Betty Friedan

By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: February 26, 2006

This retrospective includes the original New York Times review of "The Feminine Mystique" and other books, as well as interviews and articles by the author.
Obituary (February 5, 2006)
Review: 'The Feminine Mystique' (April 7, 1963)
Excerpt From 'The Feminine Mystique'
 

"A baked potato is not as big as the world, and vacuuming the living-room floor — with or without makeup — is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman's full capacity," Betty Friedan famously wrote in "The Feminine Mystique," her 1963 jeremiad on midcentury American domesticity.

Why, asked Friedan, who died this month at 85, had the percentage of women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47 percent in 1920 to 35 percent in 1958? "A century earlier," Friedan wrote, "women had fought for higher education; now girls went to college to get a husband." By 1963, it seemed, women were in thrall to the idea that "the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity" — the feminine mystique.

"To fit together the puzzle of women's retreat to home," Friedan drew heavily on interviews, social science research and her own academic training. But she also focused her attention on another source: women's magazines. In their pages, she saw the women of the 30's — "happily, proudly, adventurously, attractively career women — who loved and were loved by men" — give way in the 50's to earnestly breathless examinations of "Why Young Mothers Are Always Tired" or headlines that asked "Is Boredom Bad for You?" The articles became evidence of what Friedan came to call "the problem that has no name," the deeply felt but somehow unexpressed feeling that homemaking was not enough.

By carefully examining McCall's, Redbook, Ladies' Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, Friedan pioneered not just a movement but a method, one that combined grassroots sociology and analysis of popular culture with academic theory. Over the years, it has been adopted by a host of writers, including Barbara Ehrenreich, Arlie Hochschild, Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi, Ann Crittenden, Ann Hulbert and Judith Warner.

Friedan read women's magazines so closely because she had written for some of them, on breast-feeding and other domestic themes, while raising her three children in the New York suburbs. She had insider knowledge of how these magazines worked, how editors sometimes manufactured stories to fit what market research putatively showed that readers wanted. Indeed, "The Feminine Mystique" grew out of an idea Friedan had proposed to McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal and Redbook, all of which rejected it as out of line with their image of American womanhood. The proposal was based on a survey Friedan had put together and distributed to her classmates in the Smith College class of 1942 at their 15th reunion. At a moment of heated debates in the press about whether colleges should offer more practical training in housewifery, Friedan expected her survey would "disprove the current notion that education had fitted us ill for our role as women." Instead, she discovered, "the suspicion arose as to whether it was the education or the role that was wrong." Friedan, in her rejected article, argued that women should be educated to be individuals, not housewives, but that it was up to them to integrate these roles. (McCall's and Ladies' Home Journal later excerpted parts of the book.)

At the time of the Smith reunion, Friedan felt she hadn't lived up to her promise. She had done graduate work with the psychologist Erik Erikson at the University of California, Berkeley, but turned down a prestigious Ph.D. fellowship after a boyfriend said it would ruin their relationship, and became a reporter. "The Feminine Mystique" came from somewhere deep within me and all my experience came together in it," Friedan wrote in the introduction to the 10th anniversary edition. "My mother's discontent, my own training in Gestalt and Freudian psychology, the fellowship I felt guilty about giving up, the stint as a reporter which taught me how to follow clues to the hidden economic underside of reality, my exodus to the suburbs and all the hours with other mothers shopping at supermarkets, taking the children swimming, coffee klatches."

Armed with this insight, she was unrelenting in her analysis. At the height of Freudianism, Friedan blamed Freud for having "elevated" the feminine mystique "into a scientific religion." She also scrutinized the Kinsey Report and criticized the anthropologist Margaret Mead for professing that anatomy is destiny.

With its generalizing power, and its strong roots in psychology and sociology, "The Feminine Mystique" has less in common with the later feminist polemics it inspired than with other ambitious cultural critiques of the 1950's. Friedan's account of unfulfilled housewives, imprisoned in the "comfortable concentration camps" of their suburban living rooms, completes a picture of a generation deeply unsettled by the demands of the postwar meritocracy and the isolation of the new suburbia — whose alleged classlessness made everyone uneasy about status. These women were married to the alienated middle managers depicted in "The Organization Man," William Whyte's best-selling 1956 study of American corporate and suburban culture, men who "weren't seeking excitement or challenge." "They wanted a safe haven," wrote Whyte, an editor at Fortune. "They wanted to work for AT&T and General Electric, for heaven's sake!" The organization men were cousins to the conformist "other-directed" men described in "The Lonely Crowd," the Harvard sociologist David Riesman's 1950 study of American social character, men who looked to "the expectations and preferences of others" rather than following "an internalized set of goals." Friedan cites both books in "The Feminine Mystique." She also acknowledged Simone de Beauvoir's "Second Sex," first published in the United States in 1953, as an influence.

