Breaking the Ilusion or Disproving the Cleavers

“This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs but the violent jolt of the Capital. That is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription.”

-Virginia Wolfe, The Hours

            The 1950s is a time much idealized by today’s society—the perfect families, the man in his rightful place as breadwinner, and women were home taking care of the children. Everyone knows that was how America ran, and people were truly, genuinely happy.  This is the precise lie that Betty Friedan helped to expose through numerous interviews and her eventual novel The Feminine Mystique, simultaneously igniting a second movement of feminism in a United States that had become plagued by complacency towards an epidemic of unhappy women and repressed men.

            It was merely the course of life. Men were to work towards a successful career and women were to work towards marriage—not merely to a man, but to an entire life. In first half of the twentieth century it was perpetuated by the media, social analysis, and popular culture alike that women served as an auxiliary to the lives of men. In this auxiliary role, it was expected that women take care of their husband and children’s needs and that this was their primary function as a human being. The pre-established norm was that yes, women attended college but not in the same capacity as men. School was a mean to an end, an end very dissimilar to that of the man. It was thought that women should attend school or do secretarial jobs not to help them start a career, but rather to find a husband.

 This was the world in which Betty Friedan lived, and one she knew was built upon inequality and the repression of human nature. To Betty, a simple life as a housewife—of menial tasks, bake sales and the serving both her children and husband before herself—was not enough to bring contentedness. After struggling for years against all the opposing factors that society presented, she was able to publish her work The Feminine Mystique. After compiling numerous interviews, Betty discovered she was not alone in her feelings of emptiness and disillusionment towards the “perfect” society which America had propagated.  She used this book to back her argument that women not only had as much right to a life and career outside of the family as men, but also that they could compete in the same business and economic world right alongside them. Furthermore, Betty argued that it was not merely women who suffered through the plights of this imbalanced gender bias, but also that men were being denied natural nurturing impulses as well.
            Nor was Betty Friedan the only women to publish a work that spoke out against the status quo on this issue. Helen Gurly Brown’s Sex and the Single Female also blatantly disregarded the idea of women having their place, men having their place, and these realms being altogether irreconcilable.  In Brown’s book, she presented a virtual how to guide for independent women, not on how to obtain a husband, but rather, a mere bedfellow, explicitly—a sex partner. While a different approach than the one she herself had taken, Betty Friedan respected and found companionship in Helen Brown. They both aimed to discount the political and societal implications of what it meant to be an “independent women”. Both had the common goal to prove not only was it not outside of the norm for a woman to long for more than to exist as an auxiliary companion to a man, but that it was human nature for them to do so.

In his essay Self-Reliance Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself and you shall have the sufferage of the world.”  It is clear to see that the ideals of women such as Friedan and Brown are based within this notion. However, both Friedan and Brown would likely say that whether Emerson meant it to be taken as such or not, “man” can function as a colloquialism for “mankind”, encompassing both men and women—to be honest with oneself, regardless of gender or societal pressure is one’s highest calling.