Chapters 5 - 8 Summary and Analysis
New Characters
Margaret Mead: An anthropologist whose research was utilized by "functional"
theorists to romanticize pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, thereby
reinforcing the feminine mystique.
Summary
Friedan explores how, during the 1940s, the belief that women were inferior to
men and merely delicate breeding creatures emerged. This notion partly stemmed
from how popular culture misinterpreted and distorted Sigmund Freud's theories.
Freud, the Austrian psychoanalyst, introduced the term "penis envy" to describe
the early developmental stage when girls realize they lack a penis. Under the
feminine mystique, however, this term becomes a metaphor for women lacking male
power, dominance, confidence, and superiority. For women to desire more than
their roles as housekeepers, wives, and mothers is seen as "penis envy"—a
yearning for something not naturally theirs. Friedan argues that this is a
distortion of Freud's theories to support the feminine mystique.
Friedan notes that while Freud was brilliant in some areas, he was also a product of his time, working within a highly repressed society where women had limited opportunities. She suggests it is no surprise he observed women envying men's positions. She argues that the frustrations of Victorian women cannot be directly applied to twentieth-century women without considering the context in which Freud operated. However, media, advertising, and modern psychology failed to examine this context and instead used the concept of "penis envy" to reinforce women's domestic roles. Freud, she writes, believed that anatomy determines destiny, and this "determinism" influenced his views on women and their roles. Friedan examines his relationships with women in his life, all of whom accommodated him, and notes how his letters to his wife reveal his desire for her to be obedient and childlike, mirroring the feminine mystique of the twentieth century.
Although critics considered Freud's context for many of his theories, Friedan argues that his views on gender-determined roles and behavior were not similarly scrutinized. According to Freud, a woman is simply a deficient man, and any envy she feels towards men is reduced to sexual or biological terms. Friedan suggests that a broader perspective would reveal that women's envy stems from their inferior social position rather than a missing penis. Freud's theories were further simplified in popular culture through books like Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg's Modern Woman: The Lost Sex and Helene Deutsch's The Psychology of Woman, which characterized women's nature as passive and receptive, and men's as active and aggressive. These books implied that if women wanted to work or think, they had a "masculinity complex."
Although Friedan identifies psychoanalysts who oppose Freudian theory, she observes that the pervasive influence of media, advertising, and societal momentum surrounding these theories is so strong that redefining them becomes nearly impossible for most people.
Friedan explains that as psychiatry and psychology embraced the feminine mystique, other fields followed suit. Anthropologist Margaret Mead and a group of sociologists known as the "functionalists" further reinforced this concept. Initially, Mead's research explored cultures where gender roles were shared or even reversed. However, she eventually adopted a biological perspective on women's roles, emphasizing their function as mothers who bear and nurture children. Over time, Friedan notes, Mead's theories aligned with functionalism, suggesting that a woman's societal role should remain traditional to prevent confusion and societal breakdown. This, Friedan states, is the core argument of both Mead and the functionalists.
Friedan argues that these assumptions are based on outdated ideas that infantilize women and rely solely on historical or present contexts to predict the future, which she finds illogical. Functionalists often claim women have struggled in careers, despite having limited time to prove themselves historically. Instead, functionalism promotes "adjustment,"...
(This entire section contains 2362 words.)
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suggesting that individuals must adapt to their societal roles for the good of society, thereby maintaining a "functional" male-female social unit. This ideology justifies keeping women in traditional roles. Friedan writes, "Women were being adjusted to a state inferior to their full capabilities."
Friedan also criticizes Mead for hypocrisy in her own theories. She argues that Mead increasingly glorified women's role as childbearers, celebrating pregnancy and biology, which elevated women above Freud's inferior view but only through their biological functions. Friedan questions whether Mead has overstated women's power to give life. She points out that, towards the end of her career, Mead began to question whether women had regressed to primitive times by retreating to the home to protect their children and await their mates. However, even Mead's encouragement for women to leave the home still attributed a sexual or biological aspect to their actions.