"The Feminine Mystique," which first appeared during the printers' strike that shut down New York newspapers in 1963, had a quiet start. To promote it, W. W. Norton hired an outside publicist, Tania Grossinger, whose parents owned the famous Catskills resort of the same name. Grossinger organized a book tour, a relative rarity at the time, and had Friedan call on her network of friends in various cities. Like so many classics, the book enjoyed its first commercial success in paperback. Released in February 1964 — the same month as the paperback edition of "The Centaur," John Updike's myth-inflected novel of high school life, and J. D. Salinger's "Franny and Zooey" — the soft-cover edition sold 1.4 million copies in its first printing. Over the years, it has sold close to three million copies.

"The Feminine Mystique" puzzled some early critics. The Book Review included it in a belated digest of briefs winnowed down from full reviews that never appeared because of the strike. The reviewer, Lucy Freeman — one of the few female reporters at The New York Times — criticized Friedan's reliance on women's magazines. "Sweeping generalities, in which this book necessarily abounds, may hold a certain amount of truth but often obscure the deeper issues," wrote Freeman, who covered mental health and had written a memoir of her own depression and experiences with psychoanalysis. "It is superficial to blame the 'culture' and its handmaidens, the women's magazines, as she does. What is to stop a woman who is interested in national and international affairs from reading magazines that deal with those subjects? To paraphrase a famous line, 'The fault, dear Mrs. Friedan, is not in our culture, but in ourselves.' " In fact, Friedan did not blame women's magazines, she analyzed the America presented in their pages with uncommon acuity.

In "The Feminine Mystique," Friedan lamented that college courses for women on marriage lacked the "critical thinking demanded in other academic disciplines" and passed off "indoctrination of opinions and values" as scholarship. That Friedan could tell the difference is one reason "The Feminine Mystique" still remains vital.

Betty Friedan, the feminist crusader and author whose searing first book, "The Feminine Mystique," ignited the contemporary women's movement in 1963 and as a result permanently transformed the social fabric of the United States and countries around the world, died yesterday, her 85th birthday, at her home in Washington.

 
Excerpt From 'The Feminine Mystique' (February 5, 2006)

 
J. P. Laffont/Corbis Sygma
Betty Friedan, a founder of the National Organization for Women, led a march in Manhattan in 1970 for the Women's Strike for Equality.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Emily Bazelon, a family spokeswoman.

With its impassioned yet clear-eyed analysis of the issues that affected women's lives in the decades after World War II — including enforced domesticity, limited career prospects and, as chronicled in later editions, the campaign for legalized abortion — "The Feminine Mystique" is widely regarded as one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, the book had sold more than three million copies by the year 2000 and has been translated into many languages.

"The Feminine Mystique" made Ms. Friedan world famous. It also made her one of the chief architects of the women's liberation movement of the late 1960's and afterward, a sweeping social upheaval that harked back to the suffrage campaigns of the turn of the century and would be called feminism's second wave.

In 1966, Ms. Friedan helped found the National Organization for Women, serving as its first president. In 1969, she was a founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, now known as Naral Pro-Choice America. With Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and others, she founded the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971.

Though in later years, some feminists dismissed Ms. Friedan's work as outmoded, a great many aspects of modern life that seem routine today — from unisex Help Wanted ads to women in politics, medicine, the clergy and the military — are the direct result of the hard-won advances she helped women attain.

For decades a familiar presence on television and the lecture circuit, Ms. Friedan, with her short stature and deeply hooded eyes, looked for much of her adult life like a "combination of Hermione Gingold and Bette Davis," as Judy Klemesrud wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1970.

A brilliant student who graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1942, Ms. Friedan trained as a psychologist but never pursued a career in the field. When she wrote "The Feminine Mystique," she was a suburban housewife and mother who supplemented her husband's income by writing freelance articles for women's magazines.

