What Criticisms Has The Feminine Mystique Faced From Scholars?

My college love affair with The Feminine Mystique was excellent in many ways, but much has been revealed since to point out its limitations. Chief among these is the book’srather narrow constituency: middle-class, white, suburban women who have been tricked into thinking that there’s something lacking in their lives, and that work outside of the home is the only solution to this “dilemma” for them. Such a framing of course completely erases from consideration the experiences of women of color, women who work because they have to, women who for a variety of reasons have never had the opportunity to complete high school, let alone attend college.
Now, after having read so many more valuable accounts of women’s lives, some of the limitations of Friedan’s book in The Feminine Mystique are relatively obvious to scholars. For one, Friedan treats domesticity as if it were a pathology that needed to be cured – obviously problematic for those women who derived great personal and social meaning from their domestic work. Also, Friedan’s broad claims about culture in The Feminine Mystique are largely based on a rather narrow selection of sources, mainly lifestyle magazines, and a handful of interviews. Later, other feminists brought the issue of intersectionality to the study of women’s experiences. How do issues of race, class, and sex affect the experience of femininity? That broader perspective on women’s lives makes me realize, upon re-reading Friedan’s classic book, the many limitations of her approach.

I just finished reading The Feminine Mystique for our seminar and thus got to ponder the book’s historical impact and shortcomings in some detail. As we all know by now, the main problem that has no name that Betty Friedan uncovered was ‘a certain sentiment of sterilisation’, or in other words a feeling of discontent that no amount of education, personal growth or career development can alleviate. Many historians, feminist in particular, try to locate the problem in Friedan’s primary sources: women from the suburbs, from middle-class home environments, in advice columns, in clinical descriptions of female psyche. Women who were working in the factories, on the farms, as sharecroppers, in segregated schools – to them the ‘problem that has no name’ surely did not feel the same way.

Many others have pointed out that the book conceptualizes the problem as largely psychological and therefore solvable through education or a change in careers. Thus, in addition to overlooking major structural changes such as the implementation of childcare and labor laws, as well as antidiscrimination practices, Friedan failed to account for the limitations on personal freedom imposed by various intersecting systems of oppression. While the book provides an excellent starting point for further inquiry, subsequent scholars have greatly enriched and complicated the Friedan oeuvre.

I recently picked up The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan at a used bookstore. It is a powerful book and conveys a lot of frustration but, as I have learned from various scholarly sources, the book has a number of weaknesses and blind spots. Notably, the book centers on the experiences of suburban, middle-class, white women. They are portrayed as being trapped in unsatisfying domestic lives and The Feminine Mystique portrays their problems as if all women experience them in similar ways. In reality, of course, the experiences of women of color, of working-class women, of single mothers, and of lesbians are constrained by different sets of problems: economic necessity, racism, and lack of legal rights, for example.

Another serious criticism is that Friedan relied on interviews and magazine material from a very specific group of women from post-war America. While this led her to the discovery of the problem she sought to expose, the methodologies used mean that her broad conclusions are drawn from a very small and limited sample of material. The book portrays women’s dissatisfaction in terms of a psychological crisis of domesticity rather than examining the ways in which the structural limitations of labor markets, childcare, and racial and class hierarchies limit women’s choices. Further, Friedan’s solutions – education and careers – are based on the assumption that all women have access to these choices.

The book also had limitations around choices for women to pursue in terms of work and in terms of relationships and in terms of parenting and in terms of sexual orientation. Friedan could have easily highlighted the value and work of caregivers and chosen to emphasize a variety of choices for women in terms of relationships in order to be more inclusive of women of all sexual orientations.

A lot of the critiques of “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan, like so much of the feminism from the 50s and 60s, assume that women could choose to seek fulfillment in paid work if they wanted to. So many of the critiques of Friedan point out that she didn’t fully explore the issues of childcare, unequal wages, and the fact that in many households, two people work to make ends meet. In particular, many scholars have criticized Friedan for portraying stay-at-home mothers in largely negative terms, failing to recognize the often backbreaking labor involved in household work and caring for children.

Another persistent criticism leveled against Friedan’s book is the lack of visibility of women of color and of immigrant women. These are issues that have to be taken into account when thinking about policy solutions. While “The Feminine Mystique” is an incredibly influential book, it is fair to read it with the recognition of the many scholarly criticisms that exist of it.