The Feminine Mystique Analysis

Immediately following the conclusion of World War II, the average age of women getting married significantly dropped and the number of births skyrocketed. Young men and women yearned to settle down in the suburbs with white picket fences in order to have the perfect family. While on the outside, the suburbs epitomized the perfect family, on the inside tension and discontent quietly loomed in many households. “The postwar suburbs were either heaven or hell for their inhabitants—endless stretches of brand-new houses on quarter-acre lots occupied, during weekday hours, entirely by women and children” (Collins 1).
Born Bettye Goldstein, Friedan attended Smith College and went on to pursue graduate work in psychology at the University of California,
Gail Collins argues, “The Feminine Mystique is a very specific cry of rage about the way intelligent, well-educated women were kept out of the mainstream of American professional life and regarded as little more than a set of reproductive organs in heels” (1). At a time when women were at their academic peak with the highest college attendance and graduation rates, one would assume that women would confidently take on more important roles in the workforce, especially following the Rosie the Riveter campaign that empowered female workers during World War II; however, women took on more domestic roles in higher percentages, forgetting the progress in women’s rights their mothers and grandmothers worked so hard to achieve. Louis Menand explains, “When Friedan was writing her book, the issue of gender equality was barely on the public’s radar screen. On the contrary: it was almost taken for granted that the proper goal for intelligent women was marriage” (2). A large contributor to this decision is the false sense of accomplishment women were promised in return for their spousal duties. Critic Catherine Judd explains, “Friedan notes that suburban housewives have been told by the media, by the medical community, and by educators that they
In Friedan’s chapter “The Happy Housewife Heroine,” she critiques the stories run in popular women’s magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, and Redbook during the 1950s. Her frustration becomes very evident when detailing the “fluff’ presented to women. Friedan observes, “The new mystique makes the housewife-mothers, who never had a chance to be anything else, the model for all women” (92). Donna Seaman explains, “[Friedan] cites many blood-pressure-elevating examples of an “unremitting harangue” of “deceptively simple, clever, outrageous ads and commercials” that imply that “the great majority of American women have no ambition other than to be housewives” (1). It is no surprise that Friedan so easily found examples of articles and journals targeted toward the ideals of the feminine mystique. Popular magazines printed very few articles that portrayed women as anything but content housewives. After reviewing numerous articles and advertisements from The Washington Post, critic Mei-Ling Yang observed a stark contrast in the content presented to women in the 1950s. She writes, “Compared to the untitled women's pages of 1945, the "For and About Women" section emphasized homemaking, beauty, food, child care, and fashion. Articles on homemaking proliferated from