Read Online A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s by Stephanie Coontz - Free Book Online
Authors: Stephanie Coontz
Tags: Autobiography
Ads: Link
each course.”
A thirty-one-year-old housewife with four children proclaimed: “You have freed me from such a mass of subconscious and conscious guilt feelings, that I feel, today, as though I had been filled with helium and turned loose!” And a nineteen-year-old college sophomore enthused, “I was so enthralled, my heart beating only for the next word—next fact—next idea—I had to stop and do something to express my fervor: I splashed out a big sign, ‘YEA BETTY FRIEDAN’ to tape on the wall in front of me.”
A few housewives sent Friedan poems they had written. “Time goes on,” was the first line of one poem. “I stay behind.” Another ended with: “She waits/ Listening/ In the dead dark/ To the sea beating itself to death on the beach . . . /She died waiting.”
Many women offered themselves as case studies of how the feminine mystique had deformed women’s psyches. “I am a classic example of arrested development,” wrote one woman, referring to Friedan’s description of how women had been infantalized by society’s expectations. “I would have been the class of 1953 had I not dropped out of college after two years.... But my internal demand for self-expression . . . has been eating
away at me for about five years.” A Florida mother of four wrote that for years she had been trying in vain to explain to her husband her need “to have a purpose.” “All I’ve ever achieved was to feel guilty about wanting to be more than a housewife and a mother.”
Another woman, married eight years with two children, wrote that she had been “fighting a battle with the ‘feminine mystique’ for four years,” with a husband who “is very good as a husband but who believes women are inferior by the will of God, so it hasn’t been an easy struggle. Although I stood highest in my high school class and read constantly, none of my ideas were important.” She thanked Friedan for giving her “that extra boost I needed to know I am important to myself and my children and not just a diaper changer.”
In one letter, a woman described herself as “trapped, with no hope of freedom.... After twenty years of home, husband, and children, I finally got a chance to fulfill a dream. I went to college four evenings a week for two and a half semesters and then had to drop out. My husband gave me a choice—school or him. . . . I love my husband and so I gave up school. However, I will try to raise my sons to realize that women are people with the same dreams, hopes, and feelings as men. . . . I will also try to help my daughter realize you can be feminine, a woman, and a full person at the same time. It is too late for me, but not for them.”
Some women reported that they were reading the book with their husbands, and a few husbands wrote to say that they now understood their wives’ depression better and would try to help them pursue outside interests. One husband, a father to two girls, thanked Friedan for making him feel a little constructive guilt about women’s lack of options.
Other women complained that their husbands felt threatened, as one put it, by the idea “that I might have any interest other than him and the children.” In a January 1964 letter, a woman who had been “uprooted” by her husband to move “to the boondocks of Alaska” wrote: “All I can say Betty is your husband must be a gem. You should bow down to the East every night and give thanks to the proud, individualistic male who can allow his wife to find her identity without it dissolving their marriage.
To work in your direction would cost me my second husband as it did my first, so I’ll be a coward and bake my pies and tend my cottage and dream of all the prose I could write and the conversations I could have with interesting people.” As it turned out, Friedan’s marriage was not as solid as this woman assumed, and it fell apart soon after The Feminine Mystique became a best seller.
Some of Friedan’s readers were
A thirty-one-year-old housewife with four children proclaimed: “You have freed me from such a mass of subconscious and conscious guilt feelings, that I feel, today, as though I had been filled with helium and turned loose!” And a nineteen-year-old college sophomore enthused, “I was so enthralled, my heart beating only for the next word—next fact—next idea—I had to stop and do something to express my fervor: I splashed out a big sign, ‘YEA BETTY FRIEDAN’ to tape on the wall in front of me.”
A few housewives sent Friedan poems they had written. “Time goes on,” was the first line of one poem. “I stay behind.” Another ended with: “She waits/ Listening/ In the dead dark/ To the sea beating itself to death on the beach . . . /She died waiting.”
Many women offered themselves as case studies of how the feminine mystique had deformed women’s psyches. “I am a classic example of arrested development,” wrote one woman, referring to Friedan’s description of how women had been infantalized by society’s expectations. “I would have been the class of 1953 had I not dropped out of college after two years.... But my internal demand for self-expression . . . has been eating
away at me for about five years.” A Florida mother of four wrote that for years she had been trying in vain to explain to her husband her need “to have a purpose.” “All I’ve ever achieved was to feel guilty about wanting to be more than a housewife and a mother.”
Another woman, married eight years with two children, wrote that she had been “fighting a battle with the ‘feminine mystique’ for four years,” with a husband who “is very good as a husband but who believes women are inferior by the will of God, so it hasn’t been an easy struggle. Although I stood highest in my high school class and read constantly, none of my ideas were important.” She thanked Friedan for giving her “that extra boost I needed to know I am important to myself and my children and not just a diaper changer.”
In one letter, a woman described herself as “trapped, with no hope of freedom.... After twenty years of home, husband, and children, I finally got a chance to fulfill a dream. I went to college four evenings a week for two and a half semesters and then had to drop out. My husband gave me a choice—school or him. . . . I love my husband and so I gave up school. However, I will try to raise my sons to realize that women are people with the same dreams, hopes, and feelings as men. . . . I will also try to help my daughter realize you can be feminine, a woman, and a full person at the same time. It is too late for me, but not for them.”
Some women reported that they were reading the book with their husbands, and a few husbands wrote to say that they now understood their wives’ depression better and would try to help them pursue outside interests. One husband, a father to two girls, thanked Friedan for making him feel a little constructive guilt about women’s lack of options.
Other women complained that their husbands felt threatened, as one put it, by the idea “that I might have any interest other than him and the children.” In a January 1964 letter, a woman who had been “uprooted” by her husband to move “to the boondocks of Alaska” wrote: “All I can say Betty is your husband must be a gem. You should bow down to the East every night and give thanks to the proud, individualistic male who can allow his wife to find her identity without it dissolving their marriage.
To work in your direction would cost me my second husband as it did my first, so I’ll be a coward and bake my pies and tend my cottage and dream of all the prose I could write and the conversations I could have with interesting people.” As it turned out, Friedan’s marriage was not as solid as this woman assumed, and it fell apart soon after The Feminine Mystique became a best seller.
Some of Friedan’s readers were
Similar Books
