Brendan Pierson

EMILY SETTON

n Saturday, Feb. 4, Betty Friedan died. Her death came at a bad time. Feminism is under attack in America, on the pages of conservative weeklies, on talk radio, in popular culture. Its so-called second wave in particular, the great surge of feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, has come to be dismissed as irrelevant or, worse, debilitating. Take, for example, Kate O'Beirne's new book, Women Who Make the World Worse. In her first few sentences, O'Beirne, who is the Washington editor of the National Review, singles out Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, as the beginning of where it all went wrong. As such, it's worth looking back at The Feminine Mystique to find what, if anything, it can still offer us today.

First, a word about O'Beirne's book. It frustrated me. Not because of what it said, but because I had intended to review it and found it a piece of hackwork lacking any depth or thoughtful analysis whatsoever. It is a rote laundry list of feminist offenses: a chapter about how feminists have ruined families, one about how they are ruining schools, another about how they will soon ruin the military. Each chapter is accompanied by some statistical evidence demonstrating the destructive trend and the concerned assent of an expert or two. Reflection and analysis are almost wholly absent.

It's clear from the very beginning that it's a poorly written, poorly researched, and poorly argued book, and it looks even worse next to The Feminine Mystique. Friedan, for one thing, has a much more appealing, and less shrill, prose style. But more importantly, Friedan gives much of her work over to serious research and reflection. In her first chapter she sets out “the problem with no name”: the feeling of frustration that American housewives after World War II experienced in the midst of a culture that told them they should be satisfied with complete devotion to the household. She quotes contemporary pundits, who blamed the increasing prevalence of college education among housewives for their discontent. She analyzes women's magazines of the time, “full of food, clothing cosmetics, furniture, and the physical bodies of young women, but where is the world of thought and ideas, the world of the mind and spirit?”

EMILY EPSTEIN

She goes on to compare this to the magazines before the war, documenting the transformation of women in the popular imagination into perfectly content wives and mothers who found complete fulfillment in domestic life. She quotes Freudians who claim that American women are unable to accept their proper place in life. The language used in the 1960s can seem extreme, but the underlying message of those who argued against the entry of women into the workplace is uncomfortably reminiscent of arguments contained in O'Beirne's book. And, despite the claims of her critics, she does not dismiss the value of motherhood, but recognizes it as a “fulfillment held sacred down the ages,” which nonetheless cannot be “defined as a total way of life.” The idea that, in the words of Freud, “anatomy is destiny” that women belong naturally in a narrowly defined sphere is integral to the insistence of conservatives like O'Beirne that modern women ought to value family more and their independent goals less. The Feminine Mystique eloquently exposes the misery that this philosophy can cause.

This is not to say that The Feminine Mystique doesn't suffer from deep problems. The most common criticism leveled against it is that it speaks only to upper- and middle- class white women. Working-class women and African-American women, after all, commonly worked outside the home to make ends meet. Friedan only goes so far as to propose the employment of nannies as an acceptable solution to childcare. This proposal ignores issues of class and race as well as the possibility of public and communitarian solutions to such a problem common among women of all classes and races. Modern readers might have wished that she would have advocated for shared household responsibilities between spouses and for workplace accommodations for parents instead.

O'Beirne, however, doesn't address providing opportunity for women to pursue their interests and passions outside of the home. Instead, she makes a bizarre argument against mandatory family leave: “Under the law, workers in large firms trade higher wages or benefits for the mandated family leave benefit,” she explains. “If the benefit were free, employers wouldn't need a mandate to provide for it. Any worker more interested in longer vacation or better health benefits is disadvantaged when family leave is mandated, thereby reducing an employee's flexibility in accommodating all employees' requests.” As far as she's concerned, pointing out that a trade-off exists is the end of the discussion; that the trade-off might be socially worthwhile appears not even to occur to her.

It's worth asking why this kind of thinking has become so prevalent. Part of it may have to do with the fact that women are no longer growing up in the 1950s, bombarded by messages telling them that they can only find fulfillment in marriage and motherhood. Women today are rarely discouraged directly from pursuing careers, so when they do stay in the home, it's seen as a personal choice. This ignores both the fact that subtler sexism in the workplace can make it more difficult for women to advance than men, and, more importantly, the fact that women are still expected to bear the brunt of the work involved in running the household. Men are not asked to choose between career and family. A man can spend most of his time at work without having his devotion to his family questioned. A woman cannot. Such “soft” social pressure may be easier to dismiss than the appalling women's magazines of the 1950s, but it is no less real.

The failure of the current anti-feminist backlash to seriously deal with the problems facing women in the modern world makes Friedan's work relevant today. Despite its flaws, The Feminine Mystique affirms at its core that women can and should take part in the collective enterprise of society: in the worlds of politics, commerce, and art. This claim remains inarguable. It is obvious that to participate in, and perhaps make a mark upon, a human world larger than oneself is an important part of a full life, and if we are to recognize that the sexes are equal in dignity, it is difficult to understand why women should accept a limited role of any kind. As feminists continue to struggle for integration into the workplace and into traditionally male-dominated spheres, they face more subtle barriers than they did in the 1960s, and this is why Friedan's message is as vital as ever.