Launching the 1960s American Feminist Movement

[Hawk1981]

Restless and bored as a 1950s homemaker, recalling that she “married, had children, lived according to the feminine mystique as a suburban housewife,” Betty Friedan set out to write a magazine article based on her survey of fellow Smith College graduates to see if their experiences were similar. After researching psychology, media, advertisements and conducting interviews of suburban housewives, the result was a book published in 1963 called The Feminine Mystique.

Attacking the myth that all women wanted to be fulfilled as "housewife-mothers", the book quickly became a bestseller. Defining "Feminine Mystique" as an idea, mostly created by men, that women were naturally fulfilled by being housewives and mothers. Friedan notes through her research that 1950s media and advertising typically depicted women as happy housewives or unhappy careerists, in contrast to similar media and advertising of the 1930s that often displayed more confident and independent women, many in careers.

Friedan argues that the trend in the 1950s for younger marriage age, smaller percentage of women attending college and increasing birthrate was leading to a greater number of dissatisfied, unhappy women who wanted something more than husband, children and home.

The Feminine Mystique attacks the prevailing psychological and biological notions about determining women's roles. Noting that many women dropped out of school to marry, fearful that if they waited too long or became too educated they would not be able to attract a husband, contrasted with the expectations for men who were encouraged to find their human identity and complete their education. Friedan argues that the prevailing theory of femininity doesn't allow women to mature and find their human identity, stating that "the identity of woman is determined by her biology."

The book attacks Freud's idea that "the position of women will surely be what it is: in youth an adored darling and in mature years a loved wife" because "nature has determined woman's destiny through beauty, charm, and sweetness" and often leading to the labeling of women who wanted careers as being neurotic. Friedan contends that this argument elevates the "feminine mystique" into a scientific religion that most women were not prepared by education or by society's expectations to criticize.

Friedan notes that the schools for women focused on classes on marriage, family and courses deemed suitable for women. Studies in the Social Sciences taught women that they would be upsetting the social balance if they did not conform to their biological roles.

Contrary to the arguments that women were finding fulfillment and creating happy homes, many 1950s women who not finding their highest level of self-actualization, were driving their husbands away and causing their children to lose their own sense of themselves as separate human beings with their own lives.

Friedan concludes that by promoting education and meaningful work for American women, along with a drastic rethinking of what it means to be feminine, they could avoid being trapped in the "feminine mystique."

 

[Hawk1981]

Critics noted that Friedan's research was focused on white, upper and middle class women, entirely ignoring other types of women and their circumstances, including many who were far more oppressed. Although Friedan was writing during the civil rights movement, she barely mentions African-American women. Working-class women make their appearance mainly in a few suggestions that married women who want to work might want to hire a housekeeper or a nanny.

Remarkably, Friedan managed to write an entire book indicting American society for its attitudes toward women without discussing its laws. In 1963, most women weren’t able to get credit without a male co-signer. In some states they couldn’t sit on juries; in others, their husbands had control not only of their property but also of their earnings.

Although Friedan preaches about women getting jobs, she does not mention that newspapers were allowed to divide their help-wanted ads into categories for men and women, or that it was perfectly legal for an employer to announce that certain jobs were for men only. Even the federal government did it.

Large numbers of women were working outside of the home in the 1950s and were not typical suburban housewives; and many women who were working as housewives and mothers were happy in those roles.

Friedan herself was not just a housewife and mother who found herself unhappy in her domestic captivity. Before settling down to raise a suburban family she had a career as a journalist and activist, which she returned to at least part-time while raising children. Friedan tried to portray herself as the typical middle-class housewife of the early ’60s who dropped out of her postgraduate studies because, she said, her academic success was threatening to her boyfriend. Closer to reality was that she was from a smaller cadre of women who went to college holding two self-images simultaneously: the future stay-at-home housewife and the serious student who cared about grades and reading lists and serious discussions.

Betty Friedan with her husband, Carl, and their son Daniel, the first of their three children.

 

[Hawk1981]

Second-wave feminism is a period of feminist activity and thought that began in the United States in the early 1960s and lasted for about twenty years.

Whereas first-wave feminism focused mainly on suffrage and overturning legal obstacles to gender equality (e.g.: voting rights and property rights), second-wave feminism broadened the debate to include a wider range of issues: sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities.

The Second-wave movement is usually believed to have begun in 1963, when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, and President John F. Kennedy's Presidential Commission on the Status of Women released its report on gender inequality.

 

[Hawk1981]

Betty Friedan was influenced by the French writer Simone de Beauvoir, who had in the 1940s examined the notion of women being perceived as "other" in the patriarchal society. She went on to conclude in her 1949 treatise The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe) that male-centered ideology was being accepted as a norm and enforced by the ongoing development of myths, and that the fact that women are capable of getting pregnant, lactating, and menstruating is in no way a valid cause or explanation to place them as the "second sex".

 

[rightwinger]

Another factor of the early 60s was the birth control pill. It allowed women to control the size of their families and freed them from a lifetime of child rearing

 

[there4eyeM]

Women gained greater freedom of choice, which was only correct and what was due them. That is took society so long is reprehensible. That we still tolerate so much repression of women in the world is inexcusable, and far worse than anything attributable to "race".

 

[rightwinger]

I went to HS in the early 70s. If you read yearbooks from the time, when most females were asked future plans they said.....marriage, teaching, nursing, secretary, beautician

A whole new world of opportunities has opened to women

 

[Tom Paine 1949]

I appreciated your mentioning things women legally could NOT do before the “Second Wave” of American feminism.

It is easy to forget, in this day of often absurd arguments about “transgender bathrooms” in schools, how recently even basic rights were denied to women.

Here is a LIST of many rights so denied, along with legal and other explanations: 40 Basic Rights Women Did Not Have Until The 1970s