A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (16 page)

Ahrons began to think about going back to school, and her psychiatrist was supportive, “but he saw it mostly as a way for me to keep myself busy.” Almost everyone else was furious at the idea. Her mother told her she would be neglecting her children. Her friends said she was crazy. Her husband couldn’t understand what the point was. After all, he earned more than enough to support, even indulge, her. Connie’s father was the only person who approved of her returning to school.

Then she read
The Feminine Mystique
and “it slammed me in the face.” Four decades later, Connie can “distinctly remember reading the book and crying the entire time.” The second chapter “said you aren’t the problem, society is the problem. It never occurred to me before that I wasn’t the one who needed treatment.” She felt a weight lift from her shoulders because “now I could name the problem, and know it didn’t originate in my own psyche.” She got up from her reading and flushed her tranquilizers down the drain.

When Ahrons applied to return to college, she did so mostly to relieve her boredom and depression rather than to train for a career. “The most daring goal I could imagine was to be a substitute teacher.” But she did well in her studies and got interested in new subjects, and as she did, her horizons broadened. She went on to earn a PhD and become a distinguished researcher. “It was Friedan’s book that opened those doors.”

Ahrons knows now that Friedan’s arguments had been anticipated by earlier writers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Mirra Komarovsky. “But for women like me who had never read anything else, this was life
changing.... For us it wasn’t derivative, it was a bombshell of new ideas and information.”

Many women who read the book at the time told me they were astounded by the women’s history Friedan recounted. In reading about what the suffragists did, they came to believe that their feelings of incompetence and helplessness were not natural, but were a learned response to the way society had infantilized women.

It is difficult for modern American women, steeped in the power of positive thinking, to realize how pervasive negative thinking was for women in the 1950s and early 1960s. Friedan gave many of her readers their first exposure to what is now a self-help cliché: that individuals can achieve their full potential when they reject the stereotypes that have been laid on them and realize they have the power to change.

In the early 1960s, stereotypes about women were so prevalent that even those who consciously rejected the status quo and protested inequities elsewhere in society seldom applied their political insights to their own experiences as women. A case in point is Lillian Rubin, now an internationally known social scientist who has published twelve books over the past thirty years.

Rubin was raised in the Bronx by an immigrant working-class single mother who had a very clear view of how her daughter could better herself. “I work in a dirty factory,” her mother told her when she was young. “You’ll work in a clean office. And then you’ll get married.”

Rubin wanted to go to college, and she was a better student than her brother, who didn’t even want to attend college. But her mother believed “college was reserved for a boy; I was a girl who’d have a husband to take care of her.” Like Ahrons’s family, Lillian’s mother discounted her daughter’s intelligence. “My mother’s line was: ‘He’s the smart one, you just study harder.’”

Although Rubin was disappointed to miss out on college, she accepted that her brother would go to school and she would go to work and help pay his way. But she became increasingly anxious to escape from her mother, and the only way she could even contemplate not living at home
was to get married. So in 1943, at age nineteen, she married “the first man who asked me.”

Rubin’s husband became a certified public accountant after the war, which moved them into the middle class, fulfilling her mother’s ambitions for her. Lillian stayed home with her daughter until the child turned three, after which she worked outside the home for several years. She was also active in politics in Los Angeles, where the family lived. “But despite the work and the political activity, I still felt trapped. My life never felt like my own. Friedan called it perfectly. The feeling didn’t have a name. It didn’t have a reason. So you turned it inward and assumed
you
were the problem. And so did everyone around you.

“I thought I was a troubled person who couldn’t be satisfied with the fine life I now led—at least fine in comparison to where I came from. I had moved into this pretty house on a pretty street with a wonderful kid I adored and an okay-enough husband. So what did I have to complain about? I had climbed up to where I was supposed to—higher than my mother had hoped—and I wasn’t happy. And I didn’t know why.”

As time passed, Rubin began to feel that her husband wasn’t really “okay enough,” and she initiated a separation. “When my mother heard we’d separated, she called my husband and told him, ‘If Lillian wants to come back, treat her like a dog in the street. She doesn’t deserve what you’ve given her.’” Fearing that she would not be able to support her child, Lillian agreed to reconcile three months later. She also consented to move from central Los Angeles, where she was a community activist, to the suburbs where her husband worked.

For several years, she tried to be the supportive wife. When her husband brought clients home, she entertained them. “I was constantly putting on a show. I didn’t like the clients, and I didn’t want to be doing this, but I felt I had to. I’d look at the young mothers walking in the park and they looked very happy. How much easier their lives seemed to me. But I couldn’t do it, so I would run off to do politics. At the time, I was helping to organize the black community in Watts (what they now call South Central), where we ultimately succeeded in electing the first black
congressman in California. I loved the political work. That’s what kept me in the marriage and made the suburbs bearable.”

Rubin got home for dinner every night and did “everything expected of a wife. But I didn’t like it. And I always thought there was something wrong with me.” So did her husband, who not only couldn’t understand her discontent but feared her political activism would hurt his own reputation.

Rubin ended up leaving her husband and holding down several responsible jobs during the 1950s, first as a politician’s campaign manager and then as personnel manager in an electronics firm, where she was fired when the FBI came around asking about her political activities. She next got a job at a nonprofit company, where her boss decided to keep her on even after the FBI visited again.

Yet Rubin still did not recognize the parallels between the racial and class inequalities against which she was organizing and her own situation as a woman. She met her present husband in 1961 and married him in March 1962. “Then the rest of my life started. I sat around trying to figure out what that meant. I’d changed a man I didn’t care for, for one I adored, but that didn’t do anything for my internal life, for the things that had made me restless.”

