Daniel Horowitz's Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique

...Rum ROSEN, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, is the editor of The Maimie Papers and the author of The Lost Sisterhood, Prostitution in America and a forthcoming book titled The World Split Open: How the Women's Movement Changed America, to be published by Viking in early 2000...

...But it took Friedan to put that secret onto the national political agenda.' Friedan's career as a whole, as Horowitz's book reveals, has always focused on social and economic justice, rather than on lifestyle issues...

...3 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 25...

...By 1960, when the mass media, including almost all the women's magazines, suddenly discovered what they dubbed "The Trapped Housewife," the woes of the suburban housewife were already less than a well-kept secret...

...To his great credit, Daniel Horowitz, who labored long in the archives, has produced a fascinating, even riveting, account of how the legacy of one generation of women of the American left ended up influencing and shaping a generation of New Left women...

...But that was not his goal...

...They blessed Friedan, described their despair, and begged for advice about how to change their lives...

...I have just finished reading your splendid book and want to tell you how excited and delighted I am with it...

...Written by hand, sometimes in crayon or pencil, some letters were barely literate, and not the products of college graduates, but these women, too, knew that something was seriously wrong with their lives...

...In search of stimulation, some housewives sought out sexual affairs or volunteered their time to churches, schools, and charitable organizations...

...The continuity between women of the Old and New Left is a missing link in twentieth-century political and social history...

...Blessed with good providers, nice homes, and healthy children, they puzzled over their unhappiness...

...At the same time, Friedan—and other women like her—also had the political savvy and experience to realize that how you dressed, how you cut your hair, whether or not you wore make up, where you worked and with whom you slept, did not necessarily make you a radical or define a revolutionary politics...

...the search for a new job...

...But to women in and around the Popular Front of the 1930s (the loose political alliance against fascism among communist, progressive, and labor groups), the very word "feminist" conjured up images of spoiled bourgeois ladies who voted Republican...

...even simple symbolic acts like the purchase of a toy stethoscope for a baby daughter...

...Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, p. 44.This included the New York Times, Newsweek, Harper's Bazaar, Redbook, Time, and CBS Television...

...A naive pioneer in the field of women's history, I knew that there had to be more than Kennedy liberalism, the civil rights movement, and the student and antiwar movements...

...Although our historical amnesia is gradually being replaced with reluctant memories, Daniel Horowitz's splendid new book, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique, will still surprise—even shock—many Americans because he directly links modern feminism to the left of the thirties and forties...

...Above all, his book demonstrates the historical significance of their leftist feminism and honors their extraordinary accomplishments...

...For some women, Friedan's revelations came not a minute too soon...

...McCall's magazine, 1963, p.38...

...Eleanor Flexner, quoted by Fitzpatrick, p. xiv...

...Readers came from backgrounds that bore little resemblance to that of the college-educated housewives whose complaints filled the book...

...Friedan called this inchoate unhappiness "the problem that has no name...

...Women of the left instead debated the "the Woman Question" or the plight of female workers, but certainly not the problems of middle-class housewives.' When Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, she chose to omit her radical past from her account of her life...

...Help...

...Peter Marshall," Life, 24, December 1956, pp...

...Still, I understand their fears...

...Some women stuffed their houses with shiny new laborsaving devices...

...Excerpted in several women's magazines, read by three million people, debated in the Boston Globe, the book reached a huge population of American women and men.' Using the language of personal growth, Friedan challenged women to live examined and purposeful lives...

...But in a country that had only recently passed through the violently anticommunist convulsion of McCarthyism, Friedan feared her ideas would be discredited if she focused on the problems of working women or advocated government intervention in the affairs of women...

...True, the Old Left had always raised "the Woman Question" and condemned "male chauvinism...

...McCarthyism drove many of them into silence and anonymity, but some kept the "woman question" alive in tough times, and taught a new generation of daughters their "mother tongue...

...By the time I got to college," she explained, "the first century of struggle for women's rights had been blotted out of the national memory and the national consciousness...

...After college, she joined the swirling intellectual and political world of leftist politics, worked as a journalist, and in 1947 married Carl Friedan...

...Through their local activism, they helped preserve a spirit that would prove crucial to the rebirth of the modern women's movement...

...With phrases as simple as that, Friedan opened a Pandora's box and out tumbled the unnamed complaints that would mobilize one potential constituency of the modern women's movement...

