Claire Conger

Today’s idea is courtesy of Carina Chocano.

“The postwar suburbs around which young couples were encouraged to structure their lives were new . . . And that brand new world was sold as “traditional” . . . the way things were “supposed to be” (page 31). Women’s isolation, at home alone with the kids, was now traditional, sold in magazines by men who returned from the war and displaced the women who had been the editors. The new editors wanted copy that would sell advertising for postwar items like stoves and refrigerators, and the trappings that a woman is told she needs to get and keep a man. That’s when Betty Friedan reinvented herself as a “mad housewife” and, in order to sell her journalism, she focused her work on stories that the new editors would buy. No wonder Ms. Friedan had to write The Feminine Mystique.

“The Feminine Mystique was anything but the whiny lament of a bored housewife. It was a Marxist takedown of patriarchal capitalism as rooted in the idea of the single-income nuclear family as the basic economic unit.” (You Play the Girl page 22) Marxist economics didn’t cross my mind when I read it, because Ms. Friedan couched her argument in terms of how women are socially adjusted to patriarchy. She “played the girl.”

It’s been nearly 60 years since W.W.Norton published that book. Has anything changed?