The Feminine Mystique (and its discontents)

At right, an ad for Folgers coffee from circa 1963, when Friedan's book was published.


It will give men equal opportunity to be Playboy bunnies.
     —a federal administrator in 1964, referring to Title VII, 
         prohibiting sexual discrimination in hiring, 
         of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Quoted by Friedan, 518

Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers. But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.
    — WI State Senator Glenn Grothman, in Feb. 2012, on the rationale for repealing equal-pay-for-equal-work legislation

Free at last — again
One of the strange and ordinary things about the modern women's movement is that it keeps beginning.

This is strange insofar as we tend to extrapolate history backwards as a narrative of continuous progress leading up to the present. It's ordinary in that history so seldom, of course, moves in straight lines, and in that history is made up of many intersecting histories. The Emancipation Proclamation (1864) and the 14th Amendment (1868) were followed by the farce of Reconstruction and the tragedy of Jim Crow, opening the way for a "new" Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and '60s. The 19th century gay (his own term was "Uranian," after the "heavenly love" we've seen described in the Symposium) activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs might raise a disappointed (in so many ways) eyebrow at histories that date the gay liberation movement to Stonewall (1969). The original audiences of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) might have been surprised that the play would feel contemporary when broadcast on American television in 1960. And both Wollstonecraft (Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792) and Olympe de Gouges, who drafted a "Declaration of the Rights of Woman" (1791) to complement the French Revolution's "Declaration of the Rights of Man" (1789), might be surprised to hear accounts of a women's movement that began in the 1960s, and which is often dated to Friedan's Feminine Mystique  (1963).

Between Wollstonecraft and Friedan, we could locate other moments of origination or rebirth. In the U.S., the Seneca Falls Convention (1848) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Declaration of Sentiments mark one starting point. The suffrage movement in the U.K. became organized in the 1860s and '70s, where (somewhat unusually at this time) it was aided by a prominent male intellectual, John Stuart Mill, who presented to Parliament a petition (originated by women) for extension of the right to vote for members of Parliament in 1866; Mill published On the Subjection of Women in 1869. Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst and their daughters were major figures in the British suffrage movement to 1928 and beyond. The right to vote won by women in the wake of WWI was both a sudden victory and the result of over a century of struggle on both sides of the Atlantic.

Friedan's sense of a new beginning around 1960 should strike as both uncanny and expected, then. Her claim that she has discovered an unspoken truth about women's experience has been praised as rhetorically brilliant and critiqued as somewhat disingenuous about important recent precedents. (The intellectual historian and literary scholar Louis Menand gives a brief and helpful account of The Feminine Mystique's context and reception in a recent New Yorker article, "Books as Bombs.") To a certain extent, critiques of Friedan's acknowledgment of precedents are beside the point--more than any comparable predecessor, The Feminine Mystique was felt to mark a new beginning.

Friedan in 1970
(New York Times photo)

Friedan was a part-time magazine journalist and mother of three when she began work on the book in the '50s. After graduating with highest honors from Smith College in 1942, she went on to pursue graduate work in psychology at Berkeley with Erik Erikson, an internationally prominent psychoanalyst, but broke off her studies under pressure from a  boyfriend. Returning to the East Coast, she married a theater-director-turned-ad-executive (Mad Men and Betty Draper may come to mind as you do Friday's reading). The Feminine Mystique turned her into a national and international influence on the women's movement, and Friedan followed up on her success as a writer by assuming a more actively political role, helping to found the National Organization for Women (i.e., N.O.W.) in 1966 and serving as its first president.

I'll be curious to hear on Friday about the extent to which The Feminine Mystique seems relevant (or, conversely, dated). In many ways, it does seem like a book from a different world, though not a distant one (your and even my parents and grandparents grew up in it).

Yet we have to approach the book, too, as one that did strike its first readers as revelatory, and we should consider the rhetorical techniques that helped to make it so compelling. Foucault has given us some useful tools for this: how does Friedan constitute secrets and incite to discourse in this introductory chapter, for example? How does the book relate to the discourse of sexuality that Foucault describes?

Friedan and Freud
The fifth chapter of The Feminine Mystique is called "The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud," and lays out a thorough indictment of Freud's sometimes blinkered assumptions about women.

The chapter is both influential for and representative the view of Freud in the '60s and early '70s feminist movements in the U.S. and the U.K. Psychoanalysis was more integral and internal to French feminisms of this period. Toril Moi's concise, lucid and still useful 1985 overview of French and and English-language feminist literary theories gives a useful account of these differences:

Whereas the American femnists of the 1960s had started by vigorously denouncing Freud, the French tok it for granted that psychoanalysis could provide an emancipatory theory of the personal and a path to the exploration of the unconscious, both of vital importance to the analysis of the oppression of women in patriarchal society. (Sexual / Textual Politics 96; cf. 27-9)

Moi dates the end of this trend to Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974). Yet even Friedan's rejection of Freud comes to a significant extent from within the discourse of psychoanalysis: Friedan, remember, is no casual reader of Freud, but an accomplished student of modern psychology; she had nearly become a psychologist herself. Erik Erikson, her mentor during her graduate work at Berkeley, was one of the most important developers of the "ego-psychology" branch of modern psychoanalysis, and one  Friedan articulates one version of the argument of The Feminine Mystique as a critical development of Erikson's thought. She quotes the following passage from Erikson's Young Man Luther, A Study of Psychoanalysis and History (1958)

