Betty Friedan, “A ‘Happy’ Suburban Housewife,” from Life So Far (2000).
(In which Friedan recalls the research and writing of her epochal book The Feminine Mystique during the late 1950s and early 1960s).
“My book grew out of a Smith alumnae questionnaire. I was asked to do our fifteenth college reunion in 1957. I felt so guilty, somehow, that I hadn’t done the big things everyone expected me to do with my brilliant Smith education – giving up the fellowship in psychology, getting fired from my newspaper job for being pregnant, writing too many mundane, inane women’s magazine articles. It wasn’t just shame at not living up to other’s expectations of me. It was also, I now believe, an existential guilt which I have to this day when I’m just coasting and not using my powers to meet serious new challenges.
The reason I agreed to do the questionnaire was because of a widely debated book that had just come out, Modern Women: The Lost Sex by Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg, two Freudian psychoanalysts who said something was terribly wrong with American women – they’d had too much education and it was keeping them from ‘adjusting to their role as women.’ A noise of diffuse angst, discontent, and anger was coming our of these ideal suburbs where between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. nothing stirred over three feet tall. If American suburban housewives weren’t ‘happy’ taking care of their children and running appliances other women only dreamed of, their education must be the problem.
Now, that made me really angry. I bought all that Freudian stuff about the role of women, of course. After all, hadn’t I given up my big psychology fellowship, my newspaper ‘career’ to be fulfilled as a wife and mother myself? But the concept that educating women had negative consequences for themselves and their families was going too far. I valued my Smith education, valued it a lot, even though I felt guilty about not using it very well. I knew my Smith classmates were doing great things in their own communities, and having a great time, as I was, fixing up their houses, getting their kids educated, though most of their husbands’ careers were probably grander than my husband’s. Surely, education made us better wives and mothers, as Adlai Stevenson had said in his commencement address to the Smith class of 1955:
Women, especially educated women, have a unique opportunity to influence us, man and boy… [yet] once immersed in the very pressing and particular problems of domesticity, many women feel frustrated and far apart from the great issues and stirring debate for which their education has given them understanding and relish. Once they wrote poetry. Now it’s the laundry list. Once they discussed art and philosophy until late into the night. Now they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the dishes are finished… They had hoped to play their part in the crises of the age. But what they do is wash the dishes.
The point is that whether we talk of Africa, Islam or Asia, women never had it so good as you. In short, far from the vocation of marriage and motherhood leading you away from the great issues of our day, it brings you back to their very center and places upon you an infinitely deeper and more intimate responsibility than that borne by the majority of those who hit the headlines and make the news and live in such a turmoil of great issues that they end by being totally unable to distinguish what issues are really great.
[Women’s political mission is] to inspire in her home a vision of the meaning of life and freedom… to help her husband find value that will give purpose to his specialized daily chores… to teach her children the uniqueness of each individual human being… This assignment for you, as wives and mothers, you can do in the living room with a baby in your lap or in the kitchen with a can opener in your hand… I think there is much you can do about our crises in the humble role of housewife. I would wish you no better vocation than that.
I decided to use that Smith questionnaire to write a major magazine article refuting Modern Women: The Lost Sex and proving education didn’t make American women frustrated in their role as women. Why couldn’t we appreciate our true political parts in the ‘crises of the age’ as wife and mother? I pitched the idea to McCall’s, and they wanted it.
I spent an inordinate amount of time on that questionnaire. I asked two friends of mine, Mario Ingersoll Howell and Anne Mather Montero, to work on it with me. So Mario and Anne came out to Rockland County once and we met several times in the city and dreamed up open-ended questions as well as the usual ones. I realized later that we were putting into words questions that we had not yet asked ourselves out loud before…
We sent out the questionnaires are received two hundred responses. When the results were tabulated, I realized they raised more questions than they answered. The ones who seemed to value their education the most, who seemed the most zestful and healthy about their lives, were the ones who didn’t exactly conform to ‘the role of women’ in the sense that it was then being defined – wife, mother, housewife, living through husbands, children, home and so on. The ones who really seemed to be doing only that were either depressed or outright frustrated. But the ones with many other interests and activities – like the kind I couldn’t stop doing myself – seemed to be enjoying their children, their homes their marriages more. Maybe it wasn’t education that was the problem, keeping women from ‘adjusting to their role as women,’ but the narrow definition of ‘the role of women.’
And, for sure, the noises then coming out from these idyllic suburbs belied the image of the happy, happy suburban housewife. The ‘woman problem,’ as it was now being called. There were strange, undiagnosed diseases that sent these women to doctors, who somehow couldn’t find a cause or a cure for their ‘chronic fatigue syndromes.’
