How The Feminine Mystique Played in Peoria : Who is Betty Friedan?

Gwen Jordan

doi:10.14296/hwa.v3i0.2188

Abstract

Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking work, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, was not celebrated in her hometown of Peoria, Illinois, until its fiftieth anniversary. This article explores why many of Friedan’s Peoria contemporaries – white, educated, married, middle- and upper-middle-class women, like the women featured in her book – rejected her thesis that their lives as women without careers in the paid labor force were dissatisfying and unfulfilling. It uses evidence from interviews with Peoria women from this cohort to discern how they found fulfillment and satisfaction as professional volunteers. It is part of the revisionist effort of women’s post-World War II history to demonstrate the broad diversity of women and widen awareness of the breadth of their activities. It draws on civil society scholarship to interpret the import of their civic service. It argues that these professional volunteers are among the women that The Feminine Mystique mischaracterizes and that their contributions to producing a civil society have been undervalued.

Highlights

Evening in February when, they described, “more than 220 people showed up ... to learn about and celebrate Betty Friedan’s life and work.”[5]
Hidden among its praises is, perhaps, part of the reason that Friedan and her book, The Feminine Mystique, had not resonated or “played in Peoria.”[7]. The resolution wrongly claimed that The Feminine Mystique was a book that “spoke to all women from all walks of life and addressed what she called the problem with no name, one in which women were leading the lives society expected from them but finding themselves unfulfilled.”[8]. Many of the women in Peoria, had not even read the book and only a few claimed that they experienced “the problem with no name.”[9]. This article investigates why so many white, married, educated, middle- and upper-middle-class women from Betty Friedan’s hometown rejected her feminine mystique thesis
Many of Peoria’s white, middle- and upper-class volunteer women did recognize that their life choices were limited by their gender, but most denied that they felt the malaise of the housewife that Friedan described.[13]

Summary

The Female Professional Volunteer

In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan criticized the woman volunteer. She noted that women had done meaningful volunteer work in the past, but she argued that the feminine mystique of the postwar era kept them from taking leadership roles in community organizations: Women...of the post-1950 college generation, refuse to take policy-making positions in community organizations; they will only collect for Red Cross or March of Dimes or Scouts or be den mothers or take the lesser PTA [Parent Teacher Association] jobs. Some, including Friedan, characterized most of women’s volunteering during this time as trivial, sociologist Robert Putnam found that organizations like the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) were important to their communities: “It is easy in our cynical era to sneer at cookies, cider, and small talk, but membership in the PTA betokened a commitment to participate in a practical, child-focused form of community life.”[31] These women were part of what Putnam called the “long civic generation.”. They were the ones who responded in 1961, when President John F. Two of their most prominent associations were the YWCA and the Junior League

The Junior League of Peoria

The YWCA of Peoria

The Demise of the Professional Volunteer