Though Ms. Friedan was not generally considered a lyrical stylist, "The Feminine Mystique," read today, is as mesmerizing as it was more than four decades ago:

"Gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite a while, I came to realize that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today," Ms. Friedan wrote in the opening line of the preface. "I sensed it first as a question mark in my own life, as a wife and mother of three small children, half-guiltily, and therefore half-heartedly, almost in spite of myself, using my abilities and education in work that took me away from home." [Excerpt From 'The Feminine Mystique']

The words have the hypnotic pull of a fairy tale, and for the next 400 pages, Ms. Friedan identifies, dissects and damningly indicts one of the most pervasive folk beliefs of postwar American life: the myth of suburban women's domestic fulfillment she came to call the feminine mystique.

Drawing on history, psychology, sociology and economics, as well as on interviews she conducted with women across the country, Ms. Friedan charted a gradual metamorphosis of the American woman from the independent, career-minded New Woman of the 1920's and 30's into the vacant, aproned housewife of the postwar years.

The portrait she painted was chilling. For a typical woman of the 1950's, even a college-educated one, life centered almost exclusively on chores and children. She cooked and baked and bandaged and chauffeured and laundered and sewed. She did the mopping and the marketing and took her husband's gray flannel suit to the cleaners. She was happy to keep his dinner warm till he came wearily home from downtown.

The life she led, if educators, psychologists and the mass media were to be believed, was the fulfillment of every women's most ardent dream. Yet she was unaccountably tired, impatient with the children, craving something that neither marital sex nor extramarital affairs could satisfy. Her thoughts sometimes turned to suicide. She consulted a spate of doctors and psychiatrists, who prescribed charity work, bowling and bridge. If those failed, there were always tranquilizers to get her through her busy day.

A Nebraska housewife with a Ph.D. in anthropology whom Ms. Friedan interviewed told her:

"A film made of any typical morning in my house would look like an old Marx Brothers comedy. I wash the dishes, rush the older children off to school, dash out in the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in to make a phone call about a committee meeting, help the youngest child build a blockhouse, spend fifteen minutes skimming the newspapers so I can be well-informed, then scamper down to the washing machines where my thrice-weekly laundry includes enough clothes to keep a primitive village going for an entire year. By noon I'm ready for a padded cell. Very little of what I've done has been really necessary or important. Outside pressures lash me though the day. Yet I look upon myself as one of the more relaxed housewives in the neighborhood."
"The Feminine Mystique" began as a survey Ms. Friedan conducted in 1957 for the 15th reunion of her graduating class at Smith. It was intended to refute a prevailing postwar myth: that higher education kept women from adapting to their roles as wives and mothers. Judging from her own capable life, Ms. Friedan expected her classmates to describe theirs as similarly well adjusted. But what she discovered in the women's responses was something far more complex, and more troubling — a "nameless, aching dissatisfaction" that she would famously call "the problem that has no name."

 
Susana Raab for The New York Times
As a founder and first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966, Ms. Friedan staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time.

 
Jim Cooper/Associated Press
Betty Friedan in New York in 2000.
When Ms. Friedan sent the same questionnaire to graduates of Radcliffe and other colleges, and later interviewed scores of women personally, the results were the same. The women's answers gave her the seeds of her book. They also forced her to confront the painful limitations of her own suburban idyll.

Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born on Feb. 4, 1921, in Peoria, Ill. Her father, Harry, was an immigrant from Russia who parlayed a street-corner collar-button business into a prosperous downtown jewelry store. Her gifted, imperious mother, Miriam, had been the editor of the women's page of the local newspaper before giving up her job for marriage and children. only years later, when she was writing "The Feminine Mystique," did Ms. Friedan come to see her mother's cold, critical demeanor as masking a deep bitterness at giving up the work she loved.

Growing up brainy, Jewish, outspoken and, by the standards of the time, unlovely, Bettye was ostracized. She was barred from the fashionable sororities at her Peoria high school and rarely asked on dates. It was an experience, she would later say, that made her identify with people on the margins of society.

At Smith, she blossomed. For the first time, she could be as smart as she wanted, as impassioned as she wanted and as loud as she wanted, and for four happy years she was all those things. Betty received her bachelor's degree in 1942 — by that time she had dropped the final "e," which she considered an affectation of her mother's — and accepted a fellowship to the University of California, Berkeley, for graduate work in psychology.

At Berkeley, she studied with the renowned psychologist Erik Erikson, among others. She won a second fellowship, even more prestigious than the first, that would allow her to continue for a doctorate. But she was dating a young physicist who felt threatened by her success. He pressured her to turn down the fellowship, and she did, an experience she would later recount frequently in interviews. She also turned down the physicist, returning home to Peoria before moving to Greenwich Village in New York.

