The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique’s foremost theme is the inner conflict that women face between fulfilling the societal expectation to devote themselves to their sexual role and fulfilling their own desires to develop all parts of their personhood. When Friedan talks about pressure to fulfill a “sexual role,” she is not referring to women feeling pressured to have sex constantly. Rather, she refers to women’s biological capacity for reproduction. Her argument is that post-World War II America oriented women’s entire identity around their ability to bear children. Women were encouraged to craft their personhood around their families—to identify as someone’s wife and someone’s mother. As Friedan writes of women in her generation, “They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights […] All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children” (2).

Friedan claims that this societal emphasis on women’s sexual roles deprives them of the opportunity to develop as people as fully as men do. This argument may sound simple, but it asks women to do more than support a specific political cause or throw their weight behind a particular piece of feminist legislation. It asks women to consider that if they abide by the feminine mystique, then they essentially do not get to be complete people who evolve and grow over time.

Friedan uses her book to explain the many ways that this problem affects not just America’s women but its men and children, too. In Chapter 11, for instance, she explains that many women try to fill the emptiness in their lives with sex, leading either to mismatched sexual drives between a woman and her husband or extramarital affairs. In Chapter 12, she explores the phenomenon of women trying to live vicariously through their children, which inevitably results in depriving them of some experiences and aggressively pushing them into others.

Throughout her lifetime of advocacy for women, Friedan did not want to be perceived as a radical who wanted to overturn the idea of the family. Therefore, she does not tell women that being a wife or mother is wrong. Instead, she tells women that being a wife or mother is not a full identity. Just as men define themselves as more than “husbands,” so too do women need independent interests and activities outside the home. Although Friedan concedes that different women can find fulfillment in different places, she most strenuously pushes for educational opportunities and career opportunities. She maintains that women’s intellectual abilities are the most underused resource in the US, and that using them will elevate not just women but the whole country.