The Feminine Mystique

  Maybe they hadn’t heard of them. Ideas are not like instincts of the blood that spring into the mind intact. They are communicated by education, by the printed word. The new young housewives, who leave high school or college to marry, do not read books, the psychological surveys say. They only read magazines. Magazines today assume women are not interested in ideas. But going back to the bound volumes in the library, I found in the thirties and forties that the mass-circulation magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal carried hundreds of articles about the world outside the home. “The first inside story of American diplomatic relations preceding declared war” “Can the U. S. Have Peace After This War?” by Walter Lippman; “Stalin at Midnight,” by Harold Stassen; “General Stilwell Reports on China” articles about the last days of Czechoslovakia by Vincent Sheean; the persecution of Jews in Germany; the New Deal; Carl Sandburg’s account of Lincoln’s assassination; Faulkner’s stories of Mississippi, and Margaret Sanger’s battle for birth control.

  In the 1950’s they printed virtually no articles except those that serviced women as housewives, or described women as housewives, or permitted a purely feminine identification like the Duchess of Windsor or Princess Margaret. “If we get an article about a woman who does anything adventurous, out of the way, something by herself, you know, we figure she must be terribly aggressive, neurotic,” a Ladies’ Home Journal editor told me. Margaret Sanger would never get in today.

  In 1960, I saw statistics that showed that women under thirty-five could not identify with a spirited heroine of a story who worked in an ad agency and persuaded the boy to stay and fight for his principles in the big city instead of running home to the security of a family business. Nor could these new young housewives identify with a young minister, acting on his belief in defiance of convention. But they had no trouble at all identifying with a young man paralyzed at eighteen. (“I regained consciousness to discover that I could not move or even speak. I could wiggle only one finger of one hand.” With help from faith and a psychiatrist, “I am now finding reasons to live as fully as possible.”)

  Does it say something about the new housewife readers that, as any editor can testify, they can identify completely with the victims of blindness, deafness, physical maiming, cerebral palsy, paralysis, cancer, or approaching death? Such articles about people who cannot see or speak or move have been an enduring staple of the women’s magazines in the era of “Occupation: housewife.” They are told with infinitely realistic detail over and over again, replacing the articles about the nation, the 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.

  “Most 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 retire. By the end of the forties, the writers who couldn’t get the knack of writing in the new housewife image had left the women’s magazine field. The new magazine pros were men, and a few women who could write comfortably according to the housewife formula. Other people began to assemble backstage at the women’s magazines: there was a new kind of woman writer who lived in the housewife image, or pretended to; and there was a new kind of woman’s editor or publisher, less interested in ideas to reach women’s minds and hearts, than in selling them the things that interest advertisers—appliances, detergents, lipstick. Today, the deciding voice on most of these magazines is cast by men. Women often carry out the formulas, women edit the housewife “service” departments, but the formulas themselves, which have dictated the new housewife image, are the product of men’s minds.

  Also during the forties and fifties, serious fiction writers of either sex disappeared from the mass-circulation women’s magazines. In fact, fiction of any quality was almost completely replaced by a different kind of article. No longer the old article about issues or ideas, but the new “service” feature. Sometimes these articles lavished the artistry of a poet and the honesty of a crusading reporter on baking chiffon pies, or buying washing machines, or the miracles paint can do for a living room, or diets, drugs, clothes, and cosmetics to make the body into a vision of physical beauty. Sometimes they dealt with very sophisticated ideas: new developments in psychiatry, child psychology, sex and marriage, medicine. It was assumed that women readers could take these ideas, which appealed to their needs as wives and mothers, but only if they were boiled down to concrete physical details, spelled out in terms of the daily life of an average housewife with concrete do’s and don’ts. How to keep your husband happy; how to solve your child’s bedwetting; how to keep death out of your medicine cabinet…

  But here is a curious thing. Within their narrow range, these women
’s magazine articles, whether straight service to the housewife or a documentary report about the housewife, were almost always superior in quality to women’s magazine fiction. They were better written, more honest, more sophisticated. This observation was made over and over again by intelligent readers and puzzled editors, and by writers themselves. “The serious fiction writers have become too internal. They’re inaccessible to our readers, so we’re left with the formula writers,” an editor of Redbook said. And yet, in the old days, serious writers like Nancy Hale, even William Faulkner, wrote for the women’s magazines and were not considered inaccessible. Perhaps the new image of woman did not permit the internal honesty, the depth of perception, and the human truth essential to good fiction.

