The Equivalents

by Maggie Doherty

  A few other theories and thinkers came under fire. The anthropologist Margaret Mead promoted sex difference. Freud and his popularizers mistook women’s longing for economic and political freedom as “penis envy.” What Friedan called “sex-directed educators,” the high school and college instructors who tailored their pedagogy according to a student’s sex, trained women to be mothers and wives, not scholars or professionals. Friedan didn’t hesitate to be hyperbolic: she invoked the Nazis several times, suggesting that when it came to the suburban home, the concentration camp made for a useful point of comparison.

  Friedan wasn’t the first to argue that middle-class American women faced a strange psychological problem; after all, this was the premise of her argument, not the payoff. As she noted in her opening chapter, the problem she wanted to study had burst onto the American scene, “like a boil,” in 1960—the same year that the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study was founded. Magazines published articles titled “The Trapped Housewife.” In the month’s leading up to the book’s publication, women wrote to Friedan to say that they had imagined writing a book on the same topic. A vice president at Norton, attempting to get a blurb from the writer Pearl S. Buck before publication, acknowledged, “Much is being written these days about the plight (or whatever it is) of the educated American woman; therefore this one will have to fight its way out of a thicket.”

  Friedan’s book succeeded because it was synthetic and forceful. She brought together scholarly research, cultural criticism, and personal anecdotes to describe a dangerous epidemic that needed to be neutralized. Additionally, she offered a provocative answer to the eternal revolutionary question: What is to be done? At a time when few could imagine a husband shouldering any child care or housework responsibilities, Friedan encouraged women to flee their suburban homes and take up stimulating, paid work that took advantage of their intelligence and skills. (Friedan did not make any suggestions about who would take up the domestic work; this was a glaring omission for a former labor journalist.) The education reporter for The New York Times, the same man who had written the front-page story on Bunting’s Institute, summarized the value of the book: “The indictment is uncompromising and occasionally extreme. But while the case may be somewhat overstated, the symptoms of a dangerous trend have in no way been misstated. In fact, the book confirms and drives home with editorial passion many dangers that educators themselves often warn against privately.”

  Many readers loved Friedan’s fierceness—that she took “some hard whacks at some very sacred cows”—but others pushed back on her thesis. A reviewer in the Los Angeles Times called the book “one of the largest bundles of nonsense ever put between covers” and cited the increasing number of women awarded bachelor and graduate degrees—180,650 in 1962, a record high—as proof that women were not “trapped.” (To be sure, women’s college graduation rates had by this point rebounded from their low point in the 1950s, but they had not yet reached their high points of the 1920s and 1940s.) Angry letters poured into the Chicago Tribune. “I find it a lot of rubbish,” wrote Mrs. Kenneth Carpenter. “I am sick to death of reading about oversexed, unhappy suburban wives,” complained Mrs. Harold A. Neuman. “For every one of these there are hundreds of happy, well-adjusted wives and mothers whose perfectly normal lives include not even one teensy, bitty extra-marital affair.” “What is this woman trying to do,” asked another, “plant the seeds of doubt and discontent in the minds of happy, well-adjusted wives and mothers?”

  The problem was that for many women, the seeds of discontent had been planted long ago. As the historian Stephanie Coontz has written, The Feminine Mystique was a success not because it was novel, or prescient, but because it said the thing everyone else was thinking and said it well. Because its arguments echoed and amplified ideas that were already in circulation, the book found an eager readership. During the year 1964, The Feminine Mystique sold over one million copies, becoming one of the the best-selling nonfiction books in history.

  Betty Friedan, 1960

  * * *

  —

  By the time Kumin got her hands on The Feminine Mystique, it was several months after the book first appeared. She found herself “mad for the message.” “Yes yes yes to it all,” she wrote to Sexton. “It seemed all too true to me looking back over 3 yrs of college freshmen I taught, the apathy, the disinterest in any kind of abstract idea, the singleminded female goal, to snag a man & make babies.” (Lily Macrakis, the historian who befriended the poets during that first year at the Institute, had encountered the same problem among her students—hence her decision to scoff at their engagement rings.) Kumin, who had once embraced psychoanalytic theory, now found herself pushing back against some of psychoanalysis’s central, sexist ideas.

  In rejecting old doctrines, in revolting against mandatory femininity, Kumin was in good company. All over the country, women were left “breathless” by Friedan’s book. “I felt as though Betty Friedan had looked into my heart, mind, and psyche and…put the unexplainable distress I was suffering into words,” said one reader. Another reported that after reading the book, “I finally realized I wasn’t crazy.” And yet another understood that the problem wasn’t with her; it was with the world. “I can’t express how freeing it was for me to realize that my predicament was not all my own fault,” she said.

