Feminine Mystique, The

Feminine Mystique, The (1963).The feminist manifesto The Feminine Mystique, authored by Betty Friedan (1921– ), a professional journalist, argued that American women suffered from deep discontent. Friedan blamed what she called “the feminine mystique,” a repressive ideal promoted by journalists, magazine editors, advertisers, educators, and social scientists. This domestic ideal held that women could find fulfillment only as wives and mothers. It stunted women's aspirations and trapped them in the home. With conscious hyperbole, Friedan labeled the home a “comfortable concentration camp” in which housewives lost their freedom and sense of identity.

The Feminine Mystique reworked themes—individual freedom, suburban conformity, and domestic discontent—that pervaded postwar popular culture. In framing her arguments, however, Friedan did not use a typical liberal language of rights and equality. Influenced by Abraham Maslow's human potential psychology, she focused instead on growth and fulfillment. Full‐time domesticity, she argued, denied women's “basic human need to grow”. In The Feminine Mystique, she did not push for a women's rights movement; rather, she advocated individual fulfillment through achievement, especially through education and careers. Critics have noted that Friedan's discussion of American women dwelled on affluent, white housewives and implicitly excluded the many women who were not middle or upper class, married, white, and domestic. They have also shown how Friedan, in presenting herself as a housewife, obscured her own activist history as a left‐leaning labor journalist.

Nonetheless, The Feminine Mystique was a bestseller. It struck a chord among middle‐class women, hundreds of whom wrote to Friedan to testify that the book resonated with their own sense of dissatisfaction. As a key inspiration to liberal feminists, the book helped launch the rebirth of the women's movement in the 1960s. Friedan emerged as a major figure in the reinvigorated movement, especially as a founder and first president of the National Organization for Women.
See also Feminism; Fifties, The; Homework; Sixties, The.

Bibliography

Joanne Meyerowitz , Beyond The Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1958, Journal of American History 79 (March 1993): 1455–82.
Daniel Horowitz , Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, & Modern Feminism, 1998.

Joanne Meyerowitz