The Feminine Mystique Read online

  In the early 1960’s McCall’s has been the fastest growing of the women’s magazines. Its contents are a fairly accurate representation of the image of the American woman presented, and in part created, by the large-circulation magazines. Here are the complete editorial contents of a typical issue of McCall’s (July, 1960):

  A lead article on “increasing baldness in women,” caused by too much brushing and dyeing.

  A long poem in primer-size type about a child, called “A Boy Is A Boy.”

  A short story about how a teenager who doesn’t go to college gets a man away from a bright college girl.

  A short story about the minute sensations of a baby throwing his bottle out of the crib.

  The first of a two-part intimate “up-to-date” account by the Duke of Windsor on “How the Duchess and I now live and spend our time. The influence of clothes on me and vice versa.”

  A short story about a nineteen-year-old girl sent to a charm school to learn how to bat her eyelashes and lose at tennis. (“You’re nineteen, and by normal American standards, I now am entitled to have you taken off my hands, legally and financially, by some beardless youth who will spirit you away to a one-and-a-half-room apartment in the Village while he learns the chicanery of selling bonds. And no beardless youth is going to do that as long as you volley to his backhand.”)

  The story of a honeymoon couple commuting between separate bedrooms after an argument over gambling at Las Vegas.

  An article on “how to overcome an inferiority complex.”

  A story called “Wedding Day.”

  The story of a teenager’s mother who learns how to dance rock-and-roll.

  Six pages of glamorous pictures of models in maternity clothes.

  Four glamorous pages on “reduce the way the models do.”

  An article on airline delays.

  Patterns for home sewing.

  Patterns with which to make “Folding Screens—Bewitching Magic.”

  An article called “An Encyclopedic Approach to Finding a Second Husband.”

  A “barbecue bonanza,” dedicated “to the Great American Mister who stands, chef’s cap on head, fork in hand, on terrace or back porch, in patio or backyard anywhere in the land, watching his roast turning on the spit. And to his wife, without whom (sometimes) the barbecue could never be the smashing summer success it undoubtedly is…”

  There were also the regular front-of-the-book “service” columns on new drug and medicine developments, child-care facts, columns by Clare Luce and by Eleanor Roosevelt, and “Pats and Pans,” a column of readers’ letters.

  The image of woman that emerges from this big, pretty magazine is young and frivolous, almost childlike; fluffy and feminine; passive; gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home. The magazine surely does not leave out sex; the only passion, the only pursuit, the only goal a woman is permitted is the pursuit of a man. It is crammed full of food, clothing, cosmetics, furniture, and the physical bodies of young women, but where is the world of thought and ideas, the life of the mind and spirit? In the magazine image, women do no work except housework and work to keep their bodies beautiful and to get and keep a man.

  This was the image of the American woman in the year Castro led a revolution in Cuba and men were trained to travel into outer space; the year that the African continent brought forth new nations, and a plane whose speed is greater than the speed of sound broke up a Summit Conference; the year artists picketed a great museum in protest against the hegemony of abstract art; physicists explored the concept of anti-matter; astronomers, because of new radio telescopes, had to alter their concepts of the expanding universe; biologists made a breakthrough in the fundamental chemistry of life; and Negro youth in Southern schools forced the United States, for the first time since the Civil War, to face a moment of democratic truth. But this magazine, published for over 5,000,000 American women, almost all of whom have been through high school and nearly half to college, contained almost no mention of the world beyond the home. In the second half of the twentieth century in America, woman’s world was confined to her own body and beauty, the charming of man, the bearing of babies, and the physical care and serving of husband, children, and home. And this was no anomaly of a single issue of a single women’s magazine.

  I sat one night at a meeting of magazine writers, mostly men, who work for all kinds of magazines, including women’s magazines. The main speaker was a leader of the desegregation battle. Before he spoke, another man outlined the needs of the large women’s magazine he edited:

  Our readers are housewives, full time. They’re not interested in the broad public issues of the day. They are not interested in national or international affairs. They are only interested in the family and the home. They aren’t interested in politics, unless it’s related to an immediate need in the home, like the price of coffee. Humor? Has to be gentle, they don’t get satire. Travel? We have almost completely dropped it. Education? That’s a problem. Their own education level is going up. They’ve generally all had a high-school education and many, college. They’re tremendously interested in education for their children—fourth-grade arithmetic. You just can’t write about ideas or broad issues of the day for women. That’s why we’re publishing 90 per cent service now and 10 per cent general interest.

  Another editor agreed, adding plaintively: “Can’t you give us something else besides ‘there’s death in your medicine cabinet’? Can’t any of you dream up a new crisis for women? We’re always interested in sex, of course.”

  At this point, the writers and editors spent an hour listening to Thurgood Marshall on the inside story of the desegregation battle, and its possible effect on the presidential election. “Too bad I can’t run that story,” one editor said. “But you just can’t link it to woman’s world.”

