Feminine Mystique

Friedan's Critique

Human potential psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, popular during the late 1950s and early 1960s, influenced Friedan's claim that the feminine mystique denied women their “basic human need to grow.” By stunting this basic human need for development, Friedan claimed that women would continue to be unhappy and children would grow up with unfulfilled and neurotic mothers. Friedan also argued that the feminine mystique hurt women both personally and professionally. According to Friedan, for men and women alike, identity was largely cultivated through personal achievement, primarily through careers.

Situating her study of women in the post-World War II era, Friedan argues that after the war, women were expected to return to the domestic sphere of society, which in turn inspired the feminine mystique. She claims that men returned from war and looked to their wives for mothering. Furthermore, largely because of the escalating cold war during the 1950s, the cultivation of the American nuclear family and the idealized domestic space was part of an ideological battle against Soviet Russia to prove America's superiority. Middle-class white women were implicated in this ideological war with the USSR because they were supposed to represent idealized femininity and the triumph of the American capitalist, consumer society.

Friedan's study uses statistics and interviews to illustrate women's desire during the 1950s to achieve the feminine mystique. For instance, by the end of the 1950s, 14 million girls were engaged by the age of 17 and the average age of marriage dropped to 20. The number of women in college dropped from 47 percent [Page 297]in 1920 to 35 percent in 1958. During the mid-1950s, 60 percent of female students dropped out of college to get married or to cease their higher education before they became “undesirable” on the marriage market. The idea that women only went to college to land a husband and get their “Mrs. Degree” was a popular notion perpetuated by the media. From touting women's natural role as mothers and caregivers, to advocating how to properly take care of one's husband, the media and the education system helped perpetuate all aspects of the feminine mystique. The American housewife who properly performed her domesticity was deemed by the U.S. media to be the dream and envy of all women, in communist countries and throughout the world. In 1956, Life magazine rejoiced that American women were “moving back into the home.” A 1954 home economics high school textbook excerpt “How to Be a Good Wife” offers this advice for housewives: “Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal, on time. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospect of a good meal is part of the warm welcome needed. Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or suggest he lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soft, soothing and pleasant voice.”

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