Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)

Betty Friedan was the daughter of eastern European Jewish immigrants.  She grew up infuriated by injustice, and joined the Marxists.  She attended College, graduating summa cum laude in Psychology, and worked nearly ten years as a journalist; she was dismissed in 1952 when she fell pregnant.

Five years later a College reunion made her realise that not only she, but many of her college graduate friends, were dissatisfied with their lives as a housewife ...  some to the point of a mental breakdown.  In 1963 her book The Feminine Mystique was published, where she called this: 'The problem with no name';

“Each suburban wife struggled with it alone.  As she made the beds, shopped for groceries ...  she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – ‘Is this all?’”

The problem – what Friedan called: the 'Feminine Mystique'  – was the assumption that women could only find fulfilment through marriage, children and housework.  She founded NOW in 1966, and lobbied for women's rights – particularly women's employment rights, and women's abortion rights.  In 1970 she organised the Women's Strike for Equality, leading a march of 20,000 in New York.  In 1971 she was one of the founders of the National Women's Political Cacus, which worked to try to get more women into positions of political power.

Friedan is credited for starting the 1960s feminist movement, and her book was “one of the cornerstones of American feminism”.

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Some Quotes:

“The problem that has no name — which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities — is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.”

“In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens.  It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination--tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it.  A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination”

“If a woman had a problem in the 1950's and 1960's, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself.  Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought.  What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never know how many other women shared it.”

“The glorification of "woman's role," then, seems to be in proportion to society's reluctance to treat women as complete human beings.”

“The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.”

“By the end of the nineteen-fifties, the average marriage age of women in America dropped to 20, and was still dropping, into the teens.  Fourteen million girls were engaged by 17.  The proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1958.  A century earlier, women had fought for higher education; now girls went to college to get a husband.  By the mid-fifties, 60 per cent dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar.”

“What courses are people excited about now? I asked a blonde senior in cap and gown.  Nuclear physics, maybe? Modern art? Civilizations of Africa? Looking at me as if I were some prehistoric dinosaur, she said: "Girls don't get excited about things like that anymore….  I guess everybody wants to graduate with a diamond ring on her finger, that's the important thing.”

“The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.”

“The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.”

“We have gone on too long blaming or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of progressive dehumanization, because they have never grown to full humanity themselves.  If the mother is at fault, why isn't it time to break the pattern by urging all these Sleeping Beauties to grow up and live their own lives? There never will be enough Prince Charmings or enough therapists to break that pattern now.  It is society’s job, and finally that of each woman alone.  For it is not the strength of the mothers that is at fault but their weakness, their passive childlike dependency and immaturity that is mistaken for ‘femininity.’ Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on.  Why aren't girls forced to grow up - to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?”

“There is only one way for women to reach full human potential – by participating in the mainstream of society, by exercising their own voice in all the decisions shaping that society.  For women to have full identity and freedom, they must have economic independence.  Breaking through the barriers that had kept them from the jobs and professions rewarded by society was the first step, but it wasn’t sufficient.  It would be necessary to change the rules of the game to restructure professions, marriage, the family, the home.”

“First, she must unequivocally say “no” to the housewife image.  This does not mean, of course, that she must divorce her husband, abandon her children, give up her home.  She does not have to choose between marriage and career; that was the mistaken choice of the feminine mystique.  In actual fact, it is not as difficult as the feminine mystique implies, to combine marriage and motherhood and even the kind of lifelong personal purpose that once was called “career.” It merely takes a new life plan—in terms of one’s whole life as a woman.”

“The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists.  It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.”

Betty Friedan was "famously abrasive", demanded to be treated with respect, and described herself as "a bad-tempwred bitch".  The British femimist Germaine Greer explained: "Women don't get the respect they deserve unless they are wielding male-shaped power; if they represent women they will be called "love" and expected to clear up after themselves.  Betty wanted to change that forever."