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It had more intellectual heft and less stridency than I expected to find in a best-selling polemic. Reading it was a little like finally meeting a benefactor, and I was pleased to discover that I liked my benefactor. As a woman born well after its publication, I considered myself in some sense its beneficiary. I RECENTLY read The Feminine Mystique for the first time. Friedan showed that a work drive was as natural and undeniable as a sex drive. It turns out that the game is not zero-sum the two can feed on each other. Her book demonstrated that many women had too little work-and too little life. And yet, for some reason, a substantial fraction of housewives were mysteriously discontent.īetty Friedan’s iconic 1963 book The Feminine Mystique submitted a powerful explanation: work was a basic human need, for women as well as for men. Now it was work outside the home that was particularly frowned upon as unnatural, unfeminine. But the fetters hadn’t disappeared they had relocated. The idyllic image of the postwar American family included a vital sex life between husband and wife. Now, female sexuality was embraced-provided it was limited to marriage.

In a previous era, women’s need for sex had been denied and suppressed. The American housewife was free to play bridge with friends, redecorate her living room, experiment with new recipes, attend to her husband and children, and guarantee that her kitchen truly gleamed.įramed as a privilege, it sounds rather pleasant. Longer life spans also meant that women had many years when childrearing would no longer occupy their time. The wonders of washing machines and kitchen gadgets and supermarkets expedited chores, while the country’s new prosperity made these conveniences widely available. And the job of a housewife, though it certainly involved labor, had become less onerous than in the past. In their lives, the distinction between work and life blurred-the domain of home and family was also their worksite. In the postwar United States, for a healthy slice of the female middle class, the problem took a starkly different form. But of course, “life” is understood to encompass everything outside the office-hobbies friends and, especially, home and family. Taken literally, the term is a little odd-after all, work is a subset of life, not its opposite. The proper ratio is almost always seen as elusive, utopian, the province of Scandinavians. IN THE past few decades, the concept of “work-life balance” has assumed a prominent place in our cultural lexicon. The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s The Problem That Had No Name Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow ▪ Summer 2011