Feminine Mystique Paper

In the Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan explores a problem plaguing the women of America in the 1950s and 60s, a problem that as she says has no name. Despite the popular belief to the contrary, Friedan argues that women of the era cannot feel fulfilled in the traditional roles of homemaker and housewife. Society forces women to sacrifice their goals of careers and education and with such sacrifices, they lose opportunities for self-exploration and growth. Friedan maintains that this not only causes women to become patently, but that it infantizes and dehumanizes them. In such a state, they cannot be effective mothers or wives and problems carry over into their entire family. Friedan describes the insidious nature of the Feminine Mystique as she terms the problems and reveals some of the sources responsible for the perpetuation of the Mystique.1

Friedan defines the Mystique as a societal image that limits proper feminity to the duties of homemaker. According to such imagery, a woman's sole fulfillment and commitment should lie at home with her family. Her most important function and purpose in society and as a person is to care for that family. Any feelings of dissatisfaction or frustration she may feel are not only improper, but are dangerous to her ability to fulfill her intended purpose. Such imagery also depicted women with careers and higher education as unhappy, shrewish, and unable to find husbands. Women who bow to such ideas feel guilt at thier desires for fullfillment outside the home so they internalize their feelings or to fill the emptiness in other ways. Friedan makes a convincing case that their attempts to fill the voids in their lives can cause serious harm both to themselve and to their families. She provides numerous examples of the problems caused by such constraint on women. She reveals that women suffering under the Mystique are much more likely than highly educated women to have affairs, to partake in extreme sex seeking behavior, or to be undergoing therapy or medication. She also demonstrates how such women often try to live vicariously through their children or husbands. This can cause their children to become extremely dependant and unable to be self-reliant. It can also lead women to try to dominate their husbands which in turn leads to infidelity or sexual dissasstifaction. She also reports greater numbers of battered children come from households characterized by the Mystique than by housholds with working mothers.2

Friedan then goes on to establish the primary sources she feels are responsible for the creation and continuatin of the Mystique. It has its origins in the intense lonliness felt by both men and women during World War II. Following the war both genders sought respite from this lonliness in the comforts of home and family. Competition with returning soldiers over jobs also fostered resentment of working women, and many women found themselves passed over for jobs in favor of men. The baby boom also increased the demand that women were needed at home as mothers and caregivers. By the later 1940s, images of women in magaizines and other popular media had changed to depicting happy women not as career women but as stay at home moms and wives.3

Friedan also believes that Freudian ideas that suffused American society in the 1940s and 1950s also perpetuated the Mystique. She argues that Feud's theories are products of the sexual supression of the Victorian Age in which he lived and therefore it makes sense for him to couch them in sexual and anatomical terms. Applying them to the the current era howver is not only inaccurate, but also potentially dangerous. The main danger posed by Freud's ideas came when they permeated into other sciences and through them into academia and education. Friedan references a dangerous trend within sociology known as functionalism which sought to categorize the diffrent parts of society in anatomical or functional terms. This system relegated women's function to that of reproduction and motherhood. Women felt unqualified to dispute such ideology coming from experts. 4

Other perpetrators of the Mystique quickly capitalized on the opportunity provided by these experts. In particular magazines utilized studies and the words of experts to try to prove that children of working mothers were more likely to develop behavioral problems. However, Friedan reveals that most of the children used in these studies were in fact children of single mothers whose fathers had abandoned the family. She contended that the studies only proved that children of broken homes might develop behavioral problems, not that working mothers could be blamed for the problem.5

She names markerters of appliances and other goods for the home as the largest perpetrator of the Mystique. She learns that advertisors of such merchandise believe career women to have the least potential as consumers of their products. Therefore, they not only market their products to hoursewive, but they market the very concept of being a housewife as worthwhile. On the one hand, they dismiss career women as masculine and portray the position of housewife as desirable and proper. On the other, they cater to the housewife's emptiness by presenting their goods as professinal or fun. They give their products a flair that helps convince women that they can be "career" homemakers. Friedan believes that such marketers understand women better than many experts as they at least recognize the genuine void in many women's lives. However, she also feels that while they may not have purposly led women back into the home, they are one of the chief sources responsible for keeping them there.6

Friedan also notes an alarming trend in higher education across the country brought about both by the opinions of experts and by popular culture. Increasingly, educators discorage girls from pursuing studies deemed too masculine. Instead of seeking to become an architect or a doctor, girls find themselves encouraged to take classes on home economics or marriage instead. Whole Home Economics or Marriage classes began to appear at colleges across the country, even at prestigious women's colleges. An alarming decrease in the number of women enrolled in colleges ensues and many who do go to college eventually drop out in favor of marriage and family.7

Friedan stressed that women must fulfill themselves as full humans beings. They cannot persist in the juvenile and inhumane state to which the Mystque has bond them and hope to be balanced and happy adults. Friedan's arguments were integral for pulling the veil of the Mystique from many women's eyes, and questions no doubt linger as to whether her words are still relevant. Today many women are enrolled in colleges or have careers. It seems the days of the Feminine Mystique have long since faded, but here words still have merit. They serve as a precautinary measure against laspses such as that which took place after World War II. Just because women currently enjoy many liberties they did not in Friedan's time does not mean that those liberties cannot be taken away from them. Throughout Feminine Mystique, Friedan references how many came to portray feminism as a thing of the past. Suffrage had been attainted and thus the fight was over. Such an attitude allowed people to dismiss or even belitle the feminists. They came to be portrayed as man-haters and dominators and were used as just so much more fuel for the Mystique. Women had acheived their victory and there was no sense in living in the past. Friedan serves as a powerful reminder that such a thing cannot be permitted to happen again. The battle might be one, but it should also be remembered and analyzed lest the very thing it was fought to overcome reemerge due to ignorance and dismissal.