Free The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan Page B

world, ideas, issues, art and science; replacing the stories about adventurous spirited women. And whether the victim is man, woman or child, whether the living death is incurable cancer or creeping paralysis, the housewife reader can identify.
    Writing for these magazines, I was continually reminded by editors “that women have to identify.” Once I wanted to write an article about an artist. So I wrote about her cooking and marketing and falling in love with her husband, and painting a crib for her baby. I had to leave out the hours she spent painting pictures, her serious work—and the way she felt about it. You could sometimes get away with writing about a woman who was not really a housewife, if you made her sound like a housewife, if you left out her commitment to the world outside the home, or the private vision of mind or spirit that she pursued. In February, 1949, the Ladies’ Home Journal ran a feature, “Poet’s Kitchen,” showing Edna St. Vincent Millay cooking. “Now I expect to hear no more about housework’s being beneath anyone, for if one of the greatest poets of our day, and any day, can find beauty in simple household tasks, this is the end of the old controversy.”
    The one “career woman” who was always welcome in the pages of the women’s magazines was the actress. But her image also underwent a remarkable change: from a complex individual of fiery temper, inner depth, and a mysterious blend of spirit and sexuality, to a sexual object, a babyface bride, or a housewife. Think of Greta Garbo, for instance, and Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Katherine Hepburn. Then think of Marilyn Monroe, Debbie Reynolds, Brigitte Bardot, and “I Love Lucy.”
    When you wrote about an actress for a women’s magazine, you wrote about her as a housewife. You never showed her doing or enjoying her work as an actress, unless she eventually paid for it by losing her husband or her child, or otherwise admitting failure as a woman. A Redbook profile of Judy Holliday (June, 1957) described how “a brilliant woman begins to find in her work the joy she never found in life.” On the screen, we are told, she plays “with warmth and conviction the part of a mature, intelligent wife and expectant mother, a role unlike anything she had previously attempted.” She must find fulfillment in her career because she is divorced from her husband, has “strong feelings of inadequacy as a woman. . . . It is a frustrating irony of Judy’s life, that as an actress she has succeeded almost without trying, although, as a woman, she has failed . . .”
    Strangely enough, as the feminine mystique spread, denying women careers or any commitment outside the home, the proportion of American women working outside the home increased to one out of three. True, two out of three were still housewives, but why, at the moment when the doors of the world were finally open to all women, should the mystique deny the very dreams that had stirred women for a century?
    I found a clue one morning, sitting in the office of a women’s magazine editor—a woman who, older than I, remembers the days when the old image was being created, and who had watched it being displaced. The old image of the spirited career girl was largely created by writers and editors who were women, she told me. The new image of woman as housewife-mother has been largely created by writers and editors who are men.
    â€œMost of the material used to come from women writers,” she said, almost nostalgically. “As the young men returned from the war, a great many women writers dropped out of the field. The young women started having a lot of children, and stopped writing. The new writers were all men, back from the war, who had been dreaming about home, and a cozy domestic life.” One by one, the creators of the gay “career girl” heroines of the thirties began to