Feminine Mystique: The Happy Housewife Heroine

“The Happy Housewife Heroine” image views woman’s only role as sexual: she is a maker of babies and exists to please and clean up after her husband, to not have any disturbing or challenging thoughts or ideas—for they would be unfeminine. The feminine mystique, is essentially, a glamorized version of the repression of women—and it is perpetuated by male editors back home from war who want women to remain at home, ready to comfort them and too helpless to challenge them. Friedan notes that as magazines perpetuate the image, research shows that women struggle to be happy under it: women strain to be glamorous, try to be happy about owning lots of material goods, or are patronized by magazines that use large type fonts—as if readers are children.
The daughters recognize their mothers’ unhappiness, but don’t know what to do about it—and repeat the cycle, bowing to pressure to be properly “feminine” and popular enough to get married and become a housewife. Many of the teens Friedan interviews speak about wanting to remove their individuality to fit in, both with their peer groups and on dates. The stereotype of the unhappy “old maid” is strong for this generation, but there is no longer a stereotype of strong and independent women for these girls to emulate. Friedan describes how society acknowledges that women have a “role crisis,” but suggests that societal definitions of the crisis say the problem exists because women can’t accept the limits of their role, whereas, in her opinion, the problem exists because the role is too narrow.
The feminine mystique won’t let girls grow up. It denies them from participating in a rite of passage described by the psychologist Erik Erikson, who said adolescents’ passage to adulthood is marked by crises and decisions requiring them to make choices and determine their own values and priorities. Women, Friedan writes, are told what to do before they get the chance to question their options, and, further, they aren’t aware of other options. Women, as of the late 1950s, are denied the right to change or shape their identity beyond their limited role defined
She notes that feminists were defined during the 1950s as man-hating or reactive against men, when, in fact, what these women wanted was their own rights independent of (rather than in reaction to) men. The heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll’s House easily leaves her husband to explore her own identity and role in the world apart from that of her spouse. Friedan writes: “It is a cliché of our own time that women spent half a century fighting for ‘rights’ and the next half wondering whether they wanted them after all.”
Friedan traces feminism’s links to independence in all forms, revisiting the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY—where women argued for the right to vote—and pointing out the ironic tenets of the Declaration of Independence which states that “all men and women are created equal.” Feminists have always been fought, categorized as man-haters or angry and inadequate women. Arguments based on nature, religion, and intellect are all brought out in the fight to keep women in their “God-given” role—in much the way pro-slavery advocates claimed the Negro was an animal or