Stephanie Coontz - A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

The thoughts I had were terrible. I wished for another life. I woke up and started to clean and wash clothes and was miserable. No one seemed to understand. My friends didnt feel that way. I just assumed Id be punished in some way. Thats what happens to women who are selfish. My friends said youre so selfish.

CONSTANCE AHRONS dropped out of college to have a child, and as a young wife and mother in the early 1960s was seeing a psychiatrist for depression. Halfway through The Feminine Mystique she got up and flushed her tranquilizers down the toilet.

There were only two times I understood my motherwhen I read the Book of Job and when I read The Feminine Mystique .

KATHY HESKINS severely depressed mother wrote her a passionate but bewildering six-page letter about The Feminine Mystique when Kathy was a teenager. Only years later did she read the book herself.

It left me breathless... , recalled Glenda Schilt Edwards, who was twenty-eight when she read the book shortly after it was published. I suddenly realized that what I thought might be wrong with me was, in fact, right with me!

I was trapped in what felt like hell. I had been forced to drop out of school.... There were no domestic violence programs and no one ever talked about the issue.... I thought I was the only one being beaten and there was something terribly wrong with me. I was ashamed.

ROSE GARRITY married at age fifteen, dropped out of school after just one week in the tenth grade, had her first child at age seventeen, and then had four more in the next five and a half years. She was being regularly beaten by her husband when she read the book, and it was like the curtain was thrown back on the wizard!

I had everything a woman was supposed to wantmarriage to a nice, dependable guy (a good provider), a wonderful little kid, a nice house in the suburbsand I was miserable.

CAM STIVERS was a twenty-five-year-old wife and mother who thought her life was over until she read the book in 1963.

Authors Note

WHEN I FIRST AGREED TO WRITE ABOUT THE IMPACT OF THE 1963 BEST seller The Feminine Mystique , I wasnt sure of my ultimate focus. Would the book be about Betty Friedan, the author? Would it be about the feminist movement she helped to organize? Would it be about the ideas of The Feminine Mystique itself?

But as I read and reread Friedans book and other works on the 1950s and 1960s, and especially when I began to interview women who bought the book at the time, the answer emerged. I wanted to tell the story of the generation of women who responded most fervently to what Friedan had to saya group of women whose experiences and emotions are poorly understood today, even by their own daughters and granddaughters.

Many books have been written and movies made about the greatest generation. But the subjects of these stories are almost invariably menthe army, navy, and air force men of WWII (only 2 percent of the military in that era were female); the Mad Men of Madison Avenue who pioneered Americas mass consumer culture in the days of Eisenhower and Kennedy; the ordinary husbands and fathers who created a middle-class life for their families after the privations of the Depression and the war.

What do we know about those mens wives and daughters? As their husbands and fathers moved into a new era, many women felt suspended between the constraints of the old sphere of female existence and the promise of a future whose outline they could barely make out. They were, as one of the women I interviewed told me, a generation of intelligent women, sidelined from the world. Some were content to provide love and comfort when the men came home. But others felt that something was missing from their lives, though they could seldom put their finger on it.

These womenmostly white, mostly middle classwere at the eye of a hurricane. They knew that powerful new forces were gathering all around them, but they felt strangely, uneasily becalmed. They knew they occupied safer ground than their African-American, Latina, and white working-class counterparts, but knowing that only made them feel all the more guilty about their fears and discontents.

To modern generations, these womens lives seem as outmoded as the white gloves and pert hats they wore when they left the shelter of their homes. Yet even today, their experiences and anxieties shape the choices modern women debate and the way feminism has been defined by both its supporters and its opponents.

Tracing the history of these women and discovering why, despite their privileges, they felt so anxious about their femininity and so guilty about their aspirations was a revelation to me. I came to see how their struggles with their roles and self-images as wives and mothers helped pave the way for succeeding generations of women to have a greater range of choiceschoices not free of cost, but requiring far less sacrifice of personal identity and sense of self-worth. And uncovering the pain so many of these women felt was a vivid reminder of what can happenand still does happenwhen their granddaughters and great-granddaughters give up on the dream of combining meaningful work with a fulfilling family life.