Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The essence of The Feminine Mystique can be found in its first paragraph. Friedan begins by saying that “the problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women.” She calls it “a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States.” She notes that “each suburban wife struggled with it alone” and itemizes the activities of a typical suburban housewife: “As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—'Is this all?'”

Friedan locates the source of this dissatisfaction in “columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers.” She cites statistics showing that the average marriage age of women was falling, a high percentage of women were dropping out of college, and the American birthrate was rising. Fewer women, she says, were entering professional work. Meanwhile, the American woman was the envy of the world: “She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home.”

Friedan then turns to her own experience, including the routine in her own home and how she became aware of the feminine mystique and the “problem that has no name.” She began seeing symptoms of the problem in her own community and among the women with whom she associated, and she cites conversations she had with dissatisfied women, such as a mother of four who left college at nineteen. Women with educations were relegated to domestic tasks, and schools and colleges recommended courses designed to prepare women for their roles as mothers and homemakers. She discusses the efforts women went through to snare a husband and the therapy women underwent to cope with their unhappiness. She states that “it is NO longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women” and that “it is no longer possible today to blame the problem on loss of femininity: to say that education and independence and equality with men have made American women unfeminine.” She concludes that “the chains that bind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit,” and the remainder of the book is an effort to unbind the chains.