Melanie McDonagh
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In fact when you re-read TFM, what’s striking is that in 1963, Friedan was looking back, not just forward, to a golden age of feminism. She mused nostalgically about the Thirties, when educated women cheerfully entered the professions, didn’t drop out of college in great numbers, and didn’t have qualms about using their degrees to become professors.
Friedan herself maintained that her own turning point was when she turned down the chance to take a university fellowship because her boyfriend was
envious of her success. Yet the women before her were, oddly enough, more feminist than the women of her generation who used their college degrees as a means of getting married and as a springboard back into the home, where domesticity drove them mad. She summed it up as ‘the problem that has no name’, the intellectual frustration of educated housewives, and it was very much a post-war problem.
Today, The Feminist Mystique’s limitations are all too apparent. Umpteen critics have made the point that the book doesn’t much mention black American women and working-class women. In fact, it reads like autobiography: it was written by an intelligent woman who didn’t make enough of her educational accomplishments for other college-educated women who gave up intellectual interests for marriage and children. She makes hair-raising observations about how housewife mothers give rise to homosexual sons; that was in the days when liberals didn’t have to subscribe to a package of progressive opinions to include gay rights as well as race, gender and the rest. I’m waiting for the edition of the book that simply excises the bit about ‘the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene’.
And it cheerfully ignored the most obvious problem that feminism created. Educated, professional women who ceased to be housewives didn’t do away with the drudgery of domesticity or the long-haul of childcare as TFM blithely suggested: they simply subcontracted it to other, rather less well-educated women, the way previous generations did to servants. Contemporary Betty Friedans have Hispanics to do their housework for them; British ones have Poles and Filipinas.
But the book has, rereading it now, an oddly contemporary bite. Compare and contrast TFM with the new manual for women written by Sheryl Sandberg, head honcho of Facebook: Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Succeed, out this month in the US. Its conclusions, as you’d expect, have been extensively aired. Fans of the book include Chelsea Clinton and Condoleeza Rice and it’ll be the stuff of umpteen newspaper features over here — actually, they’ve already started — involving photogenic young women professionals with a writhing child in one hand and a mobile in the other.
It’s plainly less scholarly than TFM — no digressions on Freud and Margaret Meade here — but it’s about the same phenomenon, the way women make decisions, quite early in their careers, to hold back from promoting themselves on the basis that they might have children. Young women, Sandberg says, don’t focus on the big picture. They don’t have the intellectual self-confidence of their male peers. As she observes of young female professionals:
These women don’t even have relationships, and already they’re finding balance, balance for responsibilities they don’t yet have. And from that moment, they start quietly leaning back [from their careers]. The problem is, often they don’t realise it.
This isn’t quite the flight from college to domesticity that Friedan identified 50 years ago, and it’s happening from a very different starting point. Not going for the top, not bragging, not demanding pay rises like men do, doesn’t quite equate to the whole Stepford Wives thing: Betty Friedan was concerned with the withering of women’s minds when they became housewives, not their equal pay status.
But it’s still the same phenomenon as TFM was written about: women putting themselves down, and putting children, or the prospect of children, ahead of ambition at work. And now, as half a century ago, it’s a problem of women’s own making. Though that, I’d say, begs the large question of whether it is a problem; children are a perfectly natural priority, and human happiness doesn’t amount to a gender balance among CEOs. To be fair, the Facebook lady doesn’t say that. What she does say is that the biggest barrier between women and success at work is not (just) men or institutions; it’s themselves.
Fifty years go, Betty Friedan observed that women weren’t corralled away from work: ‘the choice, and the race back home was finally their own’. If it was true then, it seems it’s true now.
Because you read about feminism
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