There, Ms. Friedan worked as an editor at The Federated Press, a small news service that provided stories to labor newspapers nationwide. In 1946, she took a job as a reporter with U. E. News, the weekly publication of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America.

In 1947, she married Carl Friedan, a theater director who later became an advertising executive. They started a family and moved to a rambling Victorian house in suburban Rockland County, N.Y.

Ms. Friedan, whose marriage would end in divorce in 1969, is survived by their three children, Daniel Friedan of Princeton, N.J.; Emily Friedan of Buffalo; and Jonathan Friedan of Philadelphia; a brother, Harry Goldstein, of Palm Springs, Calif., and Purchase, N.Y.; a sister, Amy Adams, of Chapel Hill, N.C., and nine grandchildren.

"The Feminine Mystique" had the misfortune to appear during a newspaper printers' strike. The reviews that appeared afterward ran the gamut from bewildered to outraged to cautiously laudatory. Some critics also felt that Ms. Friedan had insufficiently acknowledged her debt to Simone de Beauvoir, whose 1949 book, "The Second Sex," dealt with many of the same issues.

Writing in The New York Times Book Review in April 1963, Lucy Freeman called "The Feminine Mystique" a "highly readable, provocative book," but went on to question its basic premise, writing, of Ms. Friedan:

"Sweeping generalities, in which this book necessarily abounds, may hold a certain amount of truth but often obscure the deeper issues. It is superficial to blame the 'culture' and its handmaidens, the women's magazines, as she does. What is to stop a woman who is interested in national and international affairs from reading magazines that deal with those subjects? To paraphrase a famous line, 'The fault, dear Mrs. Friedan, is not in our culture, but in ourselves.' " [Read the review.]
Among readers, however, the response to the book was so overwhelming that Ms. Friedan realized she needed more than words to address the condition of women's lives. After moving back to Manhattan with her family, she determined to start a progressive organization that would be the equivalent, as she often said, of an N.A.A.C.P. for women.

 
In 1966, Ms. Friedan and a group of colleagues founded the National Organization for Women. She was its president until 1970.

One of NOW's most visible public actions was the Women's Strike for Equality, held on Aug. 26, 1970, in New York and in cities around the country. In New York, tens of thousands of woman marched down Fifth Avenue, with Ms. Friedan in the lead. (Before the march, she made a point of lunching at Whyte's, a downtown restaurant formerly open to men only.)

Carrying signs and banners ("Don't Cook Dinner — Starve a Rat Tonight!" "Don't Iron While the Strike Is Hot"), women of all ages, along with a number of sympathetic men, marched joyfully down the street to cheering crowds. The march ended with a rally in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, with passionate speeches by Ms. Friedan, Ms. Steinem, Ms. Abzug and Kate Millett.

Not all of Ms. Friedan's ventures were as successful. The First Women's Bank and Trust Company, which she helped found in 1973, is no longer in business. Nor were even her indomitable presence and relentless energy enough to secure passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Though widely respected as a modern-day heroine, Ms. Friedan was by no means universally beloved, even — or perhaps especially — by members of the women's movement. She was famously abrasive. She could be thin-skinned and imperious, subject to screaming fits of temperament.

In the 1970's and afterward, some feminists criticized Ms. Friedan for focusing almost exclusively on the concerns of middle-class married white women and ignoring those of minorities, lesbians and the poor. Some called her retrograde for insisting that women could, and should, live in collaborative partnership with men.

Ms. Friedan's private life was also famously stormy. In her recent memoir, "Life So Far" (Simon & Schuster, 2000), she accused her husband of being physically abusive during their marriage, writing that he sometimes gave her black eyes, which she concealed with make-up at public events and on television.

Mr. Friedan, who died in December, repeatedly denied the accusations. In an interview with Time magazine in 2000, shortly after the memoir's publication, he called Ms. Friedan's account a "complete fabrication." He added: "I am the innocent victim of a drive-by shooting by a reckless driver savagely aiming at the whole male gender."

Ms. Friedan's other books include "It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement" (Random House, 1976); "The Second Stage" (Summit, 1981); and "The Fountain of Age" (Simon & Schuster, 1993).

The recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, she was a visiting professor at universities around the country, among them Columbia, Temple and the University of Southern California. In recent years, Ms. Friedan was associated with the Institute for Women and Work at Cornell University.

Despite all of her later achievements, Ms. Friedan would be forever known as the suburban housewife who started a revolution with "The Feminine Mystique." Rarely has a single book been responsible for such sweeping, tumultuous and continuing social transformation.

