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Today, in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), I read the rest of “The Sexual Sell,” which is about advertisements’ promotion of the Feminine Mystique, the notion that women can only find fulfillment as wives and mothers. Ms. Friedan’s points there were (1.) that advertisers have a vested interest in promoting the Feminine Mystique, since many of their products are related to homemaking, and so they want women to continue to focus on housekeeping so they can be a market for their products, and (2.) advertisers try to present homemaking as challenging, as women are encouraged to discriminate among products, use specialized products for specialized tasks, and supposedly learn the “tricks of the trade” (i.e., the best product for getting the house clean). But, according to someone Ms. Friedan quotes, the problem is that housework is not very challenging: “Anyone with a small enough back (and a small enough brain) can do these menial chores.” So, as far as Ms. Friedan is concerned, the advertisers are blowing smoke, pure and simple.
I then started the chapter, “Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available.” At the beginning of the chapter, Ms. Friedan searched for educated women who felt fulfilled as housewives. The ones recommended to her, however, did not limit their tasks to the home. One was a computer programmer. Another was thinking of entering politics. Another was a professional psychoanalyst. Another was a dancer. Another learned languages.
Ms. Friedan then notes something interesting: for some reason, the women who have tasks outside of the home perform their housekeeping responsibilities in less time than those who are full-time homemakers. One reason is that full-time housekeepers are told by the Feminine Mystique that their role is as important as that of the man, so they assume that it must take a large amount of time, like a man’s job. Another reason is that they’re bored, have little to look forward to, and thus look for new projects around the house (e.g., redecoration) for mental stimulation.
There were two quotes that stood out to me in my reading today. First, on page 220, Ms. Friedan states regarding women’s response to advertisements:
But a new stove or a softer toilet paper do not make a woman a better wife or mother, even if she thinks that’s what she needs to be. Dyeing her hair cannot stop time; buying a Plymouth will not give her a new identity; smoking a Marlboro will not get her an invitation to bed, even if that’s what she thinks she wants. But those unfulfilled promises can keep her endlessly hungry for things, keep her from ever knowing what she really needs or wants.
Like Phyllis Schlafly, Betty Friedan claims that she knows what women need and really want, even if the women don’t know it themselves. In The Power of the Positive Woman (1977), Mrs. Schlafly affirms that women by nature are nurturers. Deep down, she says, even the feminists want to have babies! For Mrs. Schlafly, if women buy into the lies of the feminists and decide not to marry or have kids (even though, elsewhere in her book, Mrs. Schlafly presents that as an acceptable option), then they will not be fulfilled, and they will end up alone.
Ms. Friedan’s claim is that women really want self-fulfillment, the satisfaction of their own accomplishments, the joy that comes with being their own person, and not just somebody’s wife or mother. For Ms. Friedan, if women buy into the lie of the Feminine Mystique, then they’ll feel like a non-person. They will fail to live according to their talents and potential, and they won’t be fulfilled.
Maybe both of them are correct. We need balance in our lives. Many of us desire to love and to be loved, and there’s also a sense of satisfaction that comes with accomplishment. I will say, though, that Mrs. Schlafly acknowledges women’s need to for challenging activities that stretch their minds, far more than Ms. Friedan acknowledges their need to nurture.
The second quote that stood out to me was on page 229:
Did the new mystique of separate-but-equal femininity arise because the growth of women in America could no longer be repressed by the old mystique of feminine inferiority?
In my posts, Feminine Mystique 1 and Feminine Mystique 2, I wrestle with a question: Did the Feminine Mystique regard women as intelligent, or as unintelligent? I guess it did both! It wanted the man to be the head of the household and the woman to nurture him, which Ms. Friedan thinks reduces women (and, for that matter, men) to a state of childishness. But the Feminine Mystique also tried to appeal to women’s vanity—to tell them that homemaking is a challenging and important job by itself. With the women’s movement of the nineteenth century, the old view that women were inferior to men did not fly with a lot of women, including those who wanted to limit themselves to the domestic sphere.
In this post, as I have summarized Ms. Friedan’s views, I hope that I have not offended women who choose to be full-time homemakers, for they may not view their tasks as menial. Raising a child (or two, or three) takes a lot of intelligence, and I don’t want to come across as if I devalue that.
