sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

definitions of “woman’s place”, the feminine mystique’s promise of “fulfillment” had inevitably
raised the expectations of many middle‐class women: ‘’Young Wives with Brains: Babies, Yes – But
What Else?’’ entitled for example a special Newsweek’s report on March 1960. 10 Their pervasive
unhappiness couldn’t remain hidden and the conflicts could no longer be contained: the illusion of
the “happy housewife” began in fact to crack. More visibly, American women began to express their
discontent. Both seriously and superficially, most articles of The New York Times, Newsweek, Good
Housekeeping, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan and McCall’s, began to treat women’s
problem. The mass media suddenly discovered the “trapped housewife”. This raising public attention
to suburban women’s issues generated a manifestly feminist position in the suburban free‐lance
writer Betty Friedan, who published in 1963 The Feminine Mystique, a devastating and brilliant
critique of this complex resurgence of domesticity.
Looking deeper under the surface: naming “the problem that has no name”
Treating the topic with journalistic method – through interviews with young housewives,
students, family life educators, psychiatrists, directors of women's magazines, advertising experts –
Friedan set out to investigate the origins of the feminine mystique, and its effects. At the end of the
50s the average marrying age for American women had fallen under twenty, a good proportion of
them left the study before the end of the course because they feared that too much education was
an impediment to marriage, making in this way the giving birth a real profession. In the words that
these women used to describe their everyday, Friedan found "the problem that has no name", a
sense of frustration and incompleteness. There was something that made insufferable their
adjustment to the model of uncompetitive femininity proposed. Frequently education was pointed
by experts as the main cause, because – they said – it pushed women to want new rights, and was a
strong deterrent to their sexual satisfaction. The professional woman, a fatal error promulgated by
feminism, was presented as neurotic and masculine. The ideal to which they conformed themselves
was shaped and channeled by advertising, television, women's magazines, movies and romance
novels. In particular, the content of women's magazines suggested them especially articles of
practical and domestic interest, ignoring the big issues of national and international public interest.
Experts at that time claimed that the fullest expression of a woman’s sexuality was motherhood.
‘’The participation of modern women in politics passes through their roles as wives and mothers’’
affirmed in 1955 the president of Smith College Adlai Stevenson, during a speech for the conferral of
degrees, ‘’I don’t think I can wish you a better destiny.’’ Moreover, thanks to the rampant
manipulation advertising – which made women the protagonists of the new consumer society –
housework had paradoxically been expanded, until it became the main activity of the day.
These programmed strategies of persuasion couldn’t be accidental. The feminine mystique –
Friedan noted – was the modern attempt to re‐establish those gender borders between public and
private which women’s activism between 19th and 20th century had strongly jeopardized,
representing the needs’ projection of middle‐class men unable to accept their own changing roles, a
veritable reassurance that their manhood wouldn’t been changed. 11 The old prejudices that
remained unhurt by the old feminist struggles soon took scientific dignity. Examining the theoretical
production strategies of the feminine mystique, Friedan identified in particular two polemical
references: the Freud's psychoanalytic heritage, and the structural‐functionalist sociological thought.
In 1947, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, two Freudian psychologists, wrote a bestselling
book about women’s sexuality: The Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. They argued that the goal
of female sexuality is ‘’receptivity and passiveness, a willingness to accept dependence without fear
or resentment, with a deep inwardness and readiness for the final goal of sexual life –
impregnation.’’ Thanks to the new sex‐directed educators within schools and college – who based
their educational program on the texts of these two scientific branches – women learned that their
passive and receptive anatomy was a kind of destiny, and that it was necessary, as well natural, to
adapt to the role that society reserved. In the last part of her book, Friedan tried to find a solution,
suggesting a new life plan for American women: they should have to get out of social isolation of
their “comfortable concentration camps” and look for professional fulfillment, remembering that