The+Feminine+Mystique


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Caption:
Betty Friedan was one of the most influential leaders of women’s liberation in the workforce. She believed that employment was necessary to a woman’s fulfillment and she expressed her opinions in her book The Feminine Mystique. This book was a milestone in the history of women’s presence in the workforce. Women had been dissatisfied with their lifestyles as homemakers since the second world war ended and by the early 1960’s word of this was beginning to become known thanks to the media. Friedan’s book was published in 1963, the year when that marked the begining of the road to equal rights for women in the workforce with the Equal Pay Act. The following is an excerpt from The Feminine Mystique itself. It provides a clear description of Betty Friedan’s values regarding women and the workforce. There are many powerful quotations and statements in this excerpt which explain why it earned the attention it was given.

Many copies have been published of this book since it was released 24 years ago. This photo of the cover of The Feminine Mystique is how it looked when it was originally published. Notice the price in the upper right-hand corner.



Excerpt:
It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question “who am I” except the voice inside herself. She may spend years on the analyst’s couch, working out her “adjustment to the feminine role,” her blocks to “fulfillment as a wife and mother,” And still the voice inside her may say, “That’s not it.” Even the best psychoanalyst can only give her the courage to listen to her own voice. When society asks so little of women, every woman has to listen to her own inner voice to find her identity in this changing world. She must create, out of her own needs and abilities, a new plan, fitting in the love and children and home that have defined femininity in the past with the work toward a greater purpose that shapes the future. To face the problem is not ot solve it. But once a woman faces it, as women are doing today all over America without much help from the experts, once she asks herself “What do I want to do?” she begins to find her own answers. Once she begins to see through the delusions of the feminine mystique-and realizes that neither her husband nor her children, nor the things in her house, nor sex, nor being like all the other women, can give her a self-she often finds the solution much easier than she anticipated....

The Solution Is Meaningful Work
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. There is no other way. But a job, any job, is not the answer-in fact, it can be part of the trap. Women who do not look for jobs equal to their actual capacity, who do not let themselves develop the lifetime interests and goals which require serious education and training, who take a job at twenty or forty to “help out at home” or just to kill extra time, are walking, almost as surely as the ones who stay inside the housewife trap, to a nonexistent future.... The only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society in a life plan that can encompass marriage and motherhood, is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique; the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession. Such a commitment is not tied to a specific job or locality. It permits year-to-year variation -a full-time paid job in one community, part-time in another, exercise of the professional skill in serious volunteer work or a period of study during pregnancy or early motherhood when a full-time job is not feasible. It is a continuous thread, kept alive by work and study and contact in the field, in any part of the country. The women I found who had made and kept alive such a long-term commitments did not suffer the problem that has no name. Nor did they live in the housewife image. But music or art or politics offered no magic solution for the women who did not, or could not, commit themselves seriously. The “arts” seem, at first glance, to be the ideal answer for a woman. They can, after all, be practiced in the home. They do not necessarily imply that dreaded professionalism, they are suitably feminine, and seem to offer endless room for personal growth and identity, with no need to compete in society for pay. But I have noticed that when women do not take up painting or ceramics seriously enough to become professionals-to be paid for their work, or for teaching it to others, and to be recognized as a peer by other professionals-sooner or later, they cease dabbling;the Sunday painting, the idle ceramics do not bring that needed sense of self when their are of no value to anyone else. The amateur or dilettante whose own work is not good enough for anyone to want to pay to hear or see or read does not gain real status by it in society, or real personal identity. These are reserved for those who have made the effort, acquired the knowledge and expertise to become professionals.... The picture of the happy housewife doing creative work at home-painting, sculpting, writing-is one of the semi-delusions of the feminine mystique. There are men and women who can do it; but when a man works at home, his wife keeps the children strictly out of the way. It is not so easy for a woman; if she is serious about her work she often must find some place away from home to do it, or she risks becoming an ogre to her children in her impatient demands for privacy. Her attention is divided and her concentration interrupted, on the job as a mother. A no-nonsense nine-to-five job, with a clear division between professional work and housework, requires much less discipline and is usually less lonely. Some of the stimulation and the new friendships that come from being part of the professional world can be lost by the woman who tries to fit her career into the physical confines of her housewife life.... The most powerful weapon of the feminine mystique is the argument that [a woman] rejects her husband and her children by working outside the home. If, for any reason, her child becomes ill or her husband has troubles of his own, the feminine mystique, insidious voices in the community, and even the woman’s own inner voice will blame her “rejection” of the housewife role. It is then that many a woman’s commitment to herself and society dies aborning or takes a serious detour.... In other instances, however, women told me that the violent objections of their husbands disappeared when they finally made up their own minds and went to work. Had they magnified their husband’s objections to evade decisions themselves? Husbands I have interviewed in this same context were sometimes surprised to find it “a relief” to be no longer the only sun and moon in their wives’ world; they were the object of less nagging and fewer insatiable demands and they no longer had to feel guilt over their wives’ discontent. As one man put it: “Not only is the financial burden lighter-and frankly, that is a relief-but the whole burden of living seems easier since Margaret went to work”.... For the women I interviewed who had suffered and solved the problem that has no name, to fulfill an ambition of their own, long buried or brand new, to work at top capacity, to have a sense of achievement, was like finding a missing piece in the puzzle of their lives. The money they earned often made life easier for the whole family, but none of them pretended this was the only reason they worked, or the main thing they got out of it. That sense of being complete and fully a part of the world-”no longer and island, part of the mainland”-had come back. They knew that it did not come from the work alone, but from the whole-their marriage, homes, children, work their changing, growing links with the community. They were once again human beings, not “just housewives.”...

Complete Fulfillment
When enough women make life plans geared to their real abilities, and speak out for maternity leaves or even maternity sabbaticals, professionally run nurseries, and other changes in the rules that may be necessary, they will not have to sacrifice the right to honorable competition and contribution anymore than they will have to sacrifice marriage and motherhood. It is wrong to keep spelling out unnecessary choices that make women unconsciously resist either commitment or motherhood-and that hold back recognition of the needed social changes. It is not a question of women having their cake and eating it, too. A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man’s advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all. But with the vision to make a new life plan of her own, she can fulfill a commitment to profession and politics, and to marriage and motherhood with equal seriousness.... Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women’s intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love? Who knows of the possibilities of love when men and women share not only children, home, and garden, not only the fulfillment of their biological roles, but the responsibilities and passions of the work that creates the human future and the full human knowledge of who they are? It has barely begun, the search of women for themselves. But the time is at hand when the voices of the feminine mystique can no longer drown out the inner voice that is driving women on to become complete.

Excerpt from: The Feminine Mystique -Betty Friedan



This picture is of Betty Friedan speaking.



Betty Friedan is the woman farthest to the left in this picture.