The Feminine Mystique 50 years later

I read the Feminine Mystique for the first time when I was in undergrad. My friend, Big Kate (big for big old feminist awesomeness), and I regularly had conversations about feminism and politics. Big Kate and I were working at a bookstore, and we could barrow any books they had, and sometimes staff would order books we wanted to read. It was pretty awesome. But after talking to Big Kate one day, I was like well I need to read this if I’m going to talk about feminism in a coherent way. I think I read that back to back with the Second Sex, which was one of Big Kate’s favorites. I love it, but also knew some of it, like most of it, would never been applicable to my life while other aspects were very applicable.

The Feminine Mystique has been published for fifty years; five decades of women being angry and not having a name for it. And Michelle Dean for The Nation pointed out rightfully, that we’re all still concerned with Betty Friedan not being very likable. But no one seems to really care about her opposition to the lavender menace (which was the offensive term used to describe lesbians in the feminist movement during the second wave) or any of the things her argument didn’t include like people of color or different classes. However, Friedan didn’t need to include everyone, she was the first, and it is easy to point out the shortcomings, as we should, but we should also look at the work as intended.

Dean notes that discussions around the Feminine Mystique now focus more on Friedan and her likability. Dean posits that this might have something to do with how unfashionable second wave has become. According to Dean, young feminists are largely ignorant of the roots of feminism. Instead of being familiar with these authors, they have no actual knowledge about these authors just what they have perceived or heard about them. Dean also wonders if maybe one reason Friedan is off-putting because she openly expressed her anger, her rage, in a way that isn’t really socially acceptable. Not that it was all that socially acceptable at the time of her publication.

Let me unpack this a bit. There seems to be a real drive for women to be liked, and more so feminism has had a push to be liked to. The one aspect of Friedan’s book that spoke to most women was her anger, and was she ever angry. But I think back to Jessica Valenti’s video for posted on The Nation a few weeks ago about being feminists being angry. Valenti starts not by saying she is angry, but instead by focusing on all the other feelings she had ending in an affirmation that she was in fact angry. However, we’re all supposed to be polite and inclusive. So my anger might be very specific to me. It is an interesting phenomena where feminists are worried about being liked when the movement arguably started from Friedan’s anger. I think back to the hashtags from a few weeks ago: #thankafeminist and #IneedMasculismbecause. In both opponents to feminists took to the same tied old angry feminist trope. I kind of wish it were true. How different would things be if all the feminists were angry all the time and raising hell? Think we’d have all this personhood crap going on? But the point the #thankafeminist hashtag was to thank feminists, talk about how awesome they are, which is about likability.