by Bruce Bawer
Those postwar years were a quiet time for feminism. One blip was the 1949 publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex—though the book, now regarded as a founding document of modern feminism, was not very widely read in the United States until its resurrection in the late 1960s. Beauvoir’s chef d’oeuvre covers a lot of territory—it seeks to provide an exhaustive, definitive account of women’s status throughout human history, the stages of female growth and self-awareness from infancy onward, the depiction of women in literature, and much else. The nature of Beauvoir’s particular blindness—one she shared with other icons of second-wave feminism—is summed up in a single sentence, written when Stalinism was in full flower: “It is in Soviet Russia that the feminist movement has made the most sweeping advances.” In 1971 Beauvoir famously put her name to the feminist “Manifesto of the 343,” whose signatories (all celebrated Frenchwomen) claimed to have had abortions; less well known is her signing in 1940 of another document, in which she affirmed to France’s Nazi occupiers that she wasn’t Jewish. (In her book La Force de l’âge, Beauvoir claimed that she “thought it repugnant to sign” the paper, but then again, she reasoned, everyone else at the lycée where she taught had signed it, too: “for most of my colleagues, as for myself, there was no way of doing otherwise.”)
Then along came Betty Friedan. A Marxist and self-described “bad-tempered bitch” who had written for women’s magazines as well as trade union journals, Friedan inaugurated the second wave in 1963 with her jeremiad The Feminine Mystique. If the first wave had been about equal rights, the second was about “liberation”—Women’s Lib. The book begins at Smith, the “Seven Sisters” college whose student body (especially back then) was overwhelmingly composed of the daughters of privilege. Friedan was a Smith girl, and in 1957, fifteen years after her graduation, she sent her classmates a questionnaire, asking how satisfied they were with their lives. The answers, she wrote in the preface to The Feminine Mystique,
simply did not fit the image of the modern American woman as she was written about in women’s magazines, studied and analyzed in classrooms and clinics, praised and damned in a ceaseless barrage of words ever since the end of World War II. There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique.
What Friedan discovered was that these women—white, upper-middle-class, most of them now suburban wives and mothers—felt a secret discontent with their lives as homemakers, that they felt guilty about it, that they thought they were alone in their dissatisfaction, and that they believed this meant there was something wrong with them. Which brings us to the opening paragraph of the book proper—a ringing, dramatic statement about what Friedan portentously called “the problem that has no name”:
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. 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. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. 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?”
Those three words—“Is this all?”—would ignite a revolution. Friedan’s point was simple: women had been stifled by a narrow image of their sex. They’d been told they were more delicate and sensitive than men, and thus less suited to careers than to homemaking. This, Friedan argued, was a betrayal of everything that Wollstonecraft, Stanton, and others had worked for, and it betrayed the example set by the innumerable women who, in the 1920s, had rejected traditional roles and opted to shape their own lives. She invoked Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, who leaves her husband and children, dismissing his argument that she is primarily a wife and mother and insisting, rather, that above all she is “a reasonable human being.”
What, Friedan asked, had sapped the life and guts out of the would-be Noras of mid-century? The culprit, she answered, was the feminine mystique—a mentality according to which “the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity.” The feminine mystique told women that they shouldn’t try to be like men but should “accep[t] their own nature.” As Friedan saw it, Smith undergraduates were now so thoroughly brainwashed by the feminine mystique that they had no interest in their coursework or in pursuing careers. As an example of the grim fate in store for them, Friedan told the story of a friend of hers, “an able writer turned full-time housewife, [who] had her suburban dream house designed by an architect to her own specifications. . . . The house . . . was almost literally one big kitchen . . . there wasn’t any place where she could get out of the kitchen, away from her children. . . . The gorgeous mahogany and stainless steel of her custom-built kitchen cabinets and electric appliances were indeed a dream, but when I saw that house, I wondered where, if she ever wanted to write again, she would put her typewriter.”
Friedan described the feminine mystique as having “bur[ied] millions of American women alive.” “[T]he time is at hand,” she prophesied, “when the voices of the feminine mystique can no longer drown out the inner voice that is driving women on to become complete.” As evidence for her assertions, Friedan presented the table of contents of a typical 1960 issue of McCall’s magazine, which she savaged for its insufficient attention to “the world beyond the home”—as if women couldn’t subscribe, if they wished, to Time or Scientific American (and as if the men’s magazines of the era weren’t, in their own way, just as narrow and inane). Friedan devoted several chapters to the contents of women’s magazines, as if they provided a complete picture of the reality of women’s lives in the 1950s and ’60s. (Her preoccupation with these magazines may be explained, at least in part, by her professional connections to them, which perhaps gave her an excessive sense of their importance—this, plus the fact that she had plainly grown sick of writing about homemaking.)
