I have a feeling that when I’m older and reflecting on my experience as a young man, there will be a vital point in the story when I exclaim, “And then I found The Feminine Mystique!” It’s bewildering to consider that the work — which launched the modern feminist movement almost 20 years before I was born — could relate in any significant way to my own life. In fact it’s more than just significant; the application to and explanation of my own life is monumental. But I’m not alone there. I think Friedan’s work applies to our entire society. My new theory is that many of the forces affecting women in the ’50s and ’60s now affect both genders equally.
I’m only halfway through the book, so I can’t summarize the entire thing yet. I’m trying to get in the habit of posting little bits as I read, instead of trying to cover the whole whopper once I’m done. (That’s been difficult since I’ve realized I’m kind of like an Ent — those tree-like creatures from Lord of the Rings. Treebeard’s saying went something like, “It takes us a really long time to say anything at all, so we don’t say anything unless it’s worth taking a really long time to say.”)
My statement about the book’s ongoing validity relates to Friedan’s thesis:
“It is my thesis that the core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity… Our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role” (p. 77).
I don’t know if it’s pure coincidence or if my reading habits are starting to converge towards a single subject, but this statement was a perfect follow-up to a book I just finished reading: The Undiscovered Self by Carl Jung. In that short book the famous psychologist seemed to be inviting someone to tackle the subject of feminism by taking the individuality angle. As Jung wrote:
“The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses” (p. 12).
In the natural progression of my independent studying, I’ve noticed a shift from fiction and philosophy to nonfiction and psychology, with the dividing time period being the 1950s. Both of these books fall in the second category, and I’m sort of surprised by Jung’s near-total absence from The Feminine Mystique. Jung’s book was published in 1957 and Friedan’s in 1963, so maybe there wasn’t enough lag time between the two.
Like I said, I still have a large chunk of it to read, but while Jung’s name has only been mentioned once so far, an entire chapter was dedicated to Sigmund Freud. In a way I’m glad about that, though, since it’s now obvious that I had a very skewed idea of Freud’s work. What I mean is, I only knew about the beneficial (or potentially beneficial) nature of his theories of the subconscious mind. I had no idea that he was sexist, or even hated or feared women. And I took a class in college called “Freud and Psychoanalysis”!
Apparently Freud was “a prisoner of his own culture,” by which Friedan means Victorian Europe at the dawn of the 20th century.
“In Freud’s time, evidently, cultural hypocrisy forced the repression of sex. [...] He then developed his theory by describing all the stages of growth as sexual… Something that could be described in physiological terms, linked to an origin of anatomy, seemed more comfortable, solid, real, scientific, as he moved into the unexplored country of the unconscious mind” (pp. 106-107).
Friedan explains that, while psychoanalysis was helpful in the therapy setting, its interpretation by mainstream culture was very damaging. Almost all the freedoms that women fought for from the mid-1800s (including the right to vote, which wasn’t granted to females until 1920 — though I didn’t know that!) until the end of WWII had reportedly vanished by the early 1960s.
“What happened to women is part of what happened to all of us in the years after the war. We found excuses for not facing the problems we once had the courage to face. The American spirit fell into a strange sleep; …the whole nation stopped growing up. All of us went back into the warm brightness of home…
“It was easier, safer, to think about love and sex than about communism, McCarthy, and the uncontrolled bomb. It was easier to look for Freudian sexual roots in man’s behavior, his ideas, and his wars than to look critically at his society and act constructively to right its wrongs” (pp. 186-187).
But as she goes on to say, “the individual” couldn’t solely be blamed for what happened in our culture. Psychologists, anthropologists, guidance counselors, professors and magazine editors all began taking Freud’s “lead,” telling women that self-fulfillment came from staying in the home, serving their husbands and children in their biological role. Once that caught on, highly paid marketers and advertisers took it to a new level of absurdity, manipulating the fear and guilt of women, knowing that these newly created housewives were responsible for 75 percent of spending in the home. (By the way, British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis is the only person I’ve found today who seems to care about this topic. His documentary The Trap explores the ways that Edward Bernays, Freud’s own nephew, became rich by applying Freud’s theories to propaganda and brainwashing efforts in post-war America. Although, Friedan doesn’t seem aware of this either. Edward’s mother is mentioned in passing as a “strong” woman from Freud’s life — but Edward himself is totally omitted.)
So ladies and gentleman, we enter a new phase of the mystical creative journey. From not on there won’t be so many muddled, abstract philosophical explorations. Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus marked the end of that painful phase for me. Now I set out to explain the real world and what might be the most bizarre mystery of the universe: PEOPLE!
Similar Posts:
- The Cunning of Desire (August 6, 2008)
- Mere Indoctrination (December 9, 2008)
- An Enlightenment Steak, With A Side Of Karma (November 6, 2008)
