They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home they wanted the men to make the major decisions. Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands. They changed the sheets on the beds twice a week instead of once, took the rug-hooking class in adult education, and pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career. They baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children’s clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running all day. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. In the fifteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night-she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-”Is this all?”įor over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books, and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. Source: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.

In the feminine mystique betty friedan