  At the very least, fiction requires a hero or, understandably for women’s magazines, a heroine, who is an “I” in pursuit of some human goal or dream. There is a limit to the number of stories that can be written about a girl in pursuit of a boy, or a housewife in pursuit of a ball of dust under the sofa. Thus the service article takes over, replacing the internal honesty and truth needed in fiction with a richness of honest, objective, concrete, realistic domestic detail—the color of walls or lipstick, the exact temperature of the oven.

  Judging from the women’s magazines today, it would seem that the concrete details of women’s lives are more interesting than their thoughts, their ideas, their dreams. Or does the richness and realism of the detail, the careful description of small events, mask the lack of dreams, the vacuum of ideas, the terrible boredom that has settled over the American housewife?

  I sat in the office of another old-timer, one of the few women editors left in the women’s magazine world, now so largely dominated by men. She explained her share in creating the feminine mystique. “Many of us were psychoanalyzed,” she recalled. “And we began to feel embarrassed about being career women ourselves. There was this terrible fear that we were losing our femininity. We kept looking for ways to help women accept their feminine role.”

  If the real women editors were not, somehow, able to give up their own careers, all the more reason to “help” other women fulfill themselves as wives and mothers. The few women who still sit in editorial conferences do not bow to the feminine mystique in their own lives. But such is the power of the image they have helped create that many of them feel guilty. And if they have missed out somewhere on love or children, they wonder if their careers were to blame.

  Behind her cluttered desk, a Mademoiselle editor said uneasily, “The girls we bring in now as college guest editors seem almost to pity us. Because we are career women, I suppose. At a luncheon session with the last bunch, we asked them to go round the table, telling us their own career plans. Not one of the twenty raised her hand. When I remember how I worked to learn this job and loved it—were we all crazy then?”

  Coupled with the women editors who sold themselves their own bill of goods, a new breed of women writers began to write about themselves as if they were “just housewives,” reveling in a comic world of children’s pranks and eccentric washing machines and Parents’ Night at the PTA. “After making the bed of a twelve-year-old boy week after week, climbing Mount Everest would seem a laughable anticlimax,” writes Shirley Jackson (McCall’s, April, 1956). When Shirley Jackson, who all her adult life has been an extremely capable writer, pursuing a craft far more demanding than bedmaking, and Jean Kerr, who is a playwright, and Phyllis McGinley, who is a poet, picture themselves as housewives, they may or may not overlook the housekeeper or maid who really makes the beds. But they implicitly deny the vision, and the satisfying hard work involved in their stories, poems, and plays. They deny the lives they lead, not as housewives, but as individuals.

  They are good craftsmen, the best of these Housewife Writers. And some of their work is funny. The things that happen with children, a twelve-year-old boy’s first cigarette, the Little League and the kindergarten rhythm band are often funny; they happen in real life to women who are writers as well as women who are just housewives. But there is something about Housewife Writers that isn’t funny—like Uncle Tom, or Amos and Andy. “Laugh,” the Housewife Writers tell the real housewife, “if you are feeling desperate, empty, bored, trapped in the bedmaking, chauffeuring and dishwashing details. Isn’t it funny? We’re all in the same trap.” Do real housewives then dissipate in laughter their dreams and their sense of desperation? Do they think their frustrated abilities and their limited lives are a joke? Shirley Jackson makes the beds, loves and laughs at her son—and writes another book. Jean Kerr’s plays are produced on Broadway. The joke is not on them.

