Book Reflection: The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

Feminism Looks Inward

Good morning! This is the second entry in my ongoing project to read some of the foundational texts of feminism in order to better understand the history of the movement. Today I’ll be reflecting on the second book on my reading list, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. I intentionally say ‘reflecting on’ rather than ‘reviewing’ because this book has been the object of scrutiny by scholars for 50+ years and I don’t presume I’m going to add a lot of insight; rather, this reflection serves to organize my thoughts and perhaps inspire some conversation on the roots of modern feminism. Let’s jump in.

Introduction and Style

The Feminine Mystique (hereafter TFM) was written in 1963 and is primarily concerned with examining the problems of post-war middle and upper class married white women, specifically stay at home moms. Friedan was a journalist who had written for a number of women’s magazines like Redbook and Good Housekeeping, and the book is written in that sort of long form magazine article style. It’s conversational but clear, and I appreciated the writing having worked through the dense and philosophical The Second Sex just before. Friedan names her problem up front, or rather she identifies a Problem That Has No Name, the ennui and lack of personal fulfillment experienced by a swathe of housewives who devoted the entirety of their life to their homes and families (really their children, husbands actually play a minor role in the book). That women should find fulfillment in this life rather than in careers or other forms of personal development is what Friedan means when she talks about ‘the feminine mystique’. It’s bit of an awkward phrase since normally I think of a mystique as something one possesses, but here’s it used to describe the societal expectations of what a woman’s life should be. The focus on women’s lack of fulfillment and interiority is a huge jumping off point from earlier first wave feminism with its emphasis on legal equality and sets the stage for what second wave feminism would become.

Time is a Flat Circle

One of the pities of reading older work like this is that there’s simply no way to replicate the impact it would have made on readers at the time. So many of the issues raised in TFM have become popularly understood as characterizing mid century women’s lives that the book doesn’t really hit as a revelation. One ‘aha’ moment I did experience however was in Friedan’s frequent reference to the relatively greater freedoms women enjoyed prior to World War 2. She points out that in the 1920s and 30s more women worked even after having kids and married later than in the immediate post-war 50s (That many of those women were doing dangerous and boring factory work and had to do it to bring in enough money to keep a household running goes largely unmentioned). The notion that the domesticity of the 1950s was actually a regression from greater freedoms women had experienced in the first half of the century was a new one for me, and it changed my understanding of the history of feminist gains. From a modern vantage point its very easy to think of these movements as representing monotonically increasing progress, but that’s really not the way feminism proceeded at all. There were ebbs and flows in women’s freedoms; the gains of one generation were not necessarily enjoyed by all subsequent ones. That this is so is visible today as modern feminists are experiencing the kind of reaction and pushback that many likely supposed was relegated to the past. And in fact Friedan identified some of the reasons for that pushback, specifically the way in which greater freedoms for women and especially their equality with or outshining of men in the workplace would represent a significant status threat to those men and change gender dynamics in ways that many of them would resist. It’s too bad she didn’t delve more deeply into what economic equality would mean for gender relations, but women operating in public life was not really her concern except to the extent it affected women’s inner lives.

Hinge Points

Sex differences are a subtext running through this work. The feminine mystique as described by Friedan presupposes that the conditions of women’s fulfillment are very different than men’s, that success in the external world shouldn’t really factor into the equation. That’s most of what she wrote the book to challenge! You see here some of the first seeds of denial of sex difference, though it’s extremely tame compared to what comes later in third wave feminism. There’s a recognition that the reality or not of sex differences (and if they are real their extent) must define the structure of the solution to the problem that has no name. The milieu Friedan was working in took for granted that sex differences existed, were huge, and therefore defined the structure of women’s fulfillment; as such it’s no surprise she pushes back hard against them. I bring it up because one of the major pushbacks we’re seeing in 2025 against contemporary feminism is against the notion that sex differences don’t exist or are so small as to be meaningless with a new wave of conservative feminists demanding that women have social permission to choose family over career, that being how far the pendulum has swung away from Friedan’s feminine mystique. I wonder what Friedan would have thought about declining marriage and family formation rates among the very cohorts she championed in TFM? Her victory over conventional notions of bourgeois feminine success was so total that 60 years later some women are now themselves fighting to retvrn to a world in which they can live as SAHMs and still get a little social respect. Though I think Friedan would have pointed out that the respect housewives got under the feminine mystique was not very fulfilling, coming as it did as a side effect of the achievements of their husbands and children. Subsuming your life to someone else makes you utterly dependent upon them for self esteem, and that’s what Friedan was rejecting. In any case it’s fascinating to read TFM’s discussion of innate psychological sex differences knowing now the degree to which their existence and extent define the attempt to synthesize modern feminism with trad family culture.

