Nautica Western’s Reviews > The Feminine Mystique > Status Update

Trying to keep an open mind and remember the cultural context this was written in. Friedan herself mentions earlier that even great thinkers can only look so far beyond their time. She, too, is ultimately a victim of her culture’s opinions on homosexuality. I don’t know enough about these studies to know how they’ve held up over time, but some of these blanket claims about gay men are tough reads lmao.

“Sometimes, in phantasy more often than in fact, he seeks a girl-child, a Lolita, as sexual object—to escape that grownup woman who is devoting all her aggressive energies, as well as her sexual energies, to living through him.”

“The old hostility against domineering ‘moms’ and aggressive career girls may, in the long run, pale before the new male hostility for the girls whose active pursuit of the ‘home career’ has resulted in a new kind of domination and aggression. To be the tool, the sex instrument, the ‘man around the house,’ is evidently no dream-come-true for a man.”

“Housework, washing dishes, diaper-changing had to be dressed up by the new mystique to become equal to splitting atoms, penetrating outer space, creating art that illuminates human destiny, pioneering on the frontiers of society. It had to become the very end of life itself to conceal the obvious fact that it is barely the beginning.”

“The glorification of ‘woman’s role,’ then, seems to be in proportion to society’s reluctance to treat women as complete human beings; for the less real function that role has, the more it is decorated with meaningless details to conceal its emptiness.”

“Like a primitive culture which sacrificed little girls to its tribal gods, we sacrifice our girls to the feminine mystique, grooming them ever more efficiently through the sexual sell to become consumers of the things to whose profitable sale out nation is dedicated.”

“But the perpetuation of housewifery, the growth of the feminine mystique, makes sense (and dollars) when one realizes that women are the chief customers of American business. Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the […] state of being housewives.”

“And so men re-created their own childhood in suburbia, and made mothers of their wives. Men fell for the mystique without a murmur of dissent. It promised them mothers for the rest of their lives, both as a reason for their being and as an excuse for their failures. Is it so strange that boys who grow up with too much mother love become men who can never get enough?”

“Mother love is said to be sacred in America, but with all the reverence and lip service she is paid, mom is a pretty safe target, no matter how correctly or incorrectly her failures are interpreted.”

“The insult, the real reflection on our culture’s definition of the role of women, is that as a nation we only noticed that something was wrong with women when we saw its effect on their sons.”