Abstract
Sometimes I think I am the only one who likes Betty Draper, the ex-wife of the central character Don Draper on AMC’s series “Mad Men.” Betty is bashed in the blogosphere: she is cold, a neglectful mother, materialistic, unhappy with her life as a homemaker and doesn’t do much about it. I think Betty Draper gets a bum rap. Watching the series, it’s clear to me that Betty Draper is Betty Friedan’s “problem with no name” incarnate. Betty Draper is an educated suburban housewife left on her own in Ossining, New York, with two kids and a lying husband. Viewers know that she would be better off if she just got a job.
Betty Draper is fictional, but as Stephanie Coontz reminds us in A Strange Stirring, the social conditions that produced “the problem with no name” were quite real. Coontz’s ambitious book centers on exploring The Feminine Mystique to analyze American women’s limited horizons in the 1950s and 1960s. Coontz examines The Feminine Mystique as a cultural phenomenon, historicizing Friedan’s work and exploring its intellectual precedents in the social sciences (something that Friedan didn’t do herself). Coontz also assesses The Feminine Mystique’s impact: the sometimes life-transforming effect it had on readers and the limited role it had in shaping “second wave” American feminisms. Through the inclusion of a chapter on African American and working-class women, Coontz confronts Friedan’s racial and class blinders, and how and whether different groups of American women were subject to pressures to stay home and fulfill themselves through family life. Lastly, Coontz writes about new gendered mystiques that currently beset women (and men).
Coontz’s ambition pays off. She has written an engaging book, making a number of smart decisions that make it accessible and assignable. Coontz has not burdened the reader with detailed exegesis of Friedan’s book; she hits the highlights, and curious readers will still want to actually read The Feminine Mystique. Coontz draws from rather than resummarizes Daniel Horowitz’s 1998 biography of Friedan, which uncovered Friedan’s past activism in the labor and civil rights movements. Coontz cites Horowitz to note how Friedan’s willingness to fudge her past helped fashion a persona as fellow-sufferer of “the problem with no name,” and thus sell books. Coontz also does an excellent job of using Friedan’s oversights in acknowledging her intellectual predecessors—especially Mirra Komarovsky and Simone de Beauvoir—to bring those and other authors’ ideas about women’s oppression back into play.
A Strange Stirring made me think about The Feminine Mystique and the feminine mystique in new ways. First, Coontz emphasizes what a fluke the 1950s were in terms of American family life and how the prosperity of the postwar economic recovery, the erasure of women’s experiences in the war effort, and the sustained rise in the birth rate postwar were contingent structural formations. Coontz’s recounting of these contingencies counters distortions that present the 1950s as an American Eden from which we have fallen. Second, Coontz had me thinking about Friedan’s book as a self-help book. The self-help world of women’s magazines prompted the publication of The Feminine Mystique and promoted its success. Coontz (p. 88) argues that “Friedan gave many of her readers their first exposure to what is now a self-help cliché: that individuals can achieve their full potential when they reject the stereotypes that have been laid on them and realize they have the power to change.” That cliché is a basic feminist insight, and Coontz reinscribed for me just how infused with “post-feminism” popular culture has become.
Coontz’s book works less well for me when she tries to account for The Feminine Mystique’s and the feminine mystique’s limited penetration into African American and white working-class communities. While her chapter on these groups is a corrective to class- and race-washed narratives about feminisms in the 1960s, I think Coontz missed an opportunity to tie her analysis of the social conditions faced by women outside the “mainstream” more closely to the reasons why Friedan ignored those women. Coontz argues that Black women and working-class white women were relatively unaffected by the feminine mystique for different reasons. She argues that educated Black women could not stay out of the labor market, as they were unlikely to be married to men who could support the family on one income, while white working-class women lived in a world where even menial paid work in the public sphere was an escape from isolated household drudgery. For both groups, economic conditions militated against the inward focus of white middle-class women the feminine mystique fed on. I have my doubts, as does Coontz, about how impermeable each community was to the feminine mystique, but I felt that Coontz’s argument that Friedan should have seen and then communicated this relative freedom to her readers is problematic. Friedan’s class blinders were firmly in place despite her unionism, but Coontz thinks that she should have seen through her race blinders and accepted educated Black working women, combining paid work and home life with less guilt, as counterarguments to the feminine mystique. I wonder if Friedan could have promoted any Black women as role models to her white middle-class readership in the early 1960s, even if she had wanted to. I’m not trying to excuse Friedan; I just think that Coontz neglected to make an argument about the limitations Friedan faced in terms of the intended audience for her book. Coontz is clear that Friedan wanted her work to sell to the white mainstream. The 60 percent of employed Black women working in domestic labor or as cleaning staff in the 1950s (p. 127) would have been much more visible to Friedan’s intended audience than Black professional women working chiefly in the Black community. Given that racial and class reality, it’s easier to argue that Friedan’s white female, middle-class audience would have found it impossible to identify with Black women in any meaningful way.
Coontz ( p. 145) writes that The Feminine Mystique wasn’t “ahead of its time;” rather, Friedan’s book became a bestseller because it tapped a nerve of concern about women’s roles, brought data together beyond the world of experts, and made the discussion accessible to a wider audience. We can’t run the counterfactual experiment to see what would have happened if Friedan had never written The Feminine Mystique. Coontz doesn’t even try. Instead, she gives us a thoughtful assessment of both what Friedan accomplished as a public feminist intellectual and how far American women have come in vanquishing the feminine mystique over the last half-century. After all, in 2012, even television’s “Real Housewives” have jobs.