In January 1963, Rubin went back to school at the University of California. Shortly afterward, she read
The Feminine Mystique
and “it was a revelation. It was like having a pain and finally your doctor tells you, your pain actually has a source. You aren’t imagining it.” For the first time she felt “total reassurance” about what she wanted to do with her life.

Rubin had already embarked on a new path, but Friedan’s book helped her to understand what had led her there and to avoid the second thoughts about her choices that had plagued Anne Parsons. “I had lived the life Betty described. I woke up every day wondering if this was all there is, berating myself for not appreciating my good fortune, my nice suburban house, and my neighbors, all of whom seemed so much happier than I. I had no way to relate to them. Until I read
The Feminine Mystique
, I thought my feelings were unique and that I was somehow flawed, not a proper woman.” But Friedan’s book told Lillian
that the course she had embarked on was exactly what “a proper woman” would do.

 

EVEN BEFORE THEY READ FRIEDAN’S BOOK, MANY OTHER WOMEN HAD already begun to take steps to build a different life than that prescribed by the feminine mystique. But surrounded by disapproval of their lives and denigration of their capacities, they thirsted for validation. Pat Cody, co-owner of Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley, California, was the fourth of eight children of Catholic working-class parents and the first to go to college. “I did not feel guilty about working,” she recalls. “It had been a necessity in my life since I did babysitting when I was fourteen.” But once she went into business with her husband, she was puzzled and angered by the way men treated her. Often, when she asked a sales rep a question, he would reply to her husband. When her husband brought home
The Feminine Mystique
, her reaction was “At last, a name for a situation!”

When Barbara Bergmann graduated from Cornell University in 1948, her mother asked, “How come you’ve come back without a husband? What do you think I sent you there for?” When
The Feminine Mystique
was published, Bergmann was in her mid-thirties and an untenured associate professor at Brandeis University. “I was unmarried, and fairly sure I had missed out on having a family. So when the book came out, I was in a state of envying housewives. Reading the book didn’t make me any happier with my single state, but it showed that the most common alternative wasn’t so hot either.” Her mother died in 1965, “and later that year I married the first man that walked in. We are still married, both just turned eighty.” But she made sure to marry someone who did not ask her to give up the career she had once thought could preclude marriage.

 

IT HAS OFTEN BEEN CLAIMED THAT
THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
MADE women dissatisfied with their marriages. Certainly many women who felt trapped in unhappy marriages credit Friedan with giving them, as Janet C. said, “the courage to decide that the world wouldn’t end if I left my husband.”

Sandra G. wrote that in 1953, at age eighteen, she had married the first boy she had sex with, “and he threw that up to me every time we had a fight. I had ‘given in’ to him, he said. How did he know I hadn’t ‘done it’ with other boys? And I felt bad, but I also kept thinking, ‘He was the one who slept with other people before me; why am I the one who has to feel so bad?’” Reading Friedan made Sandra feel “like I had a right to get respect from a man, and if I didn’t get it I could actually fend for myself.”

Joanne Kinney was married with two children when she read the book “in pieces and parts when time permitted” in 1963 and 1964. Joanne and her sister would discuss Friedan’s views and their husbands’ reaction to the book’s publicity. Both husbands hated the ideas they were hearing.

Joanne had always resented that she had to ask her husband for permission to buy clothing. She was also frustrated because “working outside the home was not allowed.” He claimed it “would be too embarrassing for people to think I had to work.”
The Feminine Mystique
showed Joanne that there were other unhappy housewives in America. It also made her think that a woman didn’t necessarily have to stay with someone just because she wasn’t sure where she would live and who would support her if she left. In Joanne’s words, “I guess Friedan gave me the right to divorce . . . or so I thought.”

But few of these women took an antimarriage attitude away from
The Feminine Mystique
, which made a point of not criticizing husbands for their wives’ unhappiness. Instead, they took Friedan at her word when she said marriages would be happier when women no longer tried to meet all their needs through their assigned roles as wives and mothers. Many of the women who left their husbands in the wake of discovering feminist ideas practically glow with happiness when describing their second marriage. Joanne told of her joy at being able to marry the close friend who “is and was the love of my life since I met him in my second year of high school.”

Jocelyn M. makes a similar point. “Once I gained the confidence to expect more out of life, I learned just how happy a marriage could be.
But it took a second marriage, after a lot of miserable years as a passive wife, before I knew that happiness.”

Other women reported that their marriages were improved or even saved because they read the book. Several said that before they read Friedan they had tried to deal with their feelings of emptiness by flirting with other men or drinking too much. “For a while I and a couple of my neighbors lived a
Desperate Housewives
-lite sort of life,” recalls Jolene W. “I never actually committed adultery, but I came close a couple of times. But once I took Betty’s advice and got the part-time job I had been interested in, I didn’t seem to need that kind of gratification anymore.”

Heather Kleiner first heard of
The Feminine Mystique
in the early 1960s, but she didn’t immediately relate to it because she and her husband, then in graduate school, “were part of a group of other student-parents, beset with similar problems of juggling work, studies, and parenting. So I did not feel the loneliness and isolation of my suburban counterparts.”

But after the birth of her second child in 1966, recalls Heather, “I became a housewife, and my ‘days of rage’ began. . . . I remember being very, very angry.... And I blamed my poor husband for contributing to my stultifying unhappiness.” Reading
The Feminine Mystique
helped her realize “that my problems were societal and that my husband and other family members were as much ‘victimized’ as I by gendered role expectations.”

A few women said they might have saved their marriages if they had read
The Feminine Mystique
sooner. One woman, after reading an article by Friedan in
Good Housekeeping,
wrote her a letter in August 1960, saying, “If I had only had these words and thoughts brought to my attention 10 years ago, perhaps my life would not have taken on the somewhat tragic aspect that it did. Because from just such frustrations as not feeling like a human being, I divorced my husband.”