Jerusalem and I had an idea. What if we went back and read a classic, massively influential, widely discussed political book that neither of us had actually read? The kind of book that we suspect lots of people mention frequently without having actually read.
Our first choice was Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, the work that more than any other defines second-wave feminism.
When we actually cracked it open, we found that the broad outlines track with the popular understanding. Friedan argues that the American postwar housewife is bored and miserable, afflicted with “the problem that has no name,” and that the solution is for women to put down their mops and embrace professional ambition. She blames women’s magazines, college presidents, and pop culture for cultivating a “mystique” that encourages women to seek fulfillment solely as mothers and homemakers.
But the book is also in critical respects stranger than I was anticipating. Friedan goes on at enormous length about Freudian psychoanalysis, which she sees as exerting a massive negative influence over postwar American society. She compares suburban housewives to concentration camp victims. She blames the feminine mystique for creating a plague of what would today be called “helicopter parenting” and says that overbearing mothers are turning their sons gay. She claims that American prisoners of war in Korea died at higher rates than their World War II-era predecessors because they were coddled by 1950s housewives.
And yet, for all that some of the later chapters seem deranged, this is a book that on another level very clearly achieved the bulk of what its author wanted: Today’s college-educated women have professional careers, and even the cranks who think that’s bad shy away from calling for the re-imposition of the regressive norms and structures that Friedan fought against.
One thing Jerusalem and I debate is Friedan’s fairly anti-materialist take on these social trends. She argues that cultural tastemakers are the creators of the mystique and that it will be dismantled by changing the content of cultural products. I’m a little skeptical, offering a more Marx-inflected view that puts material and technological changes in the driver’s seat, while Jerusalem is more Hegelian. We also chew over the book’s frank and overt non-intersectionality. Friedan is interested in a relatively affluent minority of women who have elite educational credentials and makes no apology for it.
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