After many years of avoiding it, I did, in fact, read “The Feminine Mystique” in 2025 (full disclosure: I skimmed parts in the middle…). It’s a tome at the heart of the modern feminist movement, unavoidable if you look deep enough. When I picked it up on hold the library, I was taken aback by its excessive length. Many powerhouse books, culture-makers and trendsetters, are slim, incisive.
The same cannot be said for Betty Friedan’s contribution to the misery of women everywhere. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages. The opening passage is legendary; whether or not you’ve read the book, you have probably come across its iconic description of “the problem that has no name.”
“Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question– ‘Is this all?’”
In the infamous words of Jordan Peterson with his inimitable Canadian tongue, “Gawd, get a hobby!” Self-indulgent seems the word for this hyperbolic opener. Friedan does not acknowledge the unique, American post-war years that led to excess leisure and idleness. Betty has a lot to say about how miserable housewives were. Did she mention anything about how men might be feeling? No. Because the patriarchy made men happy for too long. They don’t deserve the question.
Her entire premise is that idealized femininity is created by men to dupe women into self-suppression and superficiality. I’ve always been attracted, quite naively, to the “Mystique” in the title. It is so widely known that you encounter it at a young and impressionable age; your reaction is instinctive and unfiltered. When I heard “Feminine Mystique” I thought it was an articulation of the unique positive attributes of women. “I want that!” was my first thought. Ah, but alas, in the drab world of feminism there is no difference between men and women, all perceived differences are fabricated by the men who want women to suffer.
This brings me back to something I’ve wondered about before…if “the patriarchy” got together and figured out how to engineer women to bear children while getting themselves off scot-free in the continuation of the species, those guys would be so smart, they deserve to be in charge. But, of course, men did not figure out how to oppress women in this fashion. It’s not within their power. As a matter of fact, we could take a different perspective and consider whether it is inherently oppressive to have a unique and powerful capacity. There is this mystery, mystique if you will, that we awake to reality in which women have this power to transmit new life. Shouldn’t that inspire curiosity?
Not for Betty. Ironically, it seems it was Ms. Friedan and her pals in the magazine industry, not living a particularly feminine existence, who attempted to fabricate some kind of mystique through bland stories that they thought appealed to women and would move a lot of magazines, selling a lot of add space. The fact that she fabricated does not mean that all femininity is a lie.
It’s undeniable that women are attractive. If a woman wears a sundress and is accompanied by small children, people are gobsmacked by a thing of beauty. Not because that particular woman is necessarily anything exceptional, but because something beautiful—feminine—calls out to others. The cashier might reminisce about how his mother used to dress. A neighbor from afar might approach to proclaim that the children look like a painting. Happily married men will recount being moved to say something to such a woman but holding back because there is, of course, no way to do so without coming across as creepy. If there were not actually something unique to women doing womanly things, how could such an image have such a powerful effect?
Seeing a woman at a distance looking beautiful: there’s something powerful about that image that transcends the individuals. She becomes a feminine form standing for a gentle and soft person to welcome us, which is the essence of what it is to be feminine. It’s much more than sundresses, it’s an essence, a mystique, if you will. Wherever Betty’s tortured soul lies, she must be screaming in rage at this point because we’re supposed to reject all that and wear androgynous cargo pants and demand equal pay. Phooey.
I felt pinpointed by her diatribe against the Catholic Church. There is no greater articulation of the Feminine Mystique as it really exists than in the person of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and in rightly elevating the Mother of God, the Catholic Church has a unique and lofty view of women (Ha! That characterization of mine will get up the hackles of any card-carrying feminist). Lines in Friedan’s work, minus a sneering contempt at the edges, could have been lifted directly from Fulton Sheen’s “World’s First Love,” his meditations on Mary. Sheen’s meditations seem so pointedly to respond to Friedan that I thought his might have been published after “The Feminine Mystique.” Turns out, “World’s First Love” appeared a full decade before Friedan’s monumental work and, perhaps, fueled her ire.
From Friedan’s perspective, she has a point. She clearly was not happy. But if your starting premise is, as reality suggests, that there is a Creator of all things who is eternal, the feminine form becomes powerful through surrender, a way of being incomprehensible to Friedan and her materialism.
