Fifties (97 page)

The deal she made with herself then was a revealing one. It was her job as a writer to make more money than she and Carl spent on a maid—otherwise her writing would be considered counterproductive and would be viewed as subtracting from rather than adding to the greater good of the family. Her early articles, “Millionaire’s Wife” (
Cosmopolitan,
September 1956); “Now They’re Proud of Peoria” (
Reader’s Digest,
August 1955); “Two Are an Island” (
Mademoiselle)
July 1955; and “Day Camp in the Driveways” (
Parents’
Magazine, May 1957) were not exactly the achievements she had had in mind when she left Smith.

She was also very quickly finding out the limits of what could be done in writing for women’s magazines at that time. In 1956, when she was pregnant with her third child, she read in a newspaper about Julie Harris, the actress, then starring in a play called
The Lark.
Ms. Harris had had natural childbirth, something that Betty Friedan, who had undergone two cesareans, admired and even envied. She decided, with the ready agreement of the magazines, to do a piece on Ms. Harris and her childbirth. She had a glorious time interviewing the actress and was completely captivated by her. She wrote what she thought was one of her best articles on the joys of natural childbirth. To her surprise, the article was turned down at first because it was too graphic.

That was hardly her only defeat with the magazines. When she suggested an article about Beverly Pepper, just beginning to experience
considerable success as a painter and sculptor, and who was also raising a family, the editors of one magazine were scornful. American women, they told her, were not interested in someone like this and would not identify with her. Their market research, of which they were extremely confident, showed that women would only read articles that explained their own roles as wives and mothers. Not many American women out there had families and were successful as artists—therefore it would have no appeal. Perhaps, one editor said, they might do the article with a photograph of Mrs. Pepper painting the family crib.

At the time one of her children was in a play group with the child of a neighboring woman scientist. Ms. Friedan and the woman talked on occasion and her friend said she believed that a new ice age was approaching. The subject had interested Friedan, not normally a science writer, and she had suggested an article for
Harper’s.
The resulting article, “The Coming Ice Age” was a considerable success and won a number of prizes. In New York George Brockway, a book editor at Norton, saw the piece and liked it. He called to ask if she was interested in writing a book. She was excited by his interest but had no desire to expand the piece into a book; the scientific work was not really hers, in the sense that it did not reflect her true interests and feelings. It was, she later said, as if she had served as a ghostwriter for another person on it.

Then something happened that changed her life. She and two friends were asked to do a report on what had happened to the members of the Smith class of ’42 as they returned for their fifteenth reunion in 1957. She made up a questionnaire and got an assignment from
McCall’s
to pay for her time. The piece was supposed to be called “The Togetherness Woman.” The questions were: “What difficulties have you found in working out your role as a woman?” “What are the chief satisfactions and frustrations of your life today?” “How do you feel about getting older?” “How have you changed inside?” “What do you wish you had done differently?” The answers stunned her: She had tapped into a great reservoir of doubt, frustration, anxiety, and resentment. The women felt unfulfilled and isolated with their children; they often viewed their husbands as visitors from a far more exciting world.

The project also emphasized Friedan’s own frustrations. All those years trying to be a good wife and mother suddenly seemed wasted; it had been wrong to suppress her feelings rather than to deal with them. The surprise was that there were thousands of women like her out there. As she wrote later in
The Feminine Mystique:
“It was
a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slip cover materials, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’”

As she had walked around the Smith campus during her reunion, she was struck by the passivity of the young women of the class of 1957. Upon graduation, her generation had been filled with excitement about the issues of the day: When Ms. Friedan asked these young women about their futures, they regarded her with blank looks. They were going to get engaged and married and have children, of course. She thought: This is happening at Smith, a place where I found nothing but intellectual excitement when I was their age. Something had gotten deep into the bloodstream of this generation, she decided.

She left and started to write the piece for
McCall’s,
but it turned out very different from the one that she had intended to write. It reflected the despair and depression she had found among her contemporaries, and it was critical of women who lived through their husbands and children.
McCall’s,
the inventor of “togetherness”—not surprisingly—turned it down. She heard that all the women editors there wanted to run it but that they had been overruled by their male superiors. That did not entirely surprise her, but she was sure someone else would want it. So she sent it to the
Ladies’ Home Journal,
where it was accepted. There, to her amazement, it was rewritten so completely that it seemed to make the opposite points, so she pulled it. That left
Redbook,
where Bob Stein, an old friend, worked. He suggested that she do more interviews, particularly with younger women. She did, and sent the piece back to him. He was stunned by it. How could Betty Friedan write a piece so out of sync with what his magazine wanted? Why was she so angry? What in God’s name had come over her? he wondered. He turned it down and called her agent. “Look,” he said over the phone. “Only the most neurotic housewife would identify with this.”

She was, she realized later, challenging the magazines themselves. She was saying that it was wrong to mislead women to think they should feel one way when in fact they often felt quite differently. She had discovered a crisis of considerable proportions, and these magazines would only deny it.

She was angry. It was censorship, she believed. Women’s magazines
had a single purpose, she decided—to sell a vast array of new products to American housewives—and anything that worked against that, that cast doubt about the happiness of the housewives using such products, was not going to be printed. No one from the advertising department sat in on editorial meetings saying which articles could run and which could not, she knew, but the very purpose of the magazine was to see women first and foremost as consumers, not as people.

At about that time she went to New York to attend a speech by Vance Packard, the writer. He had just finished his book
The Hidden Persuaders,
about subliminal tactics in advertising. His efforts to write about this phenomenon in magazines had been completely unsuccessful, he said, so he turned it into a book, which had become a major best-seller. The parallels between his problems and hers were obvious. Suddenly, she envisioned “The Togetherness Woman” as a book. She called George Brockway at Norton, and he seemed delighted with the idea.