Bad and Boujee

Man is this book bourgeois. One of the main criticisms of TFM by later feminists, especially those concerned with intersectionality, is that it focuses solely on upper middle class white women. And that’s true, it does. Friedan is concerned with what is essentially a female leisure class. Many other women did have to work, and plenty of lower class women had more traditional feminist problems like their husbands getting drunk and beating them that simply don’t figure in Friedan’s account of middle class malaise. That said I don’t think any work needs to try and be all things to all people, and few criticisms are less interesting than ‘this book is bad because it doesn’t focus on the specific thing that I personally care deeply about’. The one way in which I think it does matter that TFM has such a narrow focus is that being such a foundational text in second wave feminism as well as a big popular success it defined the contours of what was popularly thought of as the feminist movement for years. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the runaway success and cultural impact of TFM solidified feminism in popular imaginations as concerned primarily with the psychological fulfillment of middle and upper class white women. When you think of feminist depictions of women in media from the 70s until today the image is often of a pants suited white woman walking into an office full of stuffy men and demanding an equal seat at the table. The success of the feminist movement has come to be judged by the number of women getting STEM degrees or working in the C-suite of large corporations. Not bad measures as far as they go but not applicable to the vast majority of women! I do wonder how the feminist movement would have developed had TFM and later Friedan’s National Organization for Women not been so focused on the problems of the white bourgeois woman because while later feminists like Kimberlee Crenshaw have had success in academia in broadening the conception of feminism I don’t think the intersectional view predominates in popular culture even today.

Phallic Symbols and the Lack Thereof

TFM reads in a much more modern way than The Second Sex, but one historical idiosyncrasy they share is an obsession with Freud. Freud has gone so out of style in psychological practice and popular culture both that it’s hard to conceptualize how pervasive his ideas were in the middle of the 20th century. His developmental model of human psychology was largely accepted as gospel, and as such Friedan can’t help but react to it. It’s clear from her tone she knows it’s mostly unsubstantiated bullshit, but that hardly matters given how definitive Freudian ideas were in defining the feminine mystique she was reacting against. I do think it’s a positive measure of the book’s influence that you never really hear the subjugation or othering of women justified in Freudian terms any longer. I’m looking forward to leaving Freud behind on my reading list, his ideas have had more than enough time in the sun given how arbitrary and speculative they are.

As much as Freud is a constant presence throughout TFM, other men are much less mentioned. As a modern reader I’m used to thinking of feminism largely in the context of gender war, but that theme is almost entirely absent from Friedan’s work. Given how much time she spends interrogating the feminine mystique there’s remarkably little space given to how it developed or the social structures that maintain it. The focus on women’s interior experience elides men and patriarchy from the book almost entirely. Which, to be clear, is fine. It’s a book about women’s experiences, there’s no reason to spend a lot of time talking about men. But it does represent a striking contrast to later feminist thought that is so focused on the ways men oppress women and have structured society to do so.

Afterword

My edition of TFM closed with a 1997 reflection on the book penned by Friedan herself. It’s one of the most interesting parts of the work because many of the consequences of the feminist movement she outlines, specifically the effect that women’s professional equality combined with changes in the economy that left many men less fit to fulfill their traditional role as provider for a family had on gender relations, presage the fights we’re having now over gender dynamics and family formation in 2025. She also notes with some regret how adversarial feminism became post TFM, and how the positive values of marriage and family where buried within the movement in favor of pursuit of strict gender equality. Which I agree with her on, but those who birth movements are fated to see them take on a life of their own whether they like it or not. And overall it seems that at the end of her life Friedan was proud of the work she did, which she should be. TFM is one of the most influential American social and political works of the 20th century, and it was a catalyst to a great deal of social change, most of it good.

From here the next book on the docket is Sexual Politics by Kate Millett. She introduced the concept of patriarchy to feminist discourse, and to be honest as a man I’m expecting this and many of the subsequent books on my list to take a dim view of me and my gender, but my project is about understanding not being flattered so soldier through I shall. Look for that reflection in another six weeks or so. As for Friedan, I’ve little left to say. It was a good book and I’m glad I took the time to read it, I’ve got a better understanding of second wave feminism than I had before. Have you read The Feminine Mystique? If so what did you think?

Miscellany, or The Endless Bookshelf

One reason it’s taking some time between these reflections is that I’m not just reading feminism. I typically keep about 6 books on rotation, and as it stands I’m actively reading a new and much lauded translation of Swann’s Way by Proust, re-reading The Republic by Plato, trying out a format I’ve not used in the past with The Politics by Aristotle on Audible, A Winter’s Tale (Folger edition, highly recommend them) by Shakespeare, and keeping some poetry on hand by Rilke, Neruda, and Ferlinghetti though I have to be honest, Ferlinghetti doesn’t really hit anymore in middle age (I loved the Beats and all associated writers as a young man). Somewhere out there is a half finished Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein which is really good but damn it’s a dense read. On deck I have a bunch of fiction that I just need to decide the order on. A new translation of The Idiot is promising as I love Dostoyevsky but have somehow never read this one, but I’m equally tempted to return to Japan as I’ve got some Murakami and Ishiguro that I’d probably enjoy more. An old friend also sent me a copy of Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian which I am totally unfamiliar with (it was a present in return for the 100 Years of Solitude that I sent him which he had sadly not yet read), I may take a flyer on that. Recommendations welcome.