Home-grown Radical or Home-bound Housewife? Rethinking the Origins of 1960s Feminism through the Life and Work of Betty Friedan

Abstract

In 1963, with publication of her enormously influential book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan became most famous self-identified in United States. Although she also assigned herself a professional identity-referring to her job as a freelance magazine writerFriedan began her groundbreaking social analysis by placing her own life squarely among ranch houses and split-levels of Rockland County, New York. While raising three children, Friedan took time to observe and talk with her female peers-fellow wives and mothers she met in semiprivate maternity wards, at PTA meetings and luncheons of League of Women Voters, at suburban cocktail parties, in station wagons waiting for trains ... on quiet afternoons when children were at school or on quiet evenings when husbands worked late.' Through conversations with such women, and through research in social sciences and mass media, Friedan gained insight into the problem that had no name: a stultifying sense of boredom and passivity that prevented millions of women from reaching their full potential. Convinced by psychologists, advertisers, and producers of popular culture to sacrifice personal goals for sake of familial stability, Friedan argued, women sequestered themselves within comfortable concentration camp of home-and suffered painful loss of individual identity as a result. For decades after Friedan published her impassioned social critique, historians generally accepted her version of domesticity in post-World War II America. Until recently, stereotype of June Cleaver housewife predominated in both popular and scholarly accounts of women's roles during 1950s. For example, one major study of postwar families, Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in Cold War Era (1988)