As the Feminine Mystique is reprinted on its 50th anniversary, Catherine Scott looks at Betty Friedan's relevance today and the writer's influence on modern feminism
Betty Friedan speaks in New
York's Central Park in August 1971 Photo:
AP
The 50th anniversary reprint of The Feminine Mystique has spawned many
re-examinations of Betty Friedan’s ground-breaking book, which is often
pin-pointed as the first call to arms for second-wave feminists. Pre-dating
equal pay legislation, abortion rights and sex discrimination laws, the book
lambasted a society where women still couldn’t get bank loans without a
husband’s signature, and where the perfectly-turned out Betty Draper figure was
likely to be blunting her dissatisfaction with a handful of valium when the
kitchen door was closed.
However, when Ms. Magazine recently surveyed its readers about the
effect of The Feminine Mystique, many said the book's rallying cry to
women trapped in the role of dependent housewives feels dated for today’s young
feminists. It seems Friedan’s polemic serves more as an evocative portrait of a
troubled generation of housewives, rather than as a guidebook for modern women.
To a member of the generation that might be called “fourth-wave” feminists,
my mother’s fights for the right to wear trousers or cohabit before marriage
strike me as mere historical battles. This is not because I’ve fallen victim to
the attractive and anaesthetising fiction that feminism’s work is done – it’s
more that I believe today’s young women face such a spectrum of obstacles that
one single book can no longer address them.
The complex concept of “intersectionality”, for example, was unfamiliar to
Friedan and her generation, whereas today’s feminists are much more aware of how
race, class, sexuality and gender presentation are woven into the tapestry of
problems that women face. Feminism Is For Everybody (2000) by “bell
hooks” (the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins) echoes Friedan’s concerns that
women’s labour in the home remains unpaid and unappreciated, but she points out
that much of second-wave feminism involved demanding rights for already
privileged white women, while “black females [remained] at the bottom of the
economic totem pole”.
Friedan was also initially hostile toward the “lavender menace” of lesbianism
within the feminist movement, and transgender voices went unheard in the
feminist movement well into the third wave. Books such as Julia Serano’s
Whipping Girl (2007) and Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaws (2010)
have since addressed the need for feminists to support those who reject the
socially imposed "gender binary".
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