American Mojo: Lost and Found: Restoring Our Middle Class Before the World Blows By by Peter D. Kiernan

Author:Peter D. Kiernan [Kiernan, Peter D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Business & Money
ISBN: 9781630269234
Google: 0uHGrQEACAAJ
Amazon: B00ULVR0F6
Publisher: Turner
Published: 2015-06-09T06:00:00+00:00

IN LIFE SO FAR, FRIEDAN acknowledges that when she designed the survey with her friends Mario Ingersoll Howell and Anne Mather Montero they were creating inquiries for their classmates that they had not truly posed to themselves. The irony, of course, is that the survey did not disprove the notion that education made women dysfunctional— instead, it bore a more powerful message.

These seemingly happily settled, educated women from all across the country were leading lives of desperation, disaffection, loneliness, and pain.

Worst of all were the feelings of resentment from women who were undergoing psychoanalysis and finding that the prescribed remedies (by their mostly male doctors) only added to their sense of isolation.

As she gathered the findings, it slowly dawned on Friedan that there was a major crisis facing middle-class American women. She broadened her inquiry to include women graduates from Radcliffe and other colleges. In time she would survey scores of women with strikingly similar results.

She composed an article and submitted it to the major women’s magazines for whom she had been writing—among them McCall’s, Redbook, and Ladies’ Home Journal. Her essay was rejected at every turn. She tried another version, and then another—each time with similar result.

After her fourth attempt was summarily dismissed, despite ardent massaging and editorial accommodation, Friedan reluctantly reached a couple of conclusions.

First, the subject she had unearthed threatened the very existence of the deeper-into-domesticity magazines for which she had been supplying happy hausfrau stories.

They simply could not handle the truth.

And as she huddled for warmth in her Rockland exurbia she realized that only an independent book format would grant her sufficient latitude and freedom to explore in detail what was unfolding in her research. Her greatest challenge was distilling in a credible and sensitive way the hidden anxiety that coursed through the words of all these women.

Imagine how these Smith alums might have engaged with one another on those spring reunion afternoons in 1957. The smiles and shared laughter belied the searing words they had forwarded in secret, wrapped in the comforting sequestration of Friedan’s open-ended questionnaire. None could be truly sure what the other had written. Had they shared the secret? These ladies externally adopted the code of middle-class women everywhere in those days: an omerta shared by a generation’s gender: Suffer in silence . . . endure it alone . . . keep a clean home and a smile on your face. Tell no one . . . not even . . . or especially not, your shrink.

Theirs was a deeply suppressed anxiety in spite of its prevalence— which made it the saddest kind of all.

It took nearly five years for Friedan to bring definition and form to this amorphous pain. Armed with a $3,000 advance from publisher W.W. Norton, she lined up three days a week of babysitting help and secreted herself to the Allen Room of the New York Public Library.

It was a painstaking process, involving month after month of listening, reflection, and probing. At last the answer came to her as a great notion.

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