I have called the major crisis of adolescence the identity crisis; it occurs in that period of the life cycle when each youth must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity, out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthoood; he must detect some meaningful resemblance between what he has come to see in himself and what his sharpened awareness tells him others judge and expect him to be…. In some people, in some classes, at some periods in history, the crisis will be minimal; in other people, classes and periods, the crisis will be clearly marked off as a critical period, a kind of “second birth,” apt to be aggravated either by widespread neuritocisms or by pervasive ideological unrest. (Erikson 15ff., as quoted in Friedan, 134)

The problem, Friedan says, is that this identity crisis has been thought of as a male crisis, when in fact it seems to be equally and perhaps more acute for the women of her generation. And so she expresses one major claim of her book as what we might see as a revision of the Freudian repressive hypothesis:

It is my thesis that the core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity—a stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique. It is my thesis that as the Victorian culture did not permit women to accept or gratify their basic sexual needs, our culture does not permit women to acept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role. (Friedan, 133) 

A pithier expression of this idea is that "the American woman no longer has a private image to tell her who she is, or can be, or wants to be" (126, my emphasis). This "private image" is opposed, of course, to the public image (or ego ideal) of the happy housewife supplied by '50s and '60s consumer culture. (Anyone feeling nostalgic for Lacan -- you know you do! -- might consider this latter quotation from Friedan in light of his critique of the image, of the "specular I" as opposed to the "social I" (N1167), in "The Mirror Stage"; how might Lacan respond to the individualist emphasis that becomes pronounced in at least some parts of her text?)

Friedan's feminism seems at once, then, both radically indebted and radically divergent from psychoanalysis, and can thus be a resource for you as you continue your work on Dora over the next few days.

Friedan quotes from the climactic speech of Ibsen's Nora, the heroine of The Doll's House, in her chapter on the history of the feminist movement: "'I can no longer content myself with what most people say or with what is found in books. I must think over things for myself and get to understand them...'" (141, my emphasis). Nora's words here don't have anything very immediately to do with sex as such, but everything to do with desire, and we might say (I'm suggesting) that psychoanalysis is useful to Friedan as a theory of desire, where desire need not be understood as primarily sexual. Her argument's power resides not just in its claim for equality as a reasonable or just ideal, but in her account of how the lack of a "private image" is leaving her contemporaries discontent, unfulfilled, desiring ways of being and flourishing unavailable to them. (I'll say a bit more about this in class tomorrow).


Making Waves
The Feminine Mystique is perhaps the inaugural text of what you may have heard called "Second Wave" feminism, distinct from "First Wave" feminism, which had been focused on suffrage, in its broadening of the movement's concerns to social, cultural and psychological concerns not thus far considered political. ("The personal is political," while not altogether a new idea, was interpreted with new intensity during the '60s).

Audre Lorde

Our other texts for Friday, by Audre Lorde and Barbara Johnson, are thoughtful snapshots by two brilliant writers of the feminist movement's transformation as it expanded beyond the centers of concern in Friedan's work (from "Second" to "Third Wave"). The Feminine Mystique quite explicitly focuses on middle-class, married heterosexual women; implicitly, they're white. The women's movement after the '60s increasingly sought to account intellectually for differences internal to it -- differences of race, class, nation, sexuality -- rather than to assume a homogeneous "woman" at odds with an equally homogenous patriarchy. While neither Lorde nor Johnson refer specifically to Friedan, they both give voice to the difficulty and the intellectual ambition of these new developments within feminism.

Lorde is certainly better known as a poet than as a "theorist," but the collection from which our readings are drawn (Sister Outsider) is an important prose record of "Third Wave" feminism. The essays we're reading are very much addressed to an academic audience, to feminist scholars as a professional group. They record Lorde's experience of marginalization or exclusion, and the theoretical arguments arising from that experience.

Barbara Johnson

Barbara Johnson is, in my unauthoritative and enthusiastic view, one of the best few literary scholars of her generation, perhaps the best deconstructive literary critic to have written in English. Johnson studied with Paul de Man, the major figure in American deconstruction (though he was born in Belgium), at Yale, and spent most of her career teaching at Harvard. The "Introduction" to her 1998 The Feminist Difference is a forthright attempt to gauge the value of deconstructive and psychoanalytic interpretive modes for engaging with tensions--differences--within contemporary feminism. This is certainly the most academically oriented of our three essays, but it also helps to link the implicit debate between Friedan's and Lorde's outlooks back to the interpretive traditions we've studied so far in our course. Our syllabus isn't brimming with Johnson's work only because she elaborates her theoretical views by way of the close reading of particular literary texts, and it seemed to me like it would be unsatisfying to assign her criticism without also taking the time to read the primary texts she discusses. If you happen to be familiar with Melville's Billy Budd, I'd highly recommend her essay on it ("Melville's Fist") reprinted in our Norton anthology.

"Difference" is a key theoretical term for both Lorde and Johnson, and we might discuss how much common ground there is between their uses of it. Lorde writes with an eye primarily to feminism as a movement, while Johnson, for whom these practical concerns are by no means secondary, writes in a philosophical tradition running back through de Man and Derrida (and more distantly through Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel) in which "difference" is a metaphysical as well as a social category. Do the different emphases of these two texts help to complete each other's projects, or do you see here rather a troubling gap (or difference) between theory and practice?

Though neither writer mentions Woolf, I'd be curious to hear about any continuities you see between Room and Friday's readings, too. Room casts a long shadow over later feminist thought, and we'll be referring back to it frequently this semester.

Taken together, Lorde's and Johnson's essay gesture towards a path that we easily could have spent several more weeks following in this course: studying the relations of race and feminist theory in the lat 20th century. If that intersection is interesting to you, the Norton anthology provides some excellent starting points: see the essays by bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Barbara Christian, and Barbara Smith.