The Feminine Mystique

“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. […] 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?’” 

The opening sentences of The Feminine Mystique draw the reader in by presenting Friedan’s thesis as a common, practically universal experience for women. By listing several monotonous-sounding chores in a row, she conjures the atmosphere of tedium and the lack of intellectual stimulation that she presents as endemic among American housewives. She also conveys the sense that women in mid-century America were not suffering merely the lack of particular civil rights, but rather suffering from a crushing emptiness that pervaded the most basic of daily activities. 

“Just what was this problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say ‘I feel empty somehow…incomplete.’ Or she would say, ‘I feel as if I don’t exist.’ […] Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets. Or she stays inside her house and cries. Or her children tell her a joke, and she doesn’t laugh because she doesn’t hear it.” 

This passage describes conversations between Friedan and several interviewees in which she notices that they have no shared language to discuss their feelings of incompleteness. By naming the problem “the feminine mystique,” she offers women a common vocabulary that they can use to discuss their experiences. This vocabulary allows them to name the societal pressure that plagues them rather than putting all the blame on themselves. 

“The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity.”

Friedan offers many variations on a definition for “the feminine mystique” throughout the book, but this is one of the most basic. In successive chapters, she explains how “the fulfillment of [women’s] own femininity” is always supposed to involve having a husband and children and devoting oneself to housework; any other pursuits should be considered secondary.