...It kept her from understanding the need to protect the rights of lesbians, whom she viewed as a "lavender menace" in the late 1960s...

...So she settled on a safer strategy, that of addressing middle-class white housewives as a sister suburbanite.' Gerda Lerner, a longtime activist and later a historian of women, worried about this decision...

...Many of these educated women, Friedan discovered, had nurtured dreams that were never realized, but also never forgotten...

...4 Even so, Friedan's accusations incited widespread hostility...

...we surely will never know all their names and accomplishments...

...She also had the political savvy to see the significance of their complaints and the skills with which to describe them movingly on paper...

...Among their many contributions, such leftist feminists gave a new generation of young women the gift of women's history...

...Not knowing that other women shared their troubles, they experienced them as personal and blamed themselves for their misery...

...For a lengthy discussion of the full impact of McCarthyism on American culture and society, see Ellen Schrecker's magisterial work, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988...

...Another major contribution to women's history that grew out of this cohort of committed political activists was "The Lady and the Mill Girl," an article by Gerda Lerner that described the ways in which the industrial revolution had affected women of different classes...

...Many were violently outraged,"she later wrote," at the charge that American women have been seduced back into the doll's house, living through their husbands and children instead of finding individual identity in the modern world...

...As a longtime activist on the antifascist left and in union struggles, and as an experienced labor journalist for the UE News, the newsletter of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, Friedan had early targeted the plight of women workers...

...Folder 617, Feminine Mystique Letters, Friedan Papers, Schlesinger Library...

...McCarthyism cast a shadow of self-censorship across the intellectual landscape—destroying a credible noncommunist left, squelching intellectual and political opposition, and forcing a political consensus that glossed over America's simmering racial, gender, economic, ecological, and social problems.' It instilled a deep habit of silence, even for those who were—and are— deeply proud of the political work and commitment that characterized their entire lives...

...Friedan dubbed this powerful belief system "the feminine mystique," and her book of that name became an instant best-seller...

...Born and reared in Peoria, Illinois, Betty Goldstein graduated from Smith College in 1942, already well versed in left-wing ideals of social justice and economic equality...

...The term "popular front feminist" is used by Daniel Horowitz to describe women of the Old Left who had always been interested in the problems working women faced...

...Early drafts of the manuscript, as Horowitz's research richly reveals, contained a far more daring vision, including a proposal for national legislation to create a "G.I...

...Some women painfully revealed their sense of hopelessness, the arrogance of psychiatrists they had consulted, the indifference of their husbands...

...We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says, 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home...

...Yet something always seemed to be missing...

...Gerda Lerner to Betty Friedan, Feb...

...With the publication of The Feminine Mystique, each dissatisfied housewife, at last, knew she was not alone...

...Like many women of the Old Left, Friedan had absorbed the discipline to keep her eye on social and economic justice, despite the cultural and social subordination women activists experienced...

...Her book reached an audience much broader than the women she had interviewed...

...An Introduction by Mrs...

...I can definitely trace the origins of my book," she explained, "to some of my contacts with Communists like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Claudia Jones (who was quite unknown to the large white community...

...It is a vital story, and a story well told...

...I was cursed, pitied, told to get psychiatric help...

...to go jump in the lake and accused of being 'more of a threat to the United States than the Russians.'" But many American magazines and journals reviewed The Feminine Mystique favorably...

...In the privacy of their suburban homes, these housewives revealed the depths of their despair to her...

...To quell their conflicts, some of the interviewees took tranquilizers, cooked gourmet meals, or focused obsessively on their children...

...Y ou have done for women . . . what Rachel Carson [author of the pioneering ecological expose Silent Spring] did for the birds and trees...

...This has been a strength as well as a weakness...

...In many ways, Friedan's background made her an ideal person to expose such domestic unhappiness to the American public...

...39-40...

...The postwar conviction that women should limit their lives exclusively to home and hearth had DISSENT / Summer 1999 111 tied them to the family, closed other opportunities, and crushed many spirits...

...Gerda Lerner, "The Lady and the Mill Girl," first appeared in Midcontinent American Studies, Vo 10, no.1, 1969...

...Ruth Rosen, "Feminism and Liberalism," Tikkun, (November 1988...

...Although she continued to write about women's problems throughout the fifties, Friedan never imagined herself a feminist...

...She and her husband then settled into a suburban life in which she experienced firsthand the isolation of a housewife...

