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

“By 1976, I predict, even the Republicans will have a woman running seriously for vice-president, if not for president.”

Absolutely devastating sentence to read. Betty Friedman, you thought too highly of America.

“It seemed to me that men weren’t really the enemy—they were fellow victims, suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.”

“If we continue to produce millions of young mothers who stop their growth and education short of identity, without a strong core of human values to pass on to their children, we are committing, quite simply, genocide, starting with the mass burial of American women and ending with the progressive dehumanization of their sons and daughters.”

“‘…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.’”

“Thus Professor Maslow suggested that either you have to describe as ‘masculine’ both high-dominance men and women or drop the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ altogether because they are so ‘misleading.’”

“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.”