Women In The Feminine Mystique

It has been said that “after a brief period of freedom and opportunity during World War II, American women went ‘back to the kitchen.’” The War was a time of great turmoil and change. One of the most noticeable changes was the increase of women in the workforce, because many women had to obtain a job or career outside of the home for the first time. The expectation was that when the men returned from fighting, the women would give up their jobs and return home (Milkman, WA, 553). When the war was over, the public began to seek a feeling of safety and security. One of the ways this was found was by embracing the more conventional gender roles, with men and women in separate spheres. With a renewed emphasis on marriage, couples began to marry

According to Betty Friedan, for a decade and a half women struggled in silence. Her work, The Feminine Mystique discussed this idyllic, and false, image of the happy housewife. Friedan herself had suffered from this expectation and had given up a prestigious fellowship opportunity, in part because she did not want to become “an old maid college teacher” (Horowitz, WA, 578). In The Feminine Mystique Friedan contends that many women during this period believed that they should have found fulfillment in being a wife and mother, but many felt empty and depressed. They believed that something must be wrong with them (Friedan, WA,

Nor was it a societal expectation. According to a study done by Joanne Meyerowitz there were contradictions in the postwar culture. Meyerowitz surveyed 489 monthly circulation magazines, and what she found contradicts previous beliefs about the women in this time period. Many of the articles in these magazines lauded the achievements of women who worked outside of the home. Only 15% of the articles Meyerowitz examined focused on women solely as wives and mothers (Meyerowitz, Beyond the Feminine Mystique, 1461). To the contrary, movie star Marlene Dietrich article for the Ladies’ Home Journal was met with scathing backlash. She argued that wives should revolve their lives around pleasing their husbands, and everyone woman needed a “master.” The general response of readers was that Dietrich was clueless. (Meyerowitz, Beyond the Feminine Mystique, 1473).

However, even within this career-minded rhetoric there was the assumption that all women wanted to marry and have families, and that these families would be more important than their respective careers. The more “highbrow” magazines did, at times, have a strongly antifeminist stance with a focus on physical beauty (Meyerowitz, Beyond the Feminine Mystique,