The new society Ms. Friedan proposed, founded on the notion that men and women were created equal, represented such a drastic upending of the prevailing social norms that over the years to come, she would be forced to explain her position again and again.

"Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your men,' " she told Life magazine in 1963. "It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners."

'Life So Far'

 
Review by WENDY STEINER
Published: June 25, 2000
That ''wonderful massive change in society'' we call Women's Liberation is in important part the brainchild of Betty Friedan, for it is no exaggeration to say that the ideas in ''The Feminine Mystique'' and the legislation urged on by the National Organization for Women have permanently altered the American psyche. She is truly a Mother of Us All. But do we have to like our mother? Acknowledging her ''reputation as a ferocious witch,'' Ms. Friedan would say no. ''I don't think it's a requirement to be sweet to be an effective leader or activist,'' she argues. In a memoirist, however, lack of sweetness is less forgivable, and the ''personal truth'' that ''Life So Far'' reveals cannot help giving us pause. To read this memoir is to grasp the labor and pain and sacrifices of one's mother without necessarily loving her for her efforts.
 
Friedan's earliest memory is of looking in the mirror at age 3 and seeing ''a tall girl,'' though she was then and ever afterward decidedly short. ''What made me see myself as tall back then in Peoria in my mother's room?'' she wonders. Was it the nascent I.Q. of 180, her father's exorbitant praise, an infant inkling that public achievement could be pumped up to heroic proportions as a replacement for personal happiness? Whatever the cause, history proved out the accuracy of the toddler's grandiosity. In 1970, as Friedan led women in a march down Fifth Avenue, Pete Hamill reported, ''All women looked six feet tall that day.''

Friedan's ''Life So Far'' is a chronicle of outstanding accomplishments: summa cum laude at Smith; top graduate fellowship at Berkeley (declined); a paradigm-shattering best seller; the founding of N.O.W.; audiences with Indira Gandhi and the pope; a university chair as ''a live history maker''; a $1 million grant from the Ford Foundation. ''What I have done with my life is already history,'' she reflects, but with this memoir, new triumphs are added to the record. ''I think I must have gotten pregnant the first night I left my diaphragm out''; ''of course, I got pregnant the first week I left the diaphragm off again''; the New Journalism had not yet been invented, ''but I'd figured out for myself what was needed''; ''I had learned to master any field enough in 24 hours to understand and ask the right questions on the cutting edge''; of her million-dollar Ford grant, she remarks, ''I think it's deserved.''

Her school's principal had told the young Betty Goldstein: ''You have a great talent for leadership. You must use it for good, not evil.'' She took his advice to heart, guided by her ''Jewish existential conscience, that sense . . . that I have to use my life to make the world better.'' She might more profitably have listened to her medieval literature professor: ''Miss Goldstein, you have no humility.''

False humility, of course, is nothing to admire, but neither is lack of self-knowledge. Friedan's father, she says, preserved her every school essay in his safe and declared her childhood poems masterpieces. Nevertheless he refused to come to her graduation, and his comment that if she became a psychiatrist she ''might as well be a woman'' made her so worried about not being a woman that she quit graduate school. She told everyone she was leaving in order to support the Communist movement. Aware that this was a dodge, she nevertheless did not understand why she was so afraid of being unwomanly. She reports as if truly puzzled: ''For some reason, those tight sweaters which I began to fill out and my new high heels infuriated my father.'' When she presented her research proposal for the Berkeley fellowship, she noted that the professors were embarrassed ''as the words 'oral,' 'anal,' 'genital' . . . were tossed off so blithely by me. They decided to recommend me for the biggest science fellowship at Berkeley.''

Intellectual work was sexual for her; men rewarded it. But at the same time it was not womanly; her father was not pleased. When he died, ''I moved in cold calculation to sleep with someone, anyone, as my father had accused me of doing.'' Her asthma flared up, as it did psychosomatically throughout her life. She hated the very mention of the words ''penis envy,'' but obliged Freud with a classic case of hysteria.
Her mother, in her eyes, was the source of her unhappiness. ''My mother, Miriam, was beautiful. . . . Everything she did, she did perfectly.'' Miriam had gone to college for two years and worked, but had quit her job to marry and have children. She was ashamed of the big nose and foreign accent of her immigrant husband and frustrated at her constrained life as a Peoria housewife. Little Betty, already six feet tall in her mother's mirror, resolved to have a job so as not to be like her miserable mother. And yet whenever a career opportunity arose, she opted instead for being a ''woman,'' identifying herself as ''housewife'' on the census form even after she had become a successful journalist. ''It was a woman, in a family, that I yearned to be, a warmer, more supportive, affectionate woman than my mother,'' she writes. ''Though I was consumed with dread of her and, I suppose, hate, and even finally a kind of revulsion, there was a desperate yearning underneath for the love she couldn't give me. And only now do I begin to understand the emptiness and fragility beneath her assumed superiority, perfectionism, and the constant unrelenting put-down of her husband, her children, her women friends.''

