An Introduction to The Feminine Mystique

Women, Social Trends and the Feminism of Betty Friedan

Aug 15, 2008

The publication of Betty Friedan's passionate and provocative book 'The Feminine Mystique' in 1963 was considered by many to have kick-started the women's movement.

Betty Friedan is the woman who started it all. The founder of second-wave feminism and most known for her book: The Feminine Mystique. The Feminine Mystique was a book born out of interviews Friedan conducted with American women about their lives. Friedan found that women were unhappy and could not explain exactly why; it was this phenomenon that led to The Feminine Mystique.

Social Trends and Statistics

Men and women have always been stereotyped: men are ambitious, strong, ruthless and sometimes aggressive whereas women are ‘'childlike, fluffy and feminine, passive.’' (Friedan, 1963, p.32) In the same vein, women have been encouraged to be housewives: their role is as wife and mother, nothing more. This might be changing at present, but at the time Friedan was researching The Feminine Mystique, statistics backed the traditional views of women.

Friedan found that by the end of the 1950s that the proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47% in 1920 to 35% in 1958 and that of those attending college, 60% of female students would drop out in order to get married. (Friedan, 1963, p.14) These statistics are not surprising, considering that the average age of marriage for women was just twenty and that 14,000,000 girls were engaged at the tender age of seventeen. (Friedan, 1963, p.14)

It is fair to say then, that women were seemingly happy to follow these social trends. However, Friedan, in her interviews with women, was finding that the opposite was true.

Women everywhere were experiencing what Friedan termed ‘The Problem That Has No Name.’

The Problem That Has No Name

Women used many words to describe this problem: dissatisfaction, the feeling of being incomplete, feeling as though one does not really exist, or have a purpose. Friedan documents one woman as saying:

‘'The problem is always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife and never being myself.’' (Friedan, 2001, p.73)

Those women that were housewives, Friedan claimed, were surveying their lives with a critcial eye and wondering 'Is this all?'

Those women that were growing up during this time would be faced with a dilemma: should they be themselves and do what they wanted to do, or should they do what was socially accepted, to marry and have children. Most could not, and would not break the mould.

Friedan notes: ‘'A girl refused a science fellowship at Johns Hopkins to take a job in a real-estate office.'’ (Friedan, 2001, p.60) because to study physics was not only ‘unfeminine’ but because the only ambition she had was to get married and have children.

A seventeen year old with a creative ability for writing poetry said that to be talented and educated were not what one needed to be popular. (Friedan, 1963, p.66)

The same girl described her mother as being like a rock smoothed by the waves; ‘'She’s put so much into her family that there’s nothing left.'’ (Friedan, 1963, p.66) and says that the thought of ending up the same way ‘terrifies’ her.

In the 1950s Betty Friedan documented how women everywhere were having an identity crisis: they were supposed to be fulfilled by being categorised as ‘’the wife and mother’’ but most were not. With the publication of The Feminine Mystique women everywhere experiencing the ‘Problem that has no name’ were recognising that they were not alone.

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