I read the Feminine Mystique as an undergraduate over forty years ago. My woman friend at the time had read the Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and challenged me to read it. I didn't find de Beauvoir's analysis applied my experience, and always the polemicist, I argued Betty Friedan understood America. I hadn't struggled with Marx yet, and so getting de Beauvoir was beyond my liberal comprehension of the time. I now understand the difference between the two books, between phenomenological analysis and journalism, but in 1963 I found Friedan related more to my experience.
I am re-reading the Feminine Mystique now. Betty Friedan is dead, and she was one of those constants in my life as the decades passed. I forgot what she said in the book, I just knew that it had been part of revolutionizing my consciousness and informing my critique of systemic oppressions. Re-reading it I recognize that my analysis is much deeper and more developed than what is presented in this book. I had imagined it as being profound, because that is how I remembered its impact on me. Women according to Friedan had been shaped by a "mystique" formed by popular culture in the 1950s that made being a mother and housewife the highest calling that a women could aspire to, but women yearned to exercise their talents by productive work in the world. The culture scorned this attitude, and so women repressed the desire for creative and meaningful work, much like Victorian women had repressed their sexuality. The result was depression, shopping till they dropped, excessive use of drugs and frequent visits to the therapist. A little too limited to the middle class experience of the 1950s I would say now, but I was an undergraduate and most of the women I knew were struggling with the reality that Friedan described.
Friedan had more influence on my generation than de Beauvoir. But in time I came to prefer advocates who saw the connection between race, class and gender, beginning with Angela Davis and other Marxists who went beyond dogma to analysis. Now I read women theologians and ethicists and Betty Friedan doesn't compel me as she did in 1963. But I probably would never have been prepared to read Sharon Welch without Betty Friedan. Thanks for being there then, and later.
