The Feminine Mystique at 50: A Response
Feminist Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, turns fifty this year. And today a student in my Role of Women class saw this article about it on The Gospel Coalition site and forwarded the link to me. Here's my response:
This is one of the more accurate/fair assessmentsI’ve seen about Friedan’s work from within the complementarian camp. Thank you.And thank you for not saying Friedan started feminism. Thanks, too, for notgiving the impression that “feminism” is “man-hating.” Rather, it’s pushingback against injustices directed toward women, including human trafficking,sexual abuse, and child pornography, and unfair wages, for starters. Literacyfor women (and children) was at one time in this country included on that list,but thanks to the Sunday school movement, it is no longer.
I should like to add that Friedan was more than afreelance magazine writer and suburban housewife. A woman with Ivy-Leaguecredentials, Friedan founded and was elected the first president of theNational Organization for Women (NOW), authored six books, was an adjunctprofessor, and was a lifelong advocate for women’s rights.
To the person who said Friedan was writing from aprivileged position: Through her work as a journalist, she covered storiesabout injustices committed against women of all classes. And what shechallenged was the view that every womanshould aspire to such a life as the ideal…that is, all should have theultimate dream of marrying a breadwinner, staying home with their children, andchoosing slipcovers.
The unfulfilled woman Friedan described was not thewoman of Proverbs 31. The biblical woman is described as being out in thecommunity, buying and selling, stretching her hand to the poor, and speakingthe law of loyal love. That is one fulfilled woman. She has her family’s wellbeingon her mind, but—and this is important—she also has the wider community’s needsin view. She exercises her spiritual gifts in the community and probably takesher kids with her as she does so, rather than playing Candy Land on the floor.
Friedan wrote at a timewhen Freudian ideas—which nearly everyone accepted as faultless—said that awoman who wanted to do anything other than domestic tasks (e.g., wanted tobuy/sell fields, make and sell belts) was underdeveloped sexually (i.e., hadpenis envy). In her chapter, “The Solipsism of Sigmund Freud,” she bemoans thefact that anyone who’s not a trained Freudian therapist is considered too uneducatedto challenge such ideas. But how could they get such training in a world that heldup the ideal of the feminine mystique?
Friedan also wrote at atime when women who wanted to be doctors were told to go find husbands. Womenwho wanted to go to seminary were told to go marry men headed for the missionfield or pastorate. Women whose kids were at school during the day were told tofind fulfillment in dusting and vacuuming—that wanting anything else suggestedthey were neurotic. And sadly, the very access to education thatallows me to write this response did not happen because the church championedthe cause for me to have it.
The church’s response,when we actually read her and interact with her fairly, is usually to zero inon the word “identity” and parrot in response, “We find our identity inChrist.” Now, clearly Friedan was lost and needed the Lord. But in a sense, shewas not talking about that sort of identity. She was talking about meaningfulwork. Imagine if we told unemployed people, “Find your identity only in Christ”but did nothing to address such needs on a tangible level. Many conservativesargued that a woman who considered dusting boring had wrong values. And wedistorted Friedan’s words by pitting working women against those who chose tostay at home.
But we WERE made for more than choosing slip-covers. We were made to be co-regents of the earth in partnership with men. Where we failed, then, as far as Friedan was concerned, was that we answered her legit concerns with accusations rather than casting a vision of who God made women to be along with a biblical theology of work and kingdom building.