Though Friedan had a few harsh words for the husbands who, in her view, had helped install their wives in gilded cages, she was considerably nastier about gay men, who, in her view, were “spreading like a murky smog over the American scene.” Describing them as “Peter Pans, forever childlike, afraid of age,” she attributed their homosexuality to (what else?) the feminine mystique: “The mother whose son becomes homosexual is usually not the ‘emancipated’ woman who competes with men in the world, but the very paradigm of the feminine mystique—a woman who lives through her son, whose femininity is used in virtual seduction of her son, who attaches her son to her with such dependence that he can never mature to love a woman, nor can he, often, cope as an adult with life on his own.” For all her passion about the liberation of suburban housewives, Friedan had little sympathy for gay rights. Unsurprisingly, her hatred for lesbians has (to put it mildly) complicated her legacy in the eyes of today’s heavily lesbian Women’s Studies establishment.
Underneath the hyperbole, to be sure, Friedan had a valid point: because of the (often internalized) expectations of others, limited options (or unawareness of available opportunities), and/or their own narrow view of their capabilities (a view often inculcated in them by parents or teachers), many American women in the mid-twentieth century did indeed end up leading lives that made them miserable, or at least bored and restless. The rigid gender roles of the day could be stifling—not only for women, but for men as well. In the same way that many women who would have thrived in careers ended up stagnating in their kitchens, so more than a few men who would have loved to stay at home with the kids spent their lives in jobs they hated and were ill-suited for. How many couples would have been far happier if only they had exchanged places? But such thoughts were unthinkable. Add to this the fact that women who did pursue careers were used to being paid less than men, used to being passed up for promotions, and used t
o being viewed as less serious about their careers than men were. If they were married, they were seen as wives first, professionals second; if they weren’t married, they were viewed as being on the prowl for a man and likely to exchange their careers for wedding rings. Then, of course, there were the double standards that, for example, identified promiscuous men as studs and promiscuous women as sluts, and that treated unwed mothers as objects of shame even as the fathers of those women’s children suffered no stigma at all. And let’s not forget the hypocrisy of secret abortions, arranged on the sly by doctors who would never have lent public support to the cause of legalized abortion.
Still and all, Friedan’s rhetoric was over-the-top. She described some of the most fortunate individuals in human history as downtrodden and subjugated—and did so at a time when millions of people, in countries ruled by an ideology to which Friedan subscribed, really were downtrodden and subjugated. In a chapter of The Feminine Mystique subtitled “The Comfortable Concentration Camp,” she actually opined that “[i]n a sense . . . the women . . . who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps.”
After Friedan came the deluge. In 1970, there was Kate Millett’s bestselling Sexual Politics, which drew heavily on The Second Sex: like Beauvoir, Millett peered at women through the lenses of history, biology, anthropology, psychology, literature, and politics. (Like Beauvoir, too, curiously enough, she wrote about the sexually puerile Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence as if they were representative males.) “[O]ur society . . . is a patriarchy,” diagnosed Millett, who pronounced that “[t]he chief weakness of the movement’s concentration on suffrage” during its first wave “lay in its failure to challenge patriarchal ideology at a sufficiently deep and radical level to break the conditioning processes of status, temperament and role.” Patriarchy: no word more neatly summed up the second-wave sensibility.
Like Friedan, Millett admired Marxism: she endorsed Engels’s proposal that the state, not the mother, should be a child’s primary caregiver, and praised Lenin for seeking “to terminate patriarchy and restructure its most basic institution—the family.” Though Lenin’s effort to “restructure” the family was, of course, part of the larger Soviet project to crush all institutions that threatened the absolute power of the totalitarian communist state, Millett described it as having represented a promise of an advance for women’s freedom; apropos of Lenin’s failure to pull off the “restructuring,” Millett lamented that “[a] population so recently freed did not know how to use its freedom.” This was no slip of the pen: Millett referred repeatedly to the “new freedoms” and “new liberties” purportedly introduced by the Bolsheviks in Russia. (Millett was also impressed by Mao’s China, which, she wrote, “is said to be the only country in the world which has no prostitution.”)
The year 1970 also saw the publication of Greer’s The Female Eunuch, in which the author—who over the years has identified herself variously as an anarchist, Marxist, and communist—described women as masochistically collaborating in their own oppression and encouraged them to practice “delinquency” by rejecting the nuclear family. While urging women to stop seeing themselves as erotic objects, Greer was not above using her own considerable sex appeal to maximum effect: she equated libertinism with liberation and made no secret of the fact that she regarded many of her fellow feminists as anti-sex, or as sexually repressed, and therefore not authentically liberated. At least in part for these reasons, The Female Eunuch, though perhaps the single biggest sensation of the second wave, is today, as her biographer Christine Wallace has observed, “essentially invisible on reading lists for women’s studies courses.”
Friedan, Millett, and Greer: these were among second-wave feminism’s leading lights. To read their books in the context of their Marxist sympathies is to recognize that second-wave feminism was, to no small degree, rooted in its leaders’ ideological identification with America’s Cold War adversaries. After all, to attack the suburban comforts that capitalism made possible—comforts beyond even the dreams of most Soviet subjects—was to attack capitalism itself. (When Mailer said it was all “just old socialism,” in short, he wasn’t entirely wrong.) As second-wave pioneer Phyllis Chesler acknowledged years later, second-wave feminism was a “cult” whose members all shared the same views about “capitalism, colonialism, imperialism,” and so forth. They had a motto: “The personal is political.” There were, however, two small problems with the linkage of Marxism and women’s liberation: first, the “subordination” of women could hardly be attributed to capitalism, since the former predated the latter; and second, Marx’s theories had absolutely nothing to do with liberating women from that “subordination.”
