Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism

Abstract

Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Daniel Horowitz. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. 255 pp.+ notes, index. A Jewish girl leaves Peoria, Illinois, for Smith College. Upon her 1942 graduation she goes to grad school, works in New York, then marries. A move to the suburbs and three children complete the conformist cycle. But middle-class housewifery becomes a "gilded cage," devoid of self-worth, identity, and purpose. The realization that other educated women share "the problem that has no name" prompts the writing of The Feminine Mystique (1963), the seminal text during the rebirth of American feminism in the 1960s. Sound familiar? Betty Goldstein Friedan's transformation from naive Illinois schoolgirl and bored housewife to feminist firebrand is a popular culture staple of mythic proportion. According to Smith College American Studies professor Daniel Horowitz, that's precisely the problem. Most mythic odysseys, including Friedan's, are equal parts reality and fancy. Like other social historians in the wake of E.P. Thompson, Horowitz turns his attention to the "making" of Betty Friedan, and the private drama behind the public persona. During Goldstein's childhood, Peoria was Illinois's second-largest city, and witnessed clashes between capital and labor. Labor conflict was discussed freely in the Goldstein household, as was antisemitism, the rise of fascism, free-thought, and literature. By the time Goldstein graduated from high school, she already enjoyed a reputation as a budding intellectual. Goldstein's mind blossomed at Smith. Horowitz draws on Goldstein's undergraduate papers and editorials in the campus newspaper she edited, to show that Goldstein was also an activist. He does a masterful job of linking Goldstein to Smith professors who shaped her thought. Goldstein's capacious mind led her to write on topics like pacifism, student rights, fascism, and socialism. Many articles were spirited defenses of labor unions and, at the urging of a professor, Goldstein visited Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, a hotbed of union activism. As a graduate student at Berkeley (1942-43), Goldstein immersed herself as much in the Popular Front as in psychology labs. She moved to New York, where from 1943 through 1946, she reported on labor and women's issues for the Federated Press. When she lost her job-partly due to sexism-Goldstein began writing for the UE News, the official journal of the United Electrical Workers, a radical union with a relatively progressive record on women. She continued to write for the News into 1952. Horowitz notes that her 1949 marriage to Carl Friedan did not silence Friedan's union radicalism, McCarthyism did. The UE's communist organizers led to right-wing attacks that so decimated UE membership that Friedan fell victim to staff cut-backs. Retreat to the suburbs failed to stifle Friedan. First in Queens, then in Rockland County, Friedan edited a community newsletter and immersed herself in grassroots organizing on multi-cultural housing, racism, rents, and education. …