Books as Bombs: Why the women’s movement needed “The Feminine Mystique.”
She was white and well educated; she had a financially dependable husband and a big house in a crime-free neighborhood; and she enjoyed the leisure to write, or do anything else she liked. The only expectations were that she manage the care of her healthy and well-adjusted children and be responsible for the domestic needs of her husband. By any material measure, and relative to the aspirations of most people, she was one of the most privileged human beings on the planet.
.. She was white and well educated; she had a financially dependable husband and a big house in a crime-free neighborhood; and she enjoyed the leisure to write, or do anything else she liked. The only expectations were that she manage the care of her healthy and well-adjusted children and be responsible for the domestic needs of her husband. By any material measure, and relative to the aspirations of most people, she was one of the most privileged human beings on the planet.
.. The Feminine Mystique” was a book that helped to change the world, or at least the way a lot of people saw the world, and it almost certainly could not have done so if Friedan had been completely open about her political background and motivations. She may have exaggerated her originality as well, but she succeeded where no other feminist writer had.
.. The number of women enrolled in college nearly doubled in that decade, for example, and the employment rate for women rose four times as fast as it did for men.
.. Friedan quoted the president of Mills College citing with approval the remark “Women should be educated so that they can argue with their husbands.”
.. Male-only institutions, from Harvard and Yale to the National Press Club, where invited female reporters had to sit in the balcony and were not allowed to ask questions during speeches, were prevalent.
.. The popular understanding was that the only reason for a marriageable woman to take a job was to find a husband.
.. If that was why women worked, it made perfect economic sense: because of the disparity in pay and career opportunity between men and women, virtually the only way a woman could improve her economic situation was to marry.
.. When sixteen million veterans, ninety-eight per cent of whom were men, came home, in 1945, two predictable things happened: the proportion of men in the workforce increased, as men returned to (or were given) jobs that had been done by women during the war; and there was a big spike in the birth rate. But what should have been a correction became a trend.
.. “The Second Sex” does not seem to have spoken to American women in the personal way that Friedan’s book did.
.. The fundamental argument of “The Feminine Mystique,” and of the second-wave feminism to which it gave rise, is that there is no such thing as women’s essential nature.
.. Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” was published in 1961. It has been credited with, in the long run, changing urban-renewal policies in the United States; in the short run, it helped bring an end to the career of New York City’s “master builder,” Robert Moses.
.. In all these cases, it can be said (and in most of them it has been said) that the changes the books are associated with would have happened anyway. As Coontz puts it, about Friedan, “Books don’t become best sellers because they are ahead of their time.” But people like to be able to point to a book as the cause for a new frame of mind