Beyond the realms of psychiatry and psychology under Sigmund Freud, and the sociology and anthropology theories advanced by Margaret Mead, American educational institutions began ingraining the feminine mystique in students. Friedan highlights a change in the educational approach toward women from the 1940s to the 1960s, both in women's colleges and coeducational institutions. The issue lies with both the students—who have already internalized the feminine mystique by the time they enter college—and the educators. Friedan explains how guidance counselors and social pressures increasingly direct women away from challenging courses and toward practical, how-to classes that teach skills like cooking, nurturing relationships, and managing a household.
Friedan explores how educators embraced functionalist theories regarding male and female roles, coining this type of education as “sex-directed education.” By encouraging young women to suppress their intellectual ambitions and concentrate solely on seeking a relationship and a mate, educators limit women's options compared to men, who face a broader range of future possibilities. According to Friedan, women during this period had only two limited choices: marriage and motherhood or a lonely spinsterhood. They were not encouraged to prepare for professional careers, but only for clerical or other low-paying, unchallenging jobs that might supplement a spouse's income but not fully support them. This diversion from critical adult decisions—such as choosing a career, balancing work and relationships, and pursuing opportunities—prevented them from transitioning from adolescent questioning into adulthood. They were urged to “adjust” to the feminine role without being made aware of positive alternatives.
Friedan interviews numerous high school and college students who discuss the necessity of downplaying their academic interests to fit in and become popular enough to attract a partner. She notes that these girls and young women are making a conscious decision to embrace the mystique and are somewhat aware of a “refusal to get involved” in pursuits outside of finding a husband. Even academically talented girls who initially retain their intellectual interests eventually succumb to the teachings of sex-directed education, believing that resisting would make their lives too challenging.
Sex-directed educators, she writes, inflict two types of harm on women's societal roles. Firstly, they only encourage women to focus on their sexual functions. Secondly, they neglect their duty to educate women in thinking, analyzing, and utilizing their creativity. Research at the end of the two-decade dominance of sex-directed educators shows that the least-developed women were those who attended college solely to find a husband. Many women who aimed only to fulfill their feminine roles by marrying and having children experience "anomie"—a sense of identity loss—as they grow older. Friedan suggests that physical achievements are not a replacement for a woman having her own mind alongside having a family.
Friedan explains the cultural backdrop in which the feminine mystique emerged, noting that World War II made both men and women yearn for the safety and comforts of home. Additionally, sex-directed education, Freud, and functionalists all glamorized and praised the role of women as mothers and family caretakers, leading women to marry early and have children young. The societal role of "the mother" also pressured women, as mothers were criticized for raising maladjusted young men who went to war, and men could eventually turn women their age—whom they would marry—into wives-as-mothers.
She observes that the American baby boom in the post–World War II years also occurred in other countries, but those countries did not conclude that parenting was the only meaningful work for a woman. In America, however, a woman's role as a wife and parent was promoted to the exclusion of her other potential pursuits. Men returning from war took over women's jobs, limiting women's careers and offering no promotion beyond a certain level in the professional hierarchy. Artists, educators, and thinkers, along with civilians, focused their attention on home and family life, neglecting other American interests.
Sociological studies continued to misinterpret—or inaccurately report—the correlation between mothering and happiness. Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey initially published survey results indicating that the more educated a woman is, the more sexually fulfilled she is. However, later findings reversed this thesis, although this change never reached popular awareness. Women continued to face a choice between home, family, and love, versus career, childlessness, and loneliness.
Friedan explains how women absorbed and perpetuated the mystique, with friends teaching friends and mothers teaching children, by their own examples, how women should behave. Men, too, fell victim to the mystique, expecting their wives to act not only as the mothers of their children but also as their own mothers.
Despite the emphasis on motherhood, Friedan observes that psychological research in the 1940s and 1950s revealed that mothers were seeking too much satisfaction from their children. This led to signs of maladjustment in American children. These mothers had little else in their lives besides concern for their kids. Even Dr. Spock, the famous pediatrician, acknowledged these findings, suggesting that Russian mothers, who were less child-centric, might have been raising better-adjusted children than their American counterparts. Psychiatrist David Levy termed this phenomenon "maternal overprotection" to describe the dynamic between mothers and their children.
