The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan

Preconceptions: Finally! I'll be able to figure out what these broads are all carrying on about.

Reaction: This book--like Comte's and Kinsey's--is such a positive force for good that I cannot imagine that anyone not profoundly evil would consider it harmful.

What twisted agenda requires the abandonment of human potential?

The "feminine mystique" dictates that women must choose between fulfilling lives as loved housewives or empty lives as bitchy career women. It is what insists they become "ladies in the parlor and whores in the bedroom." It is the double-standard that offers equal education and job opportunity but subtly chastises the women who take full advantage of them as too pushy or masculine.

Friedan, of course, was writing in the sixties about the feminist counter-revolution. Not long after the early feminists and suffragettes had secured the right to vote for all women, they lapsed back into roles defined by home and family. Perhaps World War II infused everyone with a longing for a stable home. Perhaps the pendulum swung back again from independence and drive. Perhaps it was just easier to take on a role from society than defining one's own.

When Friedan was writing, a new generation of college women dropped out to start families. Many cited their fear that a life of being "kept" as a housewife was far better than one of bitter loneliness as a career woman. This false choice--between love and career--steered millions of women away from choices that would better enhance their value and self-esteem.

How did this happen?

• Freudian analysis claimed women were men with something missing, suffering from "penis envy."
• Functional Sociologists, resisting Freud, tried instead to define women as their own entities, unfortunately by biological function. But in doing so, they began to prescribe behavior instead describe it. Women felt obliged to live up to the expectations of femininity.
• Sex-directed educators, believing that women were uninterested in unfeminine concerns outside the home, cultivated that very lack of interest by teaching it.
• Advertisers and other manipulators sold products to sublimate a woman's desire to be independent, creative, and productive by working in the home. They transformed the business of maintaining a house into a "profession."
• Women, socialized to believe that happiness comes from caring for a family and looking pretty, discovered that it was easier to conform to cultural expectations than to resist them. Though frustrated in their lives, they found little to inspire an escape to lives of greater satisfaction.

Femininity is profitable.

• Someone has to buy all of the clothes and soap and appliances, and there are powerful forces that must cultivate a continuous need for the tools of "keeping a house," even though doing so should never require a human being's full physical or mental abilities.
• Someone has to maintain the cycle of dependence by which boys turn their wives into mothers.

Friedan doesn't suggest a massive conspiracy is afoot to keep women down. She just asserts that there are people who profit from it, and that they profit most when the women help keep themselves down--when they feel guilty about taking jobs and leaving their children in day care.

Fundamentalist Christians and the Religious Right tend to criticize Friedan's book as an attack on the fulfilling feminine role of homemaker, and--as usual--they're half right. Friedan indeed takes issue with the idea that a woman is at her best only under conditions of serving a family.

Of course, she also points out, "This is not to say that being a den mother, or serving on a PTA committe, or organizing a covered dish supper, is not useful work; for a woman of intelligence and ability, it is simply not enough."

By saying that women should not define themselves solely by the work they perform in a house, Friedan has found herself on a list of harmful books. Friedan writes, "The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own." Is the need for identity beyond the home, the husband, and the children such a dangerous idea that it must be quashed?

I hope not. Chances are your mother sought that identity, and she either did something about it or rued it the rest of her life.

What Friedan proposes in her book is not the abandonment of the traditionally feminine but the enhancement of it. She suggests adding creativity and drive and spirit and personal fulfillment. She exhorts women to find multiple meanings in their lives beyond those assigned to them by husbands, children, or the media.

Verdict: I'm disgusted than anyone would consider this book a negative force.

Certainly, some angry women have taken it as a rallying cry to hate men, but there are always deviations on the bell curve. For the majority of women, this book is nothing more than an inspiration to find a total identity--not just as someone's wife, mother, or employee.

This book asks no one to abandon their children or shun love or deny their femininity. It just proposes that these are not fulfilling on their own. I've long suspected that much of our culture's disease comes from unreasonable expectations about love and dependency, and Friedan tries to innoculate women against them.

It's easy to say the time for this book is long past. Women enjoy more fulfillment now than ever before, and they are making inroads into politics, law, art, and business. But their leap from soul-draining housework to soul-draining office work is simply from the frying pan into the fire, and until we address larger issues of what we're doing with our lives and why, both men and women will find themselves without meaning and fulfillment.

Friedan's insight and advice, indeed, are as applicable to men as to women. Our consumer culture encourages us to play certain roles. Some roles involve mindless drudgery at home and others involve mindless drudgery at the office, but both are detrimental to human value.

Both men and women should read this book, not just for a glimpse of history (though it offers that) and not just for insight into gender issues (though they still exist) but because the problems of resisting the expectations of society are as pressing for both sexes.

Of all the books on this list, this seems the most human: it is filled with human stories and human potential, human desires and human fulfillment. It is about what we can all do to stand against the forces of our culture.

I suppose it is to be expected that the dying culture it resists should try so hard to fight back by calling it "harmful."

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