When we went to the Smith reunion in June 1957 to report on our questionnaire, for the first time since we graduated I didn’t feel uneasy with my former college classmates. They had expected such great things of me, looked up to me so, and here I was, ‘just a housewife’ as almost all of them were now. But I was onto something, something I already sensed might be important…
The night after we presented our questionnaire results, to the great interest of the Smith class of ’42, in our late thirties now, almost all of us married, mothers, housewives – and serious community leaders – and a few of us, despite everything, doing professional work, we got back late from drinks at Wiggins Tavern and found Hubbard House, where we were staying, locked. Did Smith still have a curfew? A few graduating seniors were also locked out and joined us, waiting for the janitor to come to the rescue. I started talking to these lovely young graduates. ‘What are the courses you get excited about now?’ I asked them, remembering how in the heady intellectual excitement of my days at Smith, we would linger outside Hans Kohn’s history class, or Otto Kraushaar’s philosophy class, or Kustchnig’s on government, arguing about communism, fascism, democracy, war and peace, capitalism and workers’ exploitation, and the future. What were students arguing about in 1957? And those young women, in their white dresses and black robes – who had walked with their red roses through the ivy chain as we had not, in the foregone Ivy Days of World War II – looked at us as if we were aliens from another planet.
‘We don’t get excited about things like that,’ one explained. ‘I’m going to get married right after graduation. I spend every weekend with my fiancée. What I’m interested in is where we’re going to live and his career. I want to have four children, and live somewhere where I can spend a lot of time ice-skating with them.’ Try as we might, we, who were revelling in being together again, in the college where we had acquired a passionate commitment to politics, a sense of personal responsibility for our society, for making it better, and had gotten an authentic taste of what that might be like, running the student government, the college paper – try as we might, we couldn’t get these fifties seniors to admit they had become interested in anything, at that great college, except their future husbands and children and suburban homes.
I sensed something strange going on here, juxtaposing these young ones’ carefully limited dreams with the results of my own class questionnaire. I didn’t think Smith education could have deteriorated that much; a lot of the faculty that had inspired me were still there… It was as if something was making these girls defensive, inoculating them against the larger interests, dreams and passions really good higher education can lead to. Did lead to, with me and my classmates, even if we felt we weren’t doing justice to it, living up to it. It was as if these young women weren’t going to let themselves have those larger passions and trained abilities that might indeed be frustrated by suburban housewife life.
And so I went home and wrote my article for McCall’s – ‘Are Women Wasting Their Time in College?’ – suggesting maybe it wasn’t higher education making American women frustrated in their role as women, but the current definition of the role of women. McCall’s turned it down. (I learned later that the male editor of McCall’s had been ‘shocked’ at that article, though the women subeditors had tried to get it in. I’d never had that experience before.) Then the Ladies Home Journal rewrote it to say the opposite of what I’d found, and I took the article back. I wouldn’t let them mess with my findings that way. And then Bob Stein at Redbook wrote my agent: ‘Betty has always done good work for us before. But she must be going off her rocker. Only the most neurotic housewife will identify with this.'
Each time my article got turned down, I’d do more interviews. I interviewed doctors and counsellors and did group interviews among my own suburban neighbors in Rockland County, in Westchester. And increasingly, I knew it wasn’t just overeducated Smith graduate I was writing about.
It was on an April morning in 1959 that I listened to a mother of four, having coffee with four other mothers in a suburban development fifteen miles from New York, say in a tone of quiet desperation ‘the problem.’ And suddenly I sensed that they all seemed to share the same problem. ‘I’m Jim’s wife, and Janey’s mother, a putter on of diapers and snowsuits, a server of meals, a Little League chauffeur. But who am I, as a person myself? Its like the world is going on without me.’ And I identified what I later called ‘the problem that has no name.’
‘If a woman had a problem in the 1950s and 1960s, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage or with herself,’ I had written in the magazine article. ‘What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel mysterious fulfilment waxing the kichen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never knew how many women shared it.’
On a bus, taking my kids into the city to go to the dentist, I opened a letter from Marie Rodell, about yet another editor turning down my article, and I knew that the editor was wrong. All those editors were wrong. I’d wasted nearly a whole year on this article. But I knew now I was really onto something. I also realized, suddenly, why all the editors had turned it down, why it never would get printed in one of those big women’s magazines. It wouldn’t, because what I was finding out, from answers to the questionnaire – from new interviews with my own suburban neighbors and other real suburban housewives – and what I’d started to write in my article somehow threatened the firmament they stood on, the very world the magazines were defining for women, the whole amorphous, vague, invisible miasma around ‘the role of women,’ ‘feminine fulfilment’ as it was then defined by men and psychological followers of Freud, and taken for granted by everyone as true. Maybe it wasn’t as true as it seemed. I hadn’t yet called it ‘the feminine mystique,’ but taking my kids to the dentist that day, I stopped at a pay phone and called my agent and told her not to send that article to any more magazines. I was going to write it as a book.