From almost lofty philosophical heights, Friedan launches into endless dissecting of magazine stories from the 1950s and ‘60s. She goes on and on about these stories, many of them light-hearted and realistic. Friedan holds them up as horrific examples of the oppression of women, yet it’s hard to do that when you realize just how true to life they are. Not to denigrate women but to observe that on average women have foibles, and the stories bring them to light comically. I was tickled by the story of the young mother who hatches a plan to earn spending money through a lunch sandwich business out of her home. But she accidentally buys a gross of sandwich bags not realizing that that means many thousands of bags, and, at the same time becomes afflicted with morning sickness and overwhelmed by lunch orders. Her husband rescues her by saying he will just give her spending money and she doesn’t need to do this. She is relieved and decides to hide the lunch bags behind the furnace to be used over many, many school lunches for their four children.
Friedan sees this as infantilizing, infuriating, and unjust. However, how many women do you know who go into businesses that are fundamentally unprofitable and extremely labor-intensive? There is a particularly feminine dysfunction (not exclusively) that looks a lot like what that magazine article describes, which is why someone wrote it in the first place. And there is much more of this absurdly overwrought analysis of magazine articles written by people who were not part of ordinary family life.
From there, Friedan roves through all manner of other subjects, including but not limited to strange analysis of early marriage in the mid-20th century. Certainly, it is unwise for some extremely young people to get married, but rattling off statistics is of dubious value. Also, who of the ardent feminists were marrying their daughters off at 15?
After that, it’s a truly insane turn with an analysis of the Holocaust. According to Friedan, the reason that the prisoners who so outnumbered the guards did not fight back in the concentration camps was not because they were in the throes of starvation, not because they were stripped naked and publicly humiliated, not because they were forcibly removed from their homes, separated from their families, psychologically brutalized, treated like cattle in conditions of unfathomable inhumanity. No, according to Friedan, the prisoners did not fight back, because they did not have paid jobs. If ever you were to sum up materialistic feminism, this might be its most succinct articulation: getting a paycheck for your job is what makes you human.
If everyone is most concerned with a paycheck, who is available to other people? Available to the infant, to the elderly, to the infirm? Who is there to listen and to care in an open-ended way that brings such comfort to the lonely and those forced to be idle? You cannot be adequately compensated for this kind of work, and, in many instances, if you are not secure in a relationship of interdependence with other stable adults, you jeopardize your financial future. That does not make you less human, though. Arguably, it is most humane for the competent and able-bodied adult to sacrifice himself for others.
It’s interesting that Phyllis McGinley’s book, “Sixpence in Her Shoe,” is called the book that “claps back at Feminine Mystique” when it doesn’t even mention Friedan’s screed. And yet, after long reflection since I read the book early last year, perhaps one could say a feminine pause, a moment to contemplate without needlessly giving an opinion, it makes sense that Phyllis McGinley’s work could be seen as a response. It is a counterpoint delivered in a radically different language.
When approaching Friedan’s book, you could go line by line questioning and poking holes and disagreeing. But, fundamentally, the difference that matters is in the worldview. The assertion that there is no difference between men and women; that all that’s holding women back from top-notch careers is a fabricated belief in the feminine. These castles in the air dissolve in the hands of one closer to the way things really are. Living happily as a woman with a man, making a home, and sharing a life, the differences assert themselves with all the interesting variations of the individuals involved.
The best way to respond to for Friedan is, as Phyllis McGinley might have seen, to deeply enjoy the feminine frivolous fun, simple pleasures, caring for other people, making meals. These bodily things that we can dismiss as being meaningless or of little value form the substance of our daily life and furnish the inner worlds from which our children develop. Trying to engage directly with The Feminine Mystique would be folly, defiling you with its bitterness as you try to explain it is unnecessary to be so bitter.
Women convinced that anger is the only proper response to womanhood as it exists in our world can occasionally sound convincing. All it takes to deflate that hot and angry bubble is to meet one, singular woman at peace with herself and joyful in her circumstances, which are never perfect. That one joyful woman (brainwashed, the feminists will say) exudes the real “feminine mystique,” joyful receptivity to the world and the people in it. This disposition of the happy woman demonstrates, once again, that suffering is compatible with and deep abiding joy.
