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BETTY FRIEDAN AND THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE (1963): A FEMINIST
POLITICAL DEBATE
Carolina TOPINI *
2013 had marked the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique’s publication 1 , the famous
book of American feminist Betty Friedan (1921‐2006) which had an enormous success and influence
on the American public opinion and academic context of the 1960s.
My contribution wants to retrace Betty Friedan’s fascinating biography and controversial
reflection, adopting as starting and focal point the book that allows her to become a strong reference
for the Liberal Women's Rights Movement of ‘60s and ‘70s, and at the same time made her an
extremely discussed and criticized figure within the new Radical Feminist Reflection. In the
reconstruction of the main passages of Friedan’s life, I will dialectically use two sources: on the first
part the provocative Friedan’s biography published by historian Daniel Horowitz in 1998 2 – which
remarks the denied importance which had Friedan’s radical past, much more complex and politicized
than she had always officially presented –, and on the other part, Friedan’s autobiography published
in 2000, which wanted to be a strong re‐appropriation and response to Horowitz’s provocations. 3 I
will move from the main criticisms to the structural limits of Friedan’s political vision to rebuild the
political debate which arose around her work and her later commitment within the National
Organization for Women (NOW).
The Feminine Mystique as ideological democratic construction: The modern mothers of the
American nation
The resurgence of domestic ideology in the ‘50s had complex roots. The Second World War had
triggered a radical transformation within a social organization based on a rigid sexual division of
labor: traditionally masculine activities suddenly became for women patriotic and civic duties,
allowing them to acquire new professional skills and economic independence. 4 After the war the
State began to strive for veterans’ reinsertion: what women were asked for – by forced dismissals
and a persuasive public rhetoric – was to take care of the men returning from the front, eager to
rebuild a reassuring life after the military trauma within a peaceful domestic core. Home and family
acquired an even stronger centrality: the baby boom which took place in the United States between
1945 and 1964, 5 and the general American post‐war tendency to settle within the quiet middle‐class
suburban realities, were the immediately visible social consequences of this women’s return inside
domestic walls. A social revolution like that one had begun to occur in wartime was an eventuality to
avoid, especially in a phase of geopolitical uncertainty such as that one USA were preparing to face in
Cold War. The reaffirmation of domesticity was in fact historically essential to the construction of
American national identity of 50s, which went increasingly to stiffen to cope with Soviet bloc – where
an high proportion of women worked. The revival of a structural separation between a “masculine
public sphere” and a “private female sphere” was the result of a process of ideological construction
which saw the family as the best weapons to spend in the Cold War’s battleground: domestic sphere
strategically became integral part of the political and economic modernity. 6
Politicians, experts, educators and columnists of the second post‐war, by appealing to the oldtradition
concept of "Republican Motherhood" – born during American Revolution as expression of
feminine civic virtues 7 – asked American women to embrace again domesticity in service to the
Nation. 8 Within a domestic space perceived as a refuge from social and political anxieties, women
would have been able to act as protagonists in maintaining the family as an emotionally protected
community, comforted by the new consumer goods 9 and by the awareness of being the main vehicle
of national values, as well as the symbol of the stability and superiority of American political,
economic and cultural system. But women’s lives could no longer be encompassed by the older
*
University of Bologna, Paris Diderot – Paris 7 University (History Department).