  It’s not clear who among the Institute fellows obtained that first copy, but whoever did soon lent the book to a fellow associate scholar. It passed from one woman to the next like samizdat. In a memoir, Linda Sexton recalls receiving a copy of The Feminine Mystique that her mother had annotated; the notes “showed her identification with the problems Friedan described.” Its message resonated with this group of women, now working in an institution that had been designed, in part, based on Friedan’s beliefs. In “A New Life Plan for Women,” the book’s final chapter, Friedan explained how women could get out from under the thumb of “happy housewife” ideology. “Ironically,” she wrote,

  the only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society in a life plan that can encompass marriage and motherhood, is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique; the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession. Such a commitment is not tied to a specific job or locality. It permits year-to-year variation—a full-time paid job in one community, part-time in another, exercise of the professional skill in serious volunteer work or a period of study during pregnancy or early motherhood when a full-time job is not feasible. It is a continuous thread, kept alive by work and study and contacts in the field, in any part of the country.

  She might as well have been writing fund-raising copy for the Institute, so close were her prescriptions to the Institute’s credo. (One wonders if some of Polly Bunting’s notes from the late 1950s might have made their way into Friedan’s final draft.)

  The Feminine Mystique contained advice for artists, too, that might have spoken to the Equivalents. Drawing on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who, in her 1949 book, The Second Sex, had argued that female artists were often dilettantes, Friedan insisted that women must take up the arts professionally. “The amateur or dilettante whose own work is not good enough for anyone to want to pay to hear or see or read does not gain real status by it in society, or real personal identity,” she warned. Amateurism was a particular risk in the arts, more than it would be in politics or science. “The ‘arts’ seem, at first glance, to be the ideal answer for a woman,” Friedan explained. “They can, after all, be practiced in the home. They do not necessarily imply that dreaded professionalism, they are suitably feminine, and seem to offer endless room for personal growth and identity, with no need to compete in society for pay.” This might be the description of Sexton at her dining room table, playing with rhymes in order to contain her troubled mind, or of Kumin reading her “how to write poetry” manual, convinced that she would never
earn back the investment. Friedan continued, “But I have noticed that when women do not take up painting or ceramics seriously enough to become professionals—to be paid for their work, or for teaching it to others, and to be recognized as a peer by other professionals—sooner or later, they cease dabbling.” Sexton had said much the same thing once, about the “lady poets” to whom she loathed being compared: “Women don’t strive to make anything real out of [poetry]. They just dabble in it.”

  This was another place where Bunting and Friedan seemed to be of one mind. The Institute insisted on paying its fellows, even though the stipend couldn’t support a family or even a single woman, unless she found subsidized room and board. To some observers, the money seemed superfluous, but to the fellows it was the difference between being dismissed and being taken seriously. When Alice Ryerson, conducting those first-year interviews, asked Sexton what the difference was between a dabbler and a professional, Sexton replied, “Money helps: it’s the only thing—in the society I live in.”

  In an important sense, the Equivalents had already walked some way down the path that Friedan hoped to lay. They had written about female disappointment and domestic drudgery. The creative writers, in particular, produced influential work on this topic before Friedan’s book arrived on the scene. In 1962, Sexton published a poem called “Housewife,” a brief poem that comprises ten unrhymed lines. The house in the poem is personified; it’s identified in the first line as a woman’s spouse. In the next two lines, the house is described as having skin, a mouth, and internal organs. The housewife of the poem’s title kneels within this living, breathing prison, “washing herself down” and waiting for men to “enter by force.” The poem fuses houses and husbands, suggesting that both keep women on their knees.

  “Housewife” is unlike many of Sexton’s lyrics: there is no “I,” no personal detail. The housewife of the poem is a nameless, universal figure, a shell that any female reader could project herself into. She’s like any number of the anonymous women quoted by Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, except this housewife seems permanently trapped.

  Kumin, too, represented the more disappointing aspects of marriage in her work. One poem, “Purgatory,” emerged from frustrations with her own family. During her second year at the Institute, the Kumins went to see a performance of Romeo and Juliet. Kumin found herself weeping at the play’s end—both at the pathos of the final act and at the perfection of the ending. Vic and the children looked askance at Kumin and edged away from her. Almost as an act of vengeance, Kumin wrote a poem that imagined a so-called happy ending for the star-crossed lovers.

  “And suppose the darlings get to Mantua,” the poem begins. Romeo is “unshaven,” with “egg yolk on his chin.” He’s sick, half-dressed, far from the beautiful romancer he was once. Juliet has fared no better: “the cooking lard has smoked her eye,” and there’s “another Montague…in the womb / although the first babe’s bottom’s not yet dry.” The romance of the play’s first four acts has soured: “The fifth act runs unconscionably long.” Domestic life, as Kumin presents it here, is dirty, boring, and unending. The poison drunk by Juliet pales in comparison to the frustrations of perpetual pregnancy. Better, perhaps, to end up in the crypt.

  By the fall of 1962, then, the Institute poets had already rendered gross, or tragic, the lives of housewives—the women whom Friedan would survey, speak for, and attempt to save. In October of that year, Kumin wrote to Ladies’ Home Journal to complain about a piece by the poet and writer Phyllis McGinley in which McGinley had negatively portrayed the Radcliffe Institute as implying that “being a housewife is not a noble, useful and rewarding career.” Kumin noted that “articles advising American women how to find fulfillment by minding the hearth are written by those…who are doing the exact opposite,” and said that such articles are “deservedly suspect.” (McGinley herself had two daughters and a Pulitzer.) She went on to elucidate the need for other forms of stimulation: “The fact is, that after the youngest child enters kindergarten, keeping house and raising a family do not constitute a full time job for the capable modern woman…It is one thing to escort children to the orthodontist, put up jelly and cosset a husband. It is quite another to sweep the hearth compulsively.” Such writing would not have been out of place in Friedan’s book.

