The Equivalents by Maggie Doherty

Author:Maggie Doherty [Doherty, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Mad for the Message

ON FEBRUARY 19, 1963, just eight days after Plath’s death, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published by Norton. In the book, Friedan argued that women needed to work. They needed to work outside the home, and they needed to be paid. If they didn’t, they would sink into the depths of depression. Their sanity, the happiness of their families, and the health of the nation depended on their making “a serious professional commitment.”

Friedan’s book was an analysis of the “happy housewife” ideology that had set in during the postwar years. College graduation rates for women were down; marriage rates were up. More and more census takers wrote down “occupation: housewife.” The women who responded to the census taker in this way—many of whom were white, middle-class, and college educated—were, according to the reigning ideology, supposed to be among the happiest women in the world. Yet many claimed to suffer from a vague malaise that neither money, nor medicine, nor psychoanalysis could fix. One called it “the problem that has no name.”

Friedan named the problem—“a vague undefined wish for ‘something more’ than washing dishes, ironing, punishing and praising the children”—and described the dangers it posed. Women suffered under the spell of the “feminine mystique,” a belief that “the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity.” Proponents of the “mystique” argued that Western culture has devalued femininity. Women should stop trying to be like men and should instead accept their distinctly feminine characteristics, which included “sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.” This wasn’t the same as historical sexism, according to which women were inferior, inhuman—so much property to be protected and exchanged. The feminine mystique even allowed for female sexual pleasure: a vaginal orgasm (as opposed to a clitoral orgasm) from penetrative sex with one’s husband was not only appropriate but also a sign of one’s femininity. But, as Friedan noted, this newfound attitude toward the feminine aligned perfectly with old prejudices and gender conventions. It wasn’t enough for women to give up education and career, to shrink their world down to “the cozy walls of home.” According to the feminine mystique, women were supposed to lobotomize themselves and to like it.

How did the mystique take hold? Friedan argued that ladies’ magazines, their advertisers, and some influential theorists, such as Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead, had spread the “feminine mystique” throughout the country. Magazine columnists and short fiction writers idolized the “happy housewife heroine,” who had supplanted the “spirited career girls of the thirties and forties,” a time before the mystique took hold. Meanwhile, advertisers, on television and in print, appealed to the housewife’s creativity, suggesting that she could “express herself” by buying products for the home. Advertisers pitched the housewife products that required her to contribute something of herself (she could be “creative”!) while saving her labor. These products granted the housewife more time to spend with her children (though not enough time to pursue a career outside the home).

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