  As I listened to them, a German phrase echoed in my mind—“Kinder, Kuche, Kirche,” the slogan by which the Nazis decreed that women must once again be confined to their biological role. But this was not Nazi Germany. This was America. The whole world lies open to American women. Why, then, does the image deny the world? Why does it limit women to “one passion, one role, one occupation?” Not long ago, women dreamed and fought for equality, their own place in the world. What happened to their dreams; when did women decide to give up the world and go back home?

  A geologist brings up a core of mud from the bottom of the ocean and sees layers of sediment as sharp as a razor blade deposited over the years—clues to changes in the geological evolution of the earth so vast that they would go unnoticed during the lifespan of a single man. I sat for many days in the New York Public Library, going back through bound volumes of American women’s magazines for the last twenty years. I found a change in the image of the American woman, and in the boundaries of the woman’s world, as sharp and puzzling as the changes revealed in cores of ocean sediment.

  In 1939, the heroines of women’s magazine stories were not always young, but in a certain sense they were younger than their fictional counterparts today. They were young in the same way that the American hero has always been young: they were New Women, creating with a gay determined spirit a new identity for women—a life of their own. There was an aura about them of becoming, of moving into a future that was going to be different from the past. The majority of heroines in the four major women’s magazines (then Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Home Companion) were career women—happily, proudly, adventurously, attractively career women—who loved and were loved by men. And the spirit, courage, independence, determination—the strength of character they showed in their work as nurses, teachers, artists, actresses, copywriters, saleswomen—were part of their charm. There was a definite aura that their individuality was something to be admired, not unattractive to men, that men were drawn to them as much for their spirit and character as for their looks.

  These were the mass women’s magazines—in their heyday. The stories were conventi
onal: girl-meets-boy or girl-gets-boy. But very often this was not the major theme of the story. These heroines were usually marching toward some goal or vision of their own, struggling with some problem of work or the world, when they found their man. And this New Woman, less fluffily feminine, so independent and determined to find a new life of her own, was the heroine of a different kind of love story. She was less aggressive in pursuit of a man. Her passionate involvement with the world, her own sense of herself as an individual, her self-reliance, gave a different flavor to her relationship with the man.

  The heroine and hero of one of these stories meet and fall in love at an ad agency where they both work. “I don’t want to put you in a garden behind a wall,” the hero says. “I want you to walk with me hand in hand, and together we could accomplish whatever we wanted to” (“A Dream to Share,” Redbook, January, 1939).

  These New Women were almost never housewives; in fact, the stories usually ended before they had children. They were young because the future was open. But they seemed, in another sense, much older, more mature than the childlike, kittenish young housewife heroines today. One, for example, is a nurse (“Mother-in-Law,” Ladies’ Home Journal, June, 1939). “She was, he thought, very lovely. She hadn’t an ounce of picture book prettiness, but there was strength in her hands, pride in her carriage and nobility in the lift of her chin, in her blue eyes. She had been on her own ever since she left training, nine years ago. She had earned her way, she need consider nothing but her heart.”

  One heroine runs away from home when her mother insists she must make her debut instead of going on an expedition as a geologist. Her passionate determination to live her own life does not keep this New Woman from loving a man, but it makes her rebel from her parents; just as the young hero often must leave home to grow up. “You’ve got more courage than any girl I ever saw. You have what it takes,” says the boy who helps her get away (“Have a Good Time, Dear,” Ladies’ Home Journal, May, 1939).

  Often, there was a conflict between some commitment to her work and the man. But the moral, in 1939, was that if she kept her commitment to herself, she did not lose the man, if he was the right man. A young widow (“Between the Dark and the Daylight,” Ladies’ Home Journal, February, 1939) sits in her office, debating whether to stay and correct the important mistake she has made on the job, or keep her date with a man. She thinks back on her marriage, her baby, her husband’s death…“the time afterward which held the struggle for clear judgment, not being afraid of new and better jobs, of having confidence in one’s decisions.” How can the boss expect her to give up her date! But she stays on the job. “They’d put their life’s blood into this campaign. She couldn’t let him down.” She finds her man, too—the boss!

  These stories may not have been great literature. But the identity of their heroines seemed to say something about the housewives who, then as now, read the women’s magazines. These magazines were not written for career women. The New Woman heroines were the ideal of yesterday’s housewives; they reflected the dreams, mirrored the yearning for identity and the sense of possibility that existed for women then. And if women could not have these dreams for themselves, they wanted their daughters to have them. They wanted their daughters to be more than housewives, to go out in the world that had been denied them.

  It is like remembering a long-forgotten dream, to recapture the memory of what a career meant to women before “career woman” became a dirty word in America. Jobs meant money, of course, at the end of the depression. But the readers of these magazines were not the women who got the jobs; career meant more than job. It seemed to mean doing something, being somebody yourself, not just existing in and through others.