  Kumin, Sexton, and the others found that the Institute—a program that offered time and space away from the home, along with a stipend that communicated the seriousness of their endeavors—helped them find that longed-for “something more,” without abandoning the parts of domestic life that they loved. They were Friedan’s proof of concept.

  * * *

  —

  But there were women who didn’t thrill to Friedan’s message, including the working-class writer Olsen. At first, Olsen found herself persuaded by parts of The Feminine Mystique. During the weeks that the Institute buzzed with news about Friedan’s polemic, Olsen, preparing her seminar presentation, thought she would talk on “women” specifically. She had been reflecting on the division of labor in her own home. The Olsen household might have been radical, but it was also very much of its time. In so many ways, Jack was an incredibly supportive husband; he helped out around the house, and he deeply respected his wife. He thought of her as a comrade. But nonetheless Olsen found herself responsible for the bulk of the domestic labor. “If the kids were sick, that was Mom’s problem,” Julie, Olsen’s second daughter, remembered. “Meals were Mom’s problem, laundry was Mom’s problem, and there were four of us.” And like Friedan, Olsen believed in the value of creativity. She abhorred all obstacles—social, political, economic—that got in the way of creative expression. Maybe there was something in all this chatter about women’s lives and losses that she could use.

  In the end, though, Olsen couldn’t sign on to Friedan’s project. For her, as for her husband, the true struggle was the class struggle. Looking again at The Feminine Mystique, she decided she didn’t see herself in Friedan’s pages. Who were these women who stayed at home all day, listlessly vacuuming? In the Olsen family, “women worked, period, or you couldn’t pay the rent,” Julie explained. Like the narrator in “I Stand Here Ironing,” her award-winning story from 1957, Olsen longed for more time at home with her daughters—and for the energy to enjoy that time. “I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother,” the narrator of the story says at one point, thinking about the early years, when her eldest daughter was small. “We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth.” At once a confession and a defense, “I Stand Here Ironing” communicated powerfully the plight of the working-class mother: a woman trapped not by the “feminine mystique” but by the wage labor that writers like Friedan thoughtlessly portrayed as always emancipatory.

  Olsen typified and anticipated critiques of Friedan later levied by working-class women and women of color (and those who belonged to both communities). These women criticized Friedan for failing to recognize how onerous wage labor can be. For many women, work was the problem, not the solution. Women of color, who made up the bulk of domestic workers in the 1960s, spent their time raising other people’s children rather than their own. They longed to return to their own homes, to make dinner for their own children. To them, Friedan’s complaints were unrecognizable.

  At the same time, however, some working-class women did identify with the claims Friedan made about the relationship between work and fulfillment. The sociologist Myra Marx Ferree, while researching her dissertation in the 1960s, conducted a comparative study of working-class women who worked outside the home and working-class women who did not. She found that those who worked outside the home were overall happier and more satisfied than those who did not. Later, she recalled interviewing a factory worker in Somerville, Massachusetts, who surprised the sociologist with her desire to work. “I sure would like to quit THIS job,” the woman said, “but I can’t imagine not working.”

  But voices like these did no
t usually reach the public. Because Friedan had the time, resources, and education to write a book, hers was the feminist message that gained mainstream attention in the 1960s. Domestic workers and factory workers might have had insights of their own, but they didn’t have time to write them down nor the access to get them published. Olsen was the rare working-class woman with access to the literary and intellectual elite. The Institute had given her a library card, an office, collaborators, and free time. But having come from the working class to her present perch in Cambridge, she saw beyond the intellectual vogue currently sweeping up her friends and colleagues—women who were, after all, better off. She knew about the drudgery that most jobs entailed; she knew how it was a rare job that helped a woman self-actualize. Indeed, the Institute was unusual in its combining paid work and free, creative expression; the vast majority of people would never experience the convergence of these two things.

  Olsen had both privilege and responsibility. She could try to speak for those who could not.

  CHAPTER 12

  Genius of a Sort

  THROUGHOUT THE 1962–1963 academic year, the Olsen family faced a problem every day around dinnertime: they couldn’t get Tillie to come home. Olsen put in long hours during her first year at the Institute. She kept her books, notes, and typewriter in her Mount Auburn Street office; she wanted distance between her work and her family life. When she wasn’t in her office, she was scouring the stacks in Widener Library conducting research, or she was in the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, browsing and buying books. She read widely and avidly. The work of great writers was at her fingertips: the Brontës, Melville, Rilke. She read enthusiastically and copied out powerful passages. (She would continue this practice throughout her life, often mailing favorite quotations to her friends.) “It was like giving her the key to the candy store,” Kathie said, referring to her mother’s library privileges. “She couldn’t believe it. We couldn’t get her out of there.”