...Many women gained invaluable organizing, oratorical, and writing skills as activists in labor unions, the civil rights movement, and other left movements...

...The Girls," Life, August 1949, pp...

...She ignored the different obstacles faced by working-class and minority women, championed careers as though women could easily find well-paid, meaningful work in a sex-segregated labor force, and failed to question the presumption that women bore responsibility for all domestic work...

...Interviewed near the end of her life, Flexner credited the left movement with opening up both the fields of African-American and women's history in universities...

...Among this cohort of politically engaged women was Betty Friedan, who in 1963 described herself as an "educated housewife," and published the results of interviews she had conducted with her former classmates from Smith College...

...6 FOR ALL its insights, The Feminine Mystique was not without shortcomings...

...Others wrote of the changes they were making: the return to school...

...Bill" to promote women's education...

...Cited and quoted with permission by Daniel Horowitz, "Rethinking Betty Friedan," American Quarterly, March 1996, pp.1-31 'Clipping, reviews of The Feminine Mystique, box 18, folder 676, Betty Friedan Papers...

...As I know from my own research, there are brave and brilliant women in their seventies and eighties who believe that Dan Horowitz has "outed them...

...Letter in response to the Feminine Mystique, folder 739, box 21, Betty Friedan Papers, Schlesinger Library...

...Surely, we had not invented the wheel...

...Letters arrived by the hundreds, as housewives poured out their confusion, despair, self-contempt, or determination to change...

...Later, Aileen Kraditor, another left activist, wrote Ideas of the Woman's Suffrage Movement (1965), an intellectual history of the nineteenth-century women's movement that would help jump-start the field of women's history.' Some of these women kept a very low profile during the fifties...

...New Left men had links with the Old Left, even when they defied or infuriated their radical elders...

...Where was our generational continuity to women of the past...

...pleaded one woman, "I have read your views on woman's emancipation and thoroughly agree with you on all accounts—but—how does one go about it...

...6,1963, box 201, folder 715, Betty Friedan Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University...

...True enough...

...BETTY FRIEDAN AND THE MAKING OF THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE: THE AMERICAN LEFT, THE COLD WAR, AND MODERN FEMINISM by Daniel Horowitz The University of Massachusetts Press, 1998 352 pp $29.95 IN 1967, when I first became immersed in the women's movement, I began searching for our origins in history...

...The incipient civil rights movement of the late forties and fifties produced many experienced female activists, some of whom would DISSENT / Summer 1999 113 influence younger women or turn into important feminist leaders themselves...

...But the only direct connections between women of the Old and New Left that I clearly recognized was that which yoked red-diaper daughters to their mothers...

...We will never know their numbers...

...But she also objected to Friedan's exclusion of black, poor, and working women, anticipating what would become a widespread criticism of the Feminine Mystique, as well as of the contemporary women's movement...

...Well acquainted with social and economic analysis, Friedan nevertheless focused on the psychological search for a new identity outside of the home...

...To ease her own burdens as a mother and a writer, she hired a housekeeper, but when other housewives described the isolation and narrowness of their lives, she clearly understood their frustration...

...2-3...

...I kept having the inchoate thought that something was missing, buried, just out of our sight...

...114 DISSENT / Summer 1999...

...When she became pregnant with her second child, she was fired by her employer—not an unusual experience for working women at the time...

...In short, her book was a call for self-realization, not a statement of feminist public policy...

...In 1952, she wrote a manual titled UE Fights for Women Workers, which described how the most communistinfluenced union of the postwar era had fought the discrimination practiced against women workers...

...Readers of her book imagined her as a sister housewife, trapped in the gilded cage of a suburban home, restless and impatient to lead a life of her own...

...But Friedan made a choice to be heard, not to be red-baited, and in America, that meant addressing the middle class...

...So she concentrated on the power of the feminine mystique, creating a concept through which she then accused the entire society and culture —the media, science, psychiatry, education, and social sciences—of a conspiracy to 112 DISSENT / Summer 1999 limit the lives of women...

...But even as she raised three children, she continued to write for mainstream women's magazines...

...Eleanor Flexner author of Century of Struggle (1959), the first accessible study of the suffrage movement, had worked in the Communist Party during the thirties, organized workers into radical labor unions during the war, and then worked in the Congress of American Women, a radical women's group devoted to economic, racial, and gender justice...

...IN FACT, Friedan already had a life of her own, one far more politicized than that of the average housewife or magazine writer...