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

“‘…I enjoy my children more now that I’ve made room for myself. Before, […] it was as if I was always looking for something through them. I couldn’t just enjoy them as I do now, as though they were a sunset, something outside me, separate. Before, I felt so tied down by them […]. Maybe a woman has to be by herself to be really with her children.’”

“But the rage of the millions that could have knocked down the barbed-wire fences and the SS guns was turned instead against themselves, and against the prisoners even weaker than they. Then they felt even more powerless than they were, and saw the SS guns and the fences as even more impregnable than they were.”

“The shocked recognition that this passive non-indemnity was ‘something new in history’ came, and only came, when it began to show up in the boys.”

Another issue I have to poke at is, again, sourced in Friedan being a product of her time: she is deconstructing and critiquing some forced gender roles while sort of upholding the inherent correctness of others. She calls homosexuality “a murky smog [spreading] over the American scene,” for instance. She follows this by raising issue with “aggressive” females and “passive” males. But hey, it’s 1963!

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.”