  Some of the new Housewife Writers live the image; Redbook tells us that the author of an article on “Breast-Feeding,” a woman named Betty Ann Countrywoman, “had planned to be a doctor. But just before her graduation from Radcliffe cum laude, she shrank from the thought that such a dedication might shut her off from what she really wanted, which was to marry and have a large family. She enrolled in the Yale University School of Nursing and then became engaged to a young psychiatrist on their first date. Now they have six children, ranging in age from 2 to 13, and Mrs. Countrywoman is instructor in breast-feeding at the Maternity League of Indianapolis” (Redbook, June, 1960). She says:

  For the mother, breast-feeding becomes a complement to the act of creation. It gives her a heightened sense of fulfillment and allows her to participate in a relationship as close to perfection as any that a woman can hope to achieve…. The simple fact of giving birth, however, does not of itself fulfill this need and longing…. Motherliness is a way of life. It enables a woman to express her total self with the tender feelings, the protective attitudes, the encompassing love of the motherly woman.

  When motherhood, a fulfillment held sacred down the ages, is defined as a total way of life, must women themselves deny the world and the future open to them? Or does the denial of that world force them to make motherhood a total way of life? The line between mystique and reality dissolves; real women embody the split in the image. In the spectacular Christmas 1956 issue of Life, devoted in full to the “new” American woman, we see, not as women’s-magazine villain, but as documentary fact, the typical “career woman—that fatal error that feminism propagated”—seeking “help” from a pyschiatrist. She is bright, well-educated, ambitious, attractive; she makes about the same money as her husband; but she is pictured here as “frustrated,” so “masculinized” by her career that her castrated, impotent, passive husband is indifferent to her sexually. He refuses to take responsibility and drowns his destroyed masculinity in alcoholism.

  Then there is the discontented suburban wife who raises hell at the PTA; morbidly depressed, she destroys her children and dominates her husband whom she envies for going out into the business world. “The wife, having worked before marriage, or at least having been educated for some kind of intellectual work, finds herself in the lamentable position of being ‘just a housewife.’…In her disgruntlement she can work as much damage on the lives of her husband and children (and her own life) as if she were a career woman, and indeed, sometimes more.”

  And finally, in bright and smiling contrast, are the new housewife-mothers, who cherish their “differentness,” their “unique femininity,” the “receptivity and passivity implicit in their sexual nature.” Devoted to their own beauty and their ability to bear and nurture children, they are “feminine women, with truly feminine attitudes, admired by men for their miraculous, God-given, sensationally unique ability to wear skirts, with all the implications of that fact.” Rejoicing in “the reappearance of the old-fashioned three-to-five-child family in an astonishing quarter, the upper-and upper-middle class suburbs,” Life says:

  Here, among women who might be best qualified for “careers,” there is an increasing emphasis on the nurturing and homemaking values. One might guess…that because these women are better informed and more mature than the average, they have been the first to comprehend the penalties of “feminism” and to react a
gainst them…. Styles in ideas as well as in dress and decoration tend to seep down from such places to the broader population…. This is the countertrend which may eventually demolish the dominant and disruptive trend and make marriage what it should be: a true partnership in which…men are men, women are women, and both are quietly, pleasantly, securely confident of which they are—and absolutely delighted to find themselves married to someone of the opposite sex.

  Look glowed at about the same time (October 16, 1956):

  The American woman is winning the battle of the sexes. Like a teenager, she is growing up and confounding her critics…. No longer a psychological immigrant to man’s world, she works, rather casually, as a third of the U. S. labor force, less towards a “big career” than as a way of filling a hope chest or buying a new home freezer. She gracefully concedes the top jobs to men. This wondrous creature also marries younger than ever, bears more babies and looks and acts far more feminine than the “emancipated” girl of the 1920’s or even ’30’s. Steelworker’s wife and Junior Leaguer alike do their own housework…. Today, if she makes an old-fashioned choice and lovingly tends a garden and a bumper crop of children, she rates louder hosannas than ever before.

  In the new America, fact is more important than fiction. The documentary Life and Look images of real women who devote their lives to children and home are played back as the ideal, the way women should be: this is powerful stuff, not to be shrugged off like the heroines of women’s magazine fiction. When a mystique is strong, it makes its own fiction of fact. It feeds on the very facts which might contradict it, and seeps into every corner of the culture, bemusing even the social critics.