Free A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s by Stephanie Coontz Page B

World War II, Friedan continued, “the image of the American woman as a changing, growing individual in a changing world was shattered. Her solo flight to find her own identity was forgotten in the rush for the security of togetherness. Her limitless world shrunk to the cozy walls of home.”
    How, asked Friedan, had the exhilarating embrace of individual identity and feminist ideals in the 1920s given way to a vision of feminine fulfillment that prevented a woman from using her capabilities, from “even dream [ing] about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife”? What produced the “strange paradox” of the 1950s and early 1960s, when just as professions finally were opening to women, the term “‘career woman’ became a dirty word”? How was it that in the space of little more than a decade, the feminine mystique had become “so powerful that women grow up no longer knowing that they have the desires and capacities the mystique forbids”?

    Friedan’s answer, described in painstaking detail in eight chapters packed with facts, figures, and quotations, was that the feminine mystique developed as part of a postwar backlash against the feminist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The attempt to drive women back into the home, she argued, was spearheaded by Freudian psychiatrists, conservative social scientists, and educators who increasingly claimed that when women prepared themselves for anything other than marriage and motherhood they were turning their back on their true feminine nature.
    Friedan acknowledged that women had not been forced into accepting the feminine mystique. The call for women to return to the home had tapped into pent-up desires for stability among people whose families had been disrupted by the hardships of the Great Depression and World War II. Focusing on the family also seemed to alleviate the anxieties unleashed by Cold War tensions. Responding to these inducements, and misled by so-called experts who explained that it was abnormal to want anything else, women made the “mistaken choice” to retreat into domesticity. “What happened to women is part of what happened to all of us in the years after the war. We found excuses for not facing the problems we once had the courage to face.”
    In Friedan’s view, women withdrew from the responsibilities and challenges of independence in the 1950s “just as men shrugged off the bomb, forgot the concentration camps, condoned corruption, and fell into helpless conformity.” It was easier and safer “to think about love and sex than about communism, McCarthy, and the uncontrolled bomb.... There was a kind of personal retreat, even on the part of the most far-sighted, the most spirited; we lowered our eyes from the horizon, and steadily contemplated our own navels.”
    Business interests enthusiastically promoted this retreat into personal life because they saw in it a tremendous opportunity to expand the consumer goods sector of the postwar boom economy. In an exhaustive review of 1950s advertising manuals and surveys, including studies provided by Ernest Dichter, the decade’s leading advertising guru, Friedan showed that manufacturers explicitly defined the ideal consumer as a homemaker
who could be convinced to see housework as a way of expressing her individual creativity and affirming her femininity.
    Friedan used the stunningly frank statements of the motivational researchers to reveal how they consciously tried to persuade women that buying household goods and foodstuffs would provide self-realization, sexual fulfillment, and a sense of eternal youthfulness. Advertisers became “the most powerful of [the mystique’s] perpetuators . . . flattering the American housewife, diverting her guilt and disguising her growing sense of emptiness.”
    The chapter titled “The Sexual Sell” still elicits a shock of recognition and resentment today, and it had a tremendous impact on readers at