One telling historical note from the same year that
has always impressed me—and my students when I recount it—involved the marriage
of Katharine Meyer to the journalist Philip Graham. Meyer’s father, Eugene,
owned The Washington Post Company, where his daughter and his new son-in-law
both worked. On the occasion of their marriage, Eugene Meyer simply handed over
ownership of the family’s flagship newspaper to Mr. Graham. Mrs. Graham noted
in her autobiography, titled Personal History, that, “Far from troubling me
that my father thought of my husband and not me, it pleased me. In fact, it
never crossed my mind that he might have viewed me as someone to take on an
important job at the paper.”
As it happened, Mr. Graham suffered from alcoholism
and mental illness, and before committing suicide, he sought to divorce his
wife for a much younger woman with whom he had conducted a quite open affair
around Washington. Had the divorce gone through, Mrs. Graham would likely have
lost not only her family’s newspaper but also her livelihood, to say nothing of
the incredible career she eventually forged after becoming publisher of the
Post and president of its parent company in 1963 upon Mr. Graham’s suicide—all
because her father did not think a man should have to work for his wife.
Suffice it to say that after the publication of The Feminine Mystique that
year, fewer and fewer people—both men and women—were thinking that way anymore.
Few works in all of American history have enjoyed a
greater impact, whether measured in political, cultural, or psychological
terms, than Friedan’s combination historical novel, manifesto, and cri de
coeur. Born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois, in 1921, she was raised
by immigrant Jewish parents. From an early age, she drifted toward journalism,
starting a literary magazine that was too controversial and thus went
unpublished in her high school. She then set out for Smith College—the famed
New England women’s school—in 1939, where she took a class with the wife of
future Sen. Paul Douglas (D-Il), Dorothy Wolff Douglas, who opened her mind to
the problem of female oppression. Goldstein planned to continue her studies at
the University of California, where she had won a fellowship, but she felt
compelled to turn it down when her success made her then-boyfriend nervous.
As a one-time supporter of former Vice President
Henry Wallace, Goldstein gravitated toward Marxism and landed a job as a
left-wing labor journalist. But after getting married and becoming “Betty
Friedan,” she quit her job and attempted to settle down into a life of peaceful
suburban domesticity. Deeply unhappy, she got back in touch with a number of
her college classmates from Smith and discovered she was not alone in her
feelings of dissatisfaction and lack of fulfillment. So Friedan set out to name
the disease ailing her and her friends. The result was The Feminine Mystique,
published in 1963. It was a “spirited intervention in a particular time and place,”
as the prominent historian of feminism Christine Stansell aptly noted—it was “a
flag planted by an outrider on a battlefield where armies were starting to
assemble.”
Friedan’s book was originally published during a
four-month newspaper strike in New York City and, as a result, made its way
into the world without much advertising or book reviews. The editors of both
McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal were fortunately willing to step away from
their usual domestic fare and offer excerpts of the book to their combined
readership of 36 million. The book’s publisher, W.W. Norton, arranged for a
book tour—which was unheard of then for an unknown author—and soon enough, the
first paperback printing sold 1.4 million copies. Friedan immediately began
receiving letters that read, “I feel, today, as though I had been filled with
helium and turned loose,” and “Like light bulbs going off again and again,” and
“I understood what I was feeling and felt validated!!” And a movement was born.
The book began with Friedan attempting to describe
her “sense of dissatisfaction” that sprung from a question asked by a
housewife: “Is this all?” The “problem that has no name,” as her first chapter
was entitled, centered around this vague sense of unhappiness that Friedan had
discovered in interviewing numerous women from Smith and elsewhere. “I just
don’t feel alive,” one woman told her. Friedan noted the pressure on women to
return to domesticity after World War II, believing it was exerted through
magazines and popular culture. She made clear that the problem went beyond
material concerns into a terrain of life that was more psychic and spiritual.
“Our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to
grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings,” she wrote, drawing upon
the teachings of the psychologist Erik Erikson, whose classes she took at the
University of California.
This sensible argument, though, turned sour toward
the end of the book, where she rather crazily compared the life of a postwar
suburban American housewife to that of an inmate of a Nazi concentration camp.
She insisted that, “The women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting
to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to
their own death in the concentration camps.” Even so, she struck a chord with
millions of women when she called on women to find “creative work of [their]
own” outside the home, proposing a kind of female G.I. bill that would let
women go back to college and get a degree so they could find work. Quoting the
president of Mills College, Friedan said women “should be educated so that they
can argue with their husbands.”
Although Friedan’s book suggested to some that she
was calling for a revolutionary form of politics—by citing problems that were
not material but more diffuse and spiritual and by invoking the legacy of the
Holocaust—her actual politics were quite conventional. She was just a liberal
who wanted to extend the rights that women enjoyed, just as liberal civil
rights leaders wished to do for African Americans and later for LGBT
individuals.
As the feminist historian Ruth Rosen notes, Friedan
sturdily resisted pressure to link feminism with issues of sexual freedom,
particularly free love or separatist lesbianism. She tried to steer the
National Organization for Women—the organization she helped establish—in a
middle-class, respectable, reform direction, making it simply a logical
extension of liberalism. And in this respect, she succeeded magnificently by
achieving a degree of success in her challenges of the comfortable thought and
life patterns of an entire country that few authors had achieved since Thomas
Paine published Common Sense in 1776.
A half-century later, we remain in her debt.
About the author: Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow
at the Center for American Progress and a CUNY distinguished professor of
English and journalism at Brooklyn College. He is also “The Liberal Media”
columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama, from which the
information about Friedan above is drawn and is being released in paperback
this week.
This article was published by the Center for
American Progress.
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