The economics of publishing were significantly different from those of magazines. Books were not dependent upon ads, they were dependent upon ideas, and the more provocative the idea, the more attention and, often, the better the sales. Brockway knew there had already been a number of attacks on conformity in American society, particularly as it affected men. Here was an attack that would talk about its effect on women, who were, of course, the principal buyers of books. He was impressed by Ms. Friedan. She was focused and, to his mind, wildly ambitious.

She told Brockway she would finish it in a year; instead, it took five years. Later she wrote that no one, not her husband, her editor, or anyone who knew her, thought she would ever finish it. She did so while taking care of three children. She later described herself as being like all the other mothers in suburbia, where she “hid, like secret drinking in the morning, the book I was writing when my suburban neighbors came for coffee ...”

Her research was prodigious. Three days a week she went to the New York City Public Library for research. The chief villains, she decided, were the women’s magazines. What stunned her was the fact that this had not always been true. In the same magazines in the late thirties and forties, there had been a sense of women moving steadily into the male professional world; then women’s magazines had created a very different kind of role model, of a career woman who knew how to take care of herself and who could make it on her own.

But starting around 1949, these magazines changed dramatically.
It was as if someone had thrown a giant switch. The new woman did not exist on her own. She was seen only in the light of supporting her husband and his career and taking care of the children.

The more Ms. Friedan investigated, the more she found that the world created in the magazines and the television sitcoms was, for many women at least, a fantasy world. Despite all the confidence and happiness among women portrayed in the magazines, there was underneath it all a crisis in the suburbs. It was the crisis of a generation of women who had left college with high idealism and who had come to feel increasingly frustrated and who had less and less a sense of self-esteem.

Nor, she found, did all the marvelous new appliances truly lighten the load of the housewife. If anything they seemed to extend it—there was some kind of Gresham’s law at work here: The more time-saving machines there were, the more things there were to do with them. She had stumbled across something that a number of others, primarily psychiatrists, had noticed: a certain emotional malaise, bordering on depression, among many women of the era. One psychiatrist called it “the housewife’s syndrome,” another referred to it as “the housewife’s blight.” No one wrote about it in popular magazines, certainly not in the monthly women’s magazines.

So, gathering material over several years, she began to write a book that would come out in 1963, not as
The Togetherness Woman,
but as
The Feminine Mystique.
She was approaching forty as she began, but she was regenerated by the importance of the project; it seemed to give her her own life back. The result was a seminal book on what had happened to women in America. It started selling slowly but word of it grew and grew, and eventually, with 3 million copies in print, it became a handbook for the new feminist movement that was gradually beginning to come together.

FORTY

A
T THE WORCESTER FOUNDATION
, the search for an oral contraceptive pill was beginning to go surprisingly well. The breakthrough of synthetic progesterone had given them all an immense lift. Word of how well they were doing spread throughout the scientific community and eventually reached the general public; an article had even appeared in
Look
predicting that Pincus would soon succeed in his quest.

The next stage was reached when Searle passed on to Worcester a progesterone steroid called norethynodrel, which, Chang reported back to Pincus, was more powerful than natural progesterone by a factor of at least ten to one. Goody Pincus knew at that point that it was time to bring on board a distinguished medical doctor as a collaborator—for soon the Pill would have to be tried on human subjects. At first he considered Alan Guttmacher and Abraham
Stone, both doctors and leaders in the birth-control movement. But Pincus worried that their affiliation might diminish their legitimacy for the project, and in addition, both were Jewish. This might prove to be a liability, for opposition to birth control came primarily from Catholics and fundamentalist Christians. (For all its freedom from administrative control and political pressure, the Worcester people maintained cautious in publicly discussing what they were doing. The 1955 annual report was more than a little disingenuous; it spoke of work with animals to control ovulation; the 1956 report detailed the use of steroids to help control painful menstruation.)

Finally, Pincus turned to an old colleague and friend, Dr. John Rock. Rock was a distinguished doctor, chief of gynecology and obstetrics at Harvard Medical School. He was also a devout Catholic, father of five children, and grandfather of fourteen. Rock and Pincus had known each other since the thirties by dint of their common interest in hormones. Rock, however, was trying to use them to cure infertility in women. He believed progesterone and estrogen might stimulate the womb, and he sent one of his assistants to work with Pincus to learn from his experience in retrieving mammalian eggs. Gradually, their work brought Rock and Pincus closer together.

In 1953 Pincus suggested to Sanger that Planned Parenthood get Rock to do a study on the use of progesterone as a contraceptive device. Rock, whose attitudes toward contraception had been slowly changing, was finally ready to participate. Margaret Sanger was wary of Rock at first because he was a Catholic (“He would not,” she said, “dare advance the cause of contraceptive research and remain a Catholic”). But Pincus convinced her that Rock’s attitudes were flexible, and that he was increasingly sympathetic to the idea of birth control. Besides, he was an imposing figure—strikingly handsome, charming, and graceful—and he was also a representative of one of America’s great universities. Kate McCormick agreed with Pincus; Rock, she explained to Sanger, was a “reformed Catholic.” His position, she told her friend, “is that religion has nothing to do with medicine or the practice of it, and that if the Church does not interfere with him, he will not interfere with it—whatever that may mean.” Eventually, Margaret Sanger finally came around on Rock because it seemed he would be able to win support from those who had rejected Sanger and her causes in the past. “Being a good R.C. and as handsome as a god, he can get away with anything,” she noted. In 1954 he began experiments using the new synthetic hormone from Searle on three women.