Analysis
Friedan transitions from examining the surface portrayal of the feminine
mystique in the media and its historical context to exploring the cultural
backdrop from which it emerged. In chapters five through eight, she outlines
how the social sciences rationalized and upheld the feminine mystique instead
of challenging it. This reinforcement contributed to maintaining the domestic
and sexual roles women were expected to adhere to during the mid-twentieth
century.
Mid-century academics and popular psychologists saw Sigmund Freud as a genius whose theories asserted male superiority and female inferiority. According to Freud, any efforts by women to expand their roles beyond being wives, mothers, and homemakers were merely expressions of "penis envy," or a desire to be male and have more freedom, Friedan notes. However, she questions why no one considers the historical context of Freud's theories, which were developed in Victorian Vienna. Meanwhile, Margaret Mead's initial research, which suggested that men and women could have interchangeable roles in society, eventually shifted to a focus on the significance of women as mothers and a veneration of childbirth. By the time Mead began to re-evaluate this perspective, her earlier work and prevailing interpretations of Freud's theories had already solidified the cultural belief that a woman's sole purpose was to be a housewife and mother. Friedan highlights that when these popular theories began to falter, no one was willing to scrutinize them further.
After illustrating how individual theorists propagated the feminine mystique, Friedan examines how educators and young women embraced these concepts. She explains that educators took the intellectuals’ ideas about women's roles and integrated them into the curriculum directed at women. Young girls entered college already believing that their primary purpose was to marry. Those who didn't initially hold this belief were soon convinced by curriculum options and guidance counselors who nudged them toward marriage rather than academic degrees. Men also suffered under the mystique, witnessing women become mothers at a young age and seeing their female peers replicate their mothers' patterns, rather than becoming independent adults with whom they could form meaningful relationships. Ultimately, women themselves started perpetuating the myth—friends influenced friends, and mothers taught daughters what it meant to be a woman.
Friedan’s account of how the feminine mystique led to women's oppression and became ingrained in American culture parallels theories proposed by French theorist Michel Foucault. Foucault, known for his literary criticism and theories on institutional power, argued that institutions dominate individual will and teach individuals to comply and perpetuate the institution's teachings. The ultimate success of an institution is when an individual fully internalizes its message and self-regulates according to the roles prescribed, effectively becoming a living representation of that institution. Foucault detailed these theories in his work on the formation and function of the French prison system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Initially intended to house the mentally ill and some poor, these institutions quickly became mechanisms for suppressing the lower classes and discouraging them from aspiring beyond their societal roles.
Foucault suggested that prisons suppressed individuals by first physically isolating them within prison walls, then labeling and categorizing them, and finally teaching them to accept, internalize, and believe in their new identities and societal placements. These metaphors extend to other ways social groups instruct their members to conform to assigned roles—a form of functionalism based not on gender (as Friedan describes) but on social status. Reflecting on Foucault's examples helps explain why women succumbed to the feminine mystique. Society isolated them by confining them to the home and discouraging their involvement in careers or social causes, labeled them as housewives, and taught them that their roles as wives and mothers were their only prospects. Eventually, women accepted and internalized these roles—high school girls lost interest in academics, and college women pursued their “MRS” degrees—completing the “brainwashing” process.
Although Friedan does not mention Foucault in her book, his theories on how institutions form, establish themselves, and eventually influence individual thought are relevant when reading these chapters. Friedan explains how each new theorist who could have challenged the feminine mystique instead allowed their work to be manipulated to support it. She lists a range of intellectuals—from Freud to Margaret Mead—who concur that a woman's destiny is biological. Women heed these thinkers, and despite their growing resentment and resistance to the roles they are assigned, they end up fulfilling those roles.
Adhering to the feminine mystique leads to tangible, negative consequences for these women. Although many marry and become mothers as society dictates, they feel resentful of their circumstances—sometimes expressing anger or acting as overprotective mothers.