Still, despite their missteps, misunderstandings, and excesses, the leading figures of second-wave feminism merit a degree of respect. They may have gone astray in many ways, but so do all pioneers when feeling their way into uncharted territory. At least Friedan and company were the real thing. Far from being careerists mouthing slogans to get ahead, they took serious personal and professional risks to speak their minds. And they could write.
Besides, in the larger feminist picture, they were moderates. Just compare them with, for example, the Boston College theologian Mary Daly, who, in the soberly written The Church and the Second Sex (1968) and Beyond God the Father (1973), made reasonable (and now very familiar) criticisms of Catholicism’s misogyny and Christianity’s “[e]xclusively masculine symbolism for God,” but who later developed into a radical feminist, inviting other women, in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), to join her on a “Metapatriarchal Journey of Exorcism and Ecstasy,” and concluding Pure Lust (1984), a paean to the carnal and spiritual delights of lesbianism, as follows:
Aroused by the Touch of our Wonder-filled Woman-Lust, Wonderers fly with the Grace of Be-Witching, unfolding our spiritual powers. Like flowers, like serpents, like dragons, like angels, we Spiral in rhythms of Weirdward creation. Leaping with Wander-lust, Weaving new Wonders, we intend to be Fore-Crones of Gnostic Nag-Nations. As Dreamers we glimpse our sidereal cities that gleam in the heavens like Stars of the Sea. They call us all ways, now, to Be.
After Daly’s death in 2010, Sara Corbett noted in a posthumous New York Times profile that she had “prided herself on being problematic, disagreeable, defiant” and “coached other women to do the same.” Daly also made it clear that her brand of radical second-wave feminism had nothing whatsoever to do with equality and mutual respect between the sexes, but rather with rage and retribution: she denied male students permission to take her classes and, at lectures, refused to take questions from men (she said, wrote Corbett, that “it was important for them to understand what it feels like to be voiceless and ignored”). Aptly, she was forced into retirement in 1998 by charges of sexism. Yet none of Daly’s offenses against equal rights have prevented her from becoming a Women’s Studies idol. Among the hundreds of sessions I missed at the 2010 NWSA convention was “Feminism and Religion—a Panel in Honor of the Early Work of Mary Daly.” At another session, “Queering Feminism, Feministing Queer,” a male participant, concerned that Daly, “one of the most highly esteemed feminist philosophers,” has been branded “transmisogynistic” (that is, hostile to male-to-female transsexuals), sought “to reclaim Daly for transfeminism.”
Then there was Robin Morgan, who, after breaking from the antiwar movement over its purported sexism, helped found such groups as New York Radical Women, W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, and the Women’s Media Center. “White males,” Morgan wrote in 1970, “are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. . . . [A] legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, and white women.” Morgan described “man-hating” as “an honorable and viable political act” because “the oppress
ed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.” Despite this incendiary rhetoric, Morgan has always been a thoroughly mainstream presence—published by Random House and Simon & Schuster, invited to speak at major American colleges, awarded NEA and Ford Foundation grants, and accorded the honor of having her papers archived at Duke.
An influential subset of feminism that sprang up during the second wave’s heyday was the rape-crisis movement. Rape, its leaders preached, was far more widespread than had previously been thought—an argument helped along by the sensational results of a famous Ms. magazine study. (The researcher who conducted it later admitted that the overwhelming majority of the women she had counted as rape victims did not, in fact, regard themselves as having been raped.) Previously, rape had been viewed as an infrequent crime committed by a tiny minority of disturbed individuals; now rape-crisis feminists depicted it as an expression of masculine power that reflected universal male attitudes. (In her 1975 bestseller Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Susan Brownmiller described rape as “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”) The movement also broadened the definition of rape to include any heterosexual act in which the woman feels violated—even if she doesn’t feel violated until, say, the next morning.
Among the rape-crisis movement’s stars were Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who, often in league with right-wing leaders like Jesse Helms, mounted campaigns to ban pornography, arguing that it encouraged men to commit sexual violence. (“Pornography is the theory,” wrote Morgan in 1974, “and rape is the practice.”) MacKinnon and Dworkin were the perfect tag team—the former an attractive Smith graduate and law professor who strove to make her extreme positions sound sensible, the latter a shrill, morbidly obese, and exceedingly unkempt activist who felt no need to hide her violent hatred for men. “Pornography,” Dworkin harangued a New York state commission on pornography in 1986, “is used in rape—to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act.” In her 1987 book Intercourse, Dworkin went beyond criticizing pornography and condemned heterosexual intercourse en tout, arguing that women who sleep with men in a patriarchal society are debasing themselves and contributing to their own oppression. (“Intercourse,” she memorably wrote, “is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.”)