content,’ remarks Janice, fondly, regarding the wristband of large family diamonds she wears even when the watch itself is being repaired.…Her favorite possession is her four-poster spool bed with a pink taffeta canopy. ‘I feel just like Queen Elizabeth sleeping in that bed,’ she says happily. (Her husband sleeps in another room, since he snores.)
“‘I’m so grateful for my blessings,’ she says. ‘Wonderful husband, handsome sons with dispositions to match, big comfortable house.…I’m thankful for my good health and faith in God and such material possessions as two cars, two TV’s and two fireplaces.’”
Staring uneasily at this image, I wonder if a few problems are not somehow better than this smiling empty passivity. If they are happy, these young women who live the feminine mystique, then is this the end of the road? Or are the seeds of something worse than frustration inherent in this image? Is there a growing divergence between this image of woman and human reality?
Consider, as a symptom, the increasing emphasis on glamour in the women’s magazines: the housewife wearing eye makeup as she vacuums the floor—“The Honor of Being a Woman.” Why does “Occupation: housewife” require such insistent glamorizing year after year? The strained glamour is in itself a question mark: the lady doth protest too much.
The image of woman in another era required increasing prudishness to keep denying sex. This new image seems to require increasing mindlessness, increasing emphasis on things: two cars, two TV’s, two fireplaces. Whole pages of women’s magazines are filled with gargantuan vegetables: beets, cucumbers, green peppers, potatoes, described like a love affair. The very size of their print is raised until it looks like a first-grade primer. The new McCall’s frankly assumes women are brainless, fluffy kittens, the Ladies’ Home Journal, feverishly competing, procures rock-and-roller Pat Boone as a counselor to teenagers; Redbook and the others enlarge their own type size. Does the size of the print mean that the new young women, whom all the magazines are courting, have only first-grade minds? Or does it try to hide the triviality of the content? Within the confines of what is now accepted as woman’s world, an editor may no longer be able to think of anything big to do except blow up a baked potato, or describe a kitchen as if it were the Hall of Mirrors; he is, after all, forbidden by the mystique to deal with a big idea. But does it not occur to any of the men who run the women’s magazines that their troubles may stem from the smallness of the image with which they are truncating women’s minds?
They are all in trouble today, the mass-circulation magazines, vying fiercely with each other and television to deliver more and more millions of women who will buy the things their advertisers sell. Does this frantic race force the men who make the images to see women only as thing-buyers? Does it force them to compete finally in emptying women’s minds of human thought? The fact is, the troubles of the image-makers seem to be increasing in direct proportion to the increasing mindlessness of their image. During the years in which that image has narrowed woman’s world down to the home, cut her role back to housewife, five of the mass-circulation magazines geared to women have ceased publication; others are on the brink.
The growing boredom of women with the empty, narrow image of the women’s magazines may be the most hopeful sign of the image’s divorce from reality. But there are more violent symptoms on the part of women who are committed to that image. In 1960, the editors of a magazine specifically