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Smith Historian's New Book Overturns Image of ìFeminine Mystique" Author as Conventional Suburban Housewife. Documents Locate Betty Friedan's Radical Roots in Her Smith College Days--And Even Earlier
NORTHAMPTON, Mass.--Many readers know the story behind Betty Friedan's ìThe Feminine Mystique." Middle-class housewife feels trapped in motherhood but conflicted about careerism, discovers solidarity with her suburban sisters and writes manifesto launching the women's movement.
It's a great scenario, says Smith College historian Daniel Horowitz, but it's only partly true.
ìBetty Friedan was indeed, a suburban housewife," Horowitz explains, ìbut she was no ordinary suburban housewife. The roots of her feminism run much deeper than she has wanted us to believe."
In ìBetty Friedan and the Making of 'The Feminine Mystique': The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism" (University of Massachusetts Press), Horowitz draws on a range of new research, including Friedan's own papers, to trace the development of Friedan's feminist outlook from her childhood in Peoria, Illinois, through her wartime years at Smith College and Berkeley, to her decade-long career as a writer for radical labor journals.
As early as her college years at Smith (1938-42), Horowitz writes, Friedan began to advocate progressive causes, engage feminist concerns, and question social privilege, often via editorials in the student newspaper, which she edited. Later, in a decade-long career as a labor journalist, she wrote passionately about battles for pay equity, maternity leaves, and day care. But Friedan strategically downplayed her feminist consciousness, Horowitz argues, both to sidestep the spotlight of McCarthyism and, later, to enhance ìThe Feminine Mystique's" appeal.
ìThe story Betty told, of being shocked at discovering the woman problem--in her own kitchen, as it were--made it possible for readers to identify with its author and its author to enhance the book's appeal," he theorizes. ìFor whatever reason she chose that strategy, it was a smart choice."
But, he says, Friedan's strategy hid from view the connection between the union activity in which she participated in the 1940s and the feminism she inspired in the 1960s.
Most historians have assumed that feminism in the 1960s--often known as Second Wave feminism--emerged without any connection to earlier equality movements, Horowitz notes--an assumption Friedan herself fostered. But in fact, Horowitz found, Friedan articulated many of the central premises of ìThe Feminine Mystique" as early as 1943, in an article for a labor union newspaper.
ìMen," she wrote, ìthere's a revolution cooking in your own kitchens--revolutions of the forgotten female, who is finally waking up to the fact that she can produce other things besides babies."
Knowing the depth of Friedan's feminist experience, Horowitz believes, doesn't in any way diminish the significance of her landmark book. Rather, it ìgives both feminism and Friedan a past of which they should be proud."
ìWhat I've presented is a story of Betty Friedan's life that is more heroic, interesting and compelling than the story of suburban captivity that she has offered," he says. ìThrough her life, I hope that we can also see the origins of 1960s feminism in more complicated ways."
Horowitz's book expands upon a 1996 article in ìAmerican Quarterly" titled ìRethinking Betty Friedan and 'The Feminine Mystique': Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America," for which the American Studies Association awarded him the Constance Rourke Prize. Horowitz, the Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman professor of American Studies at Smith, is the author of ìVance Packard and American Social Criticism" and ìThe Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940." In addition, he is the editor of ìSuburban Life in the 1950s: Selections from Vance Packard's 'Status Seekers.'"
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