 
Such insights are rare in this memoir. Throughout, Friedan fails to connect her love-hate for her mother and the sexualized desire for her father to her politics, appearing unaccountably hostile and rigid in her views and inspiring antagonism in other feminists. Rather than being moved by ''sisterhood,'' she took as her model for self-realization her immigrant relatives' search for freedom. She declares the women's movement, therefore, a further stage of the American Revolution, and defines women's rights in mainly material terms as the need for equal job opportunity, equal pay for equal work, adequate and affordable child care, access to public accommodations and control over reproduction. Sex, image and the family could be left as they were. Simone de Beauvoir was ''silly'' to insist that society be entirely reorganized to separate the home and family from female identity; Kate Millett was ''warped'' in her diatribes against men and her ''abstract sexual extremism that didn't apply to women's lives''; Germaine Greer was guilty of ''naughty-child exhibitionism.'' In contrast, Betty Friedan could boast of being as good a mother as the archconservative Phyllis Schlafly and at the same time of having won women the right to enter any profession or bar in the country.

Unlike the radically chic New York feminists, she spoke for the mainstream: the women of Peoria, women like her mother! Lesbians alienated these women, endangering the movement. ''It was outrageous to question the value of heterosexual relationships''; before taking back the night for women, you needed to take back the day. Ferociously protective of the rights she valued, she declared other women's concerns peripheral and unworthy. At last she had become mainstream.

The scandalous revelation of this memoir is that throughout her years of activism Betty Friedan allowed her husband to get away with beating her. Wedded to her father's approval and unable either to identify with or to separate herself from her mother, this ''two-headed lady'' remained utterly split, and yet defined the goal of feminism as healing the divide between fiery feminist and loving mother, career woman and heterosexual partner.

Now 79 years old, Friedan still inhabits this duality, describing herself as ''this dignified white-haired grande dame'' who goes around swearing in public. Her memoir ends with the announcement that she and her ex-husband have become friends. one of the path-breaking chapters in ''The Feminine Mystique'' is entitled ''The Problem That Has No Name'' (a perhaps unintended echo of ''the love that dare not speak its name''). Friedan's phrase brings the lie of the happy housewife into the light of day in order to dispel its power. But in ''Life So Far,'' Betty Friedan's lies to herself remain unnamed and fearsome. She leaves us in a sad bind, aware of the public good that came of her ''mothering'' but unable to feel that her struggle was truly carried out on our behalf.
'The Feminine Mystique'

 
By LUCY FREEMAN
Published: April 7, 1963
Millions of American women stand victim of "the feminine mystique," a philosophy that has convinced them that their only commitment is the fulfillment of a femininity found in "sexual passivity, male domination and nurturing maternal love." They are dangerous in that, unable to find their real selves, they feed emotionally on their children -- thus crippling them -- and are unable to satisfy their husbands because they cannot enjoy sex for sex's sake. They try to relieve their feelings of depression and emptiness by seeking "strained glamor." They have won the battle for suffrage but little else. This is the damning indictment levelled by Betty Friedan in her highly readable, provocative book.
 
THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
By Betty Friedan. The core of her thesis is that woman's problem today is not sexual but a problem of identity. "Our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role."

Sweeping generalities, in which this book necessarily abounds, may hold a certain amount of truth but often obscure the deeper issues. It is superficial to blame the "culture" and its handmaidens, the women's magazines, as she does. What is to stop a woman who is interested in national and international affairs from reading magazines that deal with those subjects? To paraphrase a famous line, "The fault, dear Mrs. Friedan, is not in our culture, but in ourselves."
Excerpt From 'The Feminine Mystique'

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. 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 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?"

For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents.

In the fifteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children's clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running all day. They changed the sheets on the beds twice a week instead of once, took the rug-hooking class in adult education, and pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career. Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the men to make the major decisions. They gloried in their role as women, and wrote proudly on the census blank: "Occupation: housewife."