  I found the last clear note of the passionate search for individual identity that a career seems to have symbolized in the pre-1950 decades in a story called “Sarah and the Seaplane” (Ladies’ Home Journal, February, 1949). Sarah, who for nineteen years has played the part of docile daughter, is secretly learning to fly. She misses her flying lesson to accompany her mother on a round of social calls. An elderly doctor houseguest says: “My dear Sarah, every day, all the time, you are committing suicide. It’s a greater crime than not pleasing others, not doing justice to yourself.” Sensing some secret, he asks if she is in love. “She found it difficult to answer. In love? In love with the good-natured, the beautiful Henry [the flying teacher]? In love with the flashing water and the lift of wings at the instant of freedom, and the vision of the smiling, limitless world? ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I think I am.’”

  The next morning, Sarah solos. Henry “stepped away, slamming the cabin door shut, and swung the ship about for her. She was alone. There was a heady moment when everything she had learned left her, when she had to adjust herself to be alone, entirely alone in the familiar cabin. Then she drew a deep breath and suddenly a wonderful sense of competence made her sit erect and smiling. She was alone! She was answerable to herself alone, and she was sufficient.

  “‘I can do it!’ she told herself aloud…. The wind flew back from the floats in glittering streaks, and then effortlessly the ship lifted itself free and soared.” Even her mother can’t stop her now from getting her flying license. She is not “afraid of discovering my own way of life.” In bed that night she smiles sleepily, remembering how Henry had said, “You’re my girl.”

  “Henry’s girl! She smiled. No, she was not Henry’s girl. She was Sarah. And that was sufficient. And with such a late start it would be some time before she got to know herself. Half in a dream now, she wondered if at the end of that time she would need someone else and who it would be.”

  And then suddenly the image blurs. The New Woman, soaring free, hesitates in midflight, shivers in all that blue sunlight and rushes back to the cozy walls of home. In the same year that Sarah soloed, the Ladies’ Home Journal printed the prototype of the innumerable paeans to “Occupation: housewife” that started to appear in the women’s magazines, paeans that resounded throughout the fifties. They usually begin with a woman complaining that when she has to write “housewife” on the census blank, she gets an inferiority complex. (“When I write it I realize that here I am, a middle-aged woman, with a university education, and I’ve never made anything out of my life. I’m just a housewife.”) Then the author of the paean, who somehow never is a housewife (in this case, Dorothy Thompson, newspaper woman, foreign correspondent, famous columnist, in Ladies’ Home Journal, March, 1949), roars with laughter. The trouble with you, she scolds, is you don’t realize you are expert in a dozen careers, simultaneously. “You might write: business manager, cook, nurse, chauffeur, dressmaker, interior decorator, accountant, caterer, teacher, private secretary—or just put down philanthropist.…All your life you have been giving away your energies, your skills, your talents, your services, for love.” But still, the housewife complains, I’m nearly fifty and I’ve never done what I hoped to do in my youth—music—I’ve wasted my college education.

  Ho-ho, laughs Miss Thompson, aren’t your children musical because of you, and all those struggling years while your husband was finishing his great work, didn’t you keep a charming home on $3,000 a year, and make all your children’s clothes and your own, and paper the living room yourself, and watch the markets like a hawk for bargains? And in time off, didn’t you type and proofread your husband’s manuscripts, plan festivals to make up the church deficit, play piano duets with the children to make practicing more fun, read their books in high school to follow their study? “But all this vicarious living—through others,” the housewife sighs. “As vicarious as Napoleon Bonaparte,” Miss Thompson scoffs, “or a Queen. I simply refuse to share your self-pity. You are one of the most successful women I know.”

  As for not earning any money, the argument goes, let the housewife compute the cost of her services. Women can save more money by their managerial talents inside the home than they can bring into it by outside work. As for woman’s spirit being broken by the boredom of household tasks
, maybe the genius of some women has been thwarted, but “a world full of feminine genius, but poor in children, would come rapidly to an end.…Great men have great mothers.”

  And the American housewife is reminded that Catholic countries in the Middle Ages “elevated the gentle and inconspicuous Mary into the Queen of Heaven, and built their loveliest cathedrals to ‘Notre Dame—Our Lady.’…The homemaker, the nurturer, the creator of children’s environment is the constant recreator of culture, civilization, and virtue. Assuming that she is doing well that great managerial task and creative activity, let her write her occupation proudly: ‘housewife.’”

  In 1949, the Ladies’ Home Journal also ran Margaret Mead’s Male and Female. All the magazines were echoing Farnham and Lundberg’s Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which came out in 1942, with its warning that careers and higher education were leading to the “masculinization of women with enormously dangerous consequences to the home, the children dependent on it and to the ability of the woman, as well as her husband, to obtain sexual gratification.”