Status Updates From The Feminine Mystique

“Is it so hard to understand that emancipation, the right to full humanity, was important enough to generations of women, still alive or only recently dead, that some fought with their fists, and went to jail, and even died for it?”

“They had to prove women were human. They had to shatter, violently if necessary, the decorative Dresden figurine […]. They had to prove that woman was not a passive, empty mirror, not a frilly, useless decoration, not a mindless animal, not a thing to be disposed of by others […] before they could even begin to fight for the rights [..] to become the human equals of men.”

Keeping women in their caterpillar state, not allowing them to become moths/butterflies… I’m gonna jump

“It is my thesis that as Victorian culture did not permit women to accept or gratify their basic sexual needs, our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role.”

“What if those who choose the path of ‘feminine adjustment’—evading this terror by marrying at eighteen, losing themselves in having babies and the details of housekeeping—are simply refusing to grow up, to face the question of their own identity?”

These excerpts from college and high school aged girls are genuinely heartbreaking to read

This is reminding me of the “backslide” trend I think I first saw in a book about Black history. Like the Redemption era after the Reconstruction, there is always a call and response between progress and regression. Women achieved suffrage, career and educational opportunities, and a chance at individuality—immediately, society responded with the “Occupation: housewife” movement

“Love and children and home are good, but they are not the whole world [..]. Why should women accept this picture of a half-life, instead of share in the whole of human destiny?”

“Women are human beings, not stuffed dolls, not animals.”

The increasing text size in women’s magazines being interpreted as an example of infantilizing women: it IS that serious, actually.

“But does it not occur to any of the men who run the women’s magazines that their troubles may stem from the smallness of the image with which they are truncating women’s minds?”

“Why does ‘Occupation: housewife’ require such insistent glamorizing year after year? The strained glamour is in itself a question mark: the lady doth protest too much.”

Oh if it isn’t the consequences of patriarchy coming back to bite men in the ass. “My wife has no life and wants to be in my business too much.” Well, yes!

“In the feminine mystique, there is no other way [than giving birth] for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no way she can even dream about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife.”

Is there even a point to my updates anymore? I’m highlighting every page. Just read it

Adlai Stevenson, spokesman of democratic liberalism, 1955:

“They had hoped to play their part in the crises of the age. But what they do is wash the diapers.”

This line made me cry. That’s all

“When a mystique is strong, it makes its own fiction of fact. It feeds on the very facts which might contradict it, and seeps into every corner of the culture, bemusing even the social critics.”

Something something modern political landscape something something Trump administration

“When motherhood, a fulfillment held sacred down the ages, is defined as a total way of life, must women themselves deny the world and the future open to them? Or does the denial of the world force them to make motherhood a total way of life?”

(Cont.) They fail to hold themselves accountable for perpetuating the issue, regardless of how much or little they themselves are victimized by it. So many “tradwife” influencers—with multiple nannies and maids, and their 6-7 figure bank accounts— sell an ideal of a lifestyle they aren’t even living! Their income surpasses their husband’s a lot of the time! And we just keep watching, comparing ourselves

This entire section is SO relevant to modern influencers. Friedan calls out these successful women writers and playwrights for selling what they themselves aren’t buying—for pretending to be a “regular” housewife and then poking fun at “themselves” when the joke is not really on them at all.

“…less interested in ideas to reach women’s minds and hearts, than in selling them the things that interest advertisers [..]. Women often carry out the formulas, […] but the formulas themselves, which have dictated the new housewife image, are the product of men’s minds.”

“The old image of the spirited career girl was largely created by writers and editors who were women, she told me. The new image of woman as a housewife-mother has been largely created by writers and editors who are men.”

Everyone gasped in shock and horror. DUH