The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [7]
And so, paradox or full circle, or transcendent thesis, in these thirty-odd years, women breaking through the feminine mystique to their own political and economic participation and empowerment in the mainstream of society are not becoming more like men but are expressing in the public sphere some of the values that used to be expressed or allowed only in the private nurture of the home. The mystique we had to rebel against when it was used to confine us to the home, to keep us from developing and using our full personhood in society, distorted those real values women are now embracing, with new power and zest, both in the privacy of the home and in the larger society. And in so doing, they are changing the political and personal dimensions of marriage and families, home and the society they share with men.
Marriage, which used to be a woman’s only way to social function and economic support, is now a choice for most women as well as for men. It no longer defines a woman completely as it never did a man; she often keeps her own name now or husband and wife take each other’s hyphenated. In breaking through the feminine mystique, some early feminist radical rhetoric seemed to declare war on marriage, motherhood, family. The divorce rate of those 1950s feminine mystique marriages exploded from the 1960s to the 1980s. Before, no matter who went to court, it was only the man who had the economic and social independence to get a divorce. Since then, women in great numbers can and do get out of bad marriages. In some instances, women rebelled against that feminine mystique narrow role by getting out of the marriage altogether. But in others, the marriage moved to a new kind of equality, and stability, as women went back to school, went to law school, got promoted in serious jobs, and began to share the earning burden, which before had been the man’s sole inescapable responsibility. And men began to share the child care and the housework, which before had been her exclusive, defining domain, her responsibility—and her power.
It has been fascinating to see all this changing, the new problems, and joys, working it out. Feminist rhetoric conceptualized “the politics of housework,” which most women began practicing in their daily lives. Men are not yet taking absolutely equal responsibility for children and home, just as women are not yet treated as equal in many offices. I was delighted at a front-page article in the New York Times some years ago proclaiming “American Men Not Doing 50% of the Housework.” How wonderful, I thought, that the Times would even consider it possible, desirable, front-page stuff that American men should do 50 percent of the housework—the sons of the feminine mystique, whose mothers made their sandwiches and picked their dirty underwear off the floor. It was progress, it seemed to me, that men who once “helped” (barbecuing the hamburgers while she cleaned the toilet bowl) were even doing 20 percent. Now, according to the latest figures, American men are doing 40 percent of the housework and child care.8 I doubt they’re doing much ironing, but neither are the women. I’ve seen reports that sales of all those soaps women were supposed to throw in those appliances to keep them running twenty-four hours a day went way down during those years. And families started buying 25-watt light bulbs to hide the dust, until Saturday when they all cleaned house together. But it didn’t make me happy to read recently that only 35 percent of American families have one meal a day together.
The fact is, the divorce rate is no longer exploding. And most of the divorces now are among the