It is the incontrovertible assertion of this book that women should be educated and treated as individuals rather than functionaries whose jobs are predestined by nature. Why such a truism should be so much in dispute that it needs as long and as vehement a justification as this volume is, according to Mrs. Friedan, the fault of a postwar cult which she aptly names "the feminine mystique".
This mystique, she says, insidiously maintains that the highest value and only commitment for women is "the fulfilment of their own femininity". And that means the glorification of "Occupation: housewife" from natural childbirth and breastfeeding to baking your own bread, having majored in home economics. The mystique is Victorian homelife made roseate by the women's magazines and the ad-men, and made intellectually respectable by pseudo-Freud. It grew up partly as a reaction against feminism, and partly in a search for security after the last war, but principally through a mistaken choice. The women of America (Mrs. Friedan is American) thought that they had to choose outright between marriage and a career. Thus instead of studying pure mathematics at college they learnt how "to play the role of woman", and once they were inside the home the salesmen saw that they stayed there, penned.
The results, we are told, of early marriage and interests centred exclusively on the home are frustrated, stunted wives, nagged husbands and passive, smothered children. Contrary to common belief, Mrs. Friedan argues, the more education a woman has, the happier is her marriage likely to be and the more often is she likely to achieve orgasm in sex. Moreover, women who have jobs feel less tired than those who stay at home, do their housework in less time and consult the analyst less frequently.
This mystique, then, is an angst of America, where more girls start (but do not all finish) college and where parent-teacher associations and dishwashers both proliferate. But the symptoms detailed are evident here, in less overt but equally dangerous form, to take but the one example of the long, heated and often obscurantist correspondence which took place a few years ago in The Times on how girls should be educated. The problem is without doubt real and great, and the important question is what to do about it.
"A massive attempt", says Mrs. Friedan, must be made by educators and parents-and ministers, magazine editors, manipulators, guidance counsellors-to stop the early-marriage movement, stop girls from growing up wanting to be "just a housewife", stop it by insisting, with the same attention from childhood on that parents and educators give to boys, that girls develop the resources of self, goals that will permit them to find their own identity.
Agreed. But once a girl has chosen her satisfying career is it that easy for her to pursue it? Mrs. Friedan would grant that the most deeply committed professional woman will not be willing to hand her children of pre-school age to the care of another, even if there were adequate mother substitutes or creches available. Most women, then, face a period in their lives when they will have and want to spend at least part of their time at home. The difficulty, somewhat underestimated here, is how to get into gear for the rest of the time.
Mrs. Friedan feels that if a woman is determined enough she can keep up her vocation. The creative arts can, to some extent, be practised on a part-time basis; so can medicine, teaching and journalism. But the trouble is that on neither side of the Atlantic is there enough part-time employment of a responsible nature.
There remains in addition, and discussed little by Mrs. Friedan, that large section of the female population which, in this country at any rate, never aspires beyond the minimum statutory education. The Crowther report and every subsequent relevant analysis have shown that at each stage fewer girls than boys feel the urge to seize the educational ladder. These early leavers are even more susceptible than college girls to the ills of boredom and vacuity after even earlier marriage and with the aid of more and more automation in the home. Here again it is political action that is needed, from better initial education (less emphasis on typing and cookery in secondary modern schools?) to training schemes for those in their thirties and forties.
If, then, there is still a feminist fight to be fought it is for the right to work. And if they are to win it women must have all the ammunition they can of the calibre of this book. Mrs. Friedan may lack detachment but this is live sociology and her vigour is contagious.
.lcThis is a review of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which is for many a kind of feminist bible. Friedan called the frustration of home-bound, educated women 'the problem that has no name'.
