Pictured: Betty Friedan.

The reason The Feminine Mystique was written was what really influenced me to read it. Betty Friedan’s motivation had been to disprove “fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949—the housewife-mother” (pg. xi-xx). She had recognized how dissatisfied many of her past women classmates at Smith College were.

It’s curious to think about how much of her book is still relevant to the lives and satisfaction of women today. On page 163, Friedan wrote, “The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.” When I read this, I immediately thought of the “free the nipple” movement focused on desexualizing women’s bodies and normalizing breastfeeding. Even when we’ve completely erased this need for censorship amongst women (again, with the distinction that it should be a choice whether or not you wear a bra, not because you feel pressured to), there will still be the issue of erasing the hostility that comes without universal desexualization. I recall a recent video of a woman talking about her experience, and how she will not wear a bra because she doesn’t want to, but she still lives in a world where she is fearful of simply sitting on the subway because of her choice.

Friedan also noted that continuously, “stories in women’s magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child.” This was an unfortunate trend I noticed even now when I was analyzing advertising in my film and media studies class. The cultural idea in America that women enjoy being caregivers has changed, but not entirely. During covid, the majority of people who left the workforce were women. Why? When faced with the need for childcare, the expectation was that she would be the one to do it (in a heterosexual relationship.) Not the man, despite both having the same responsibilities to care for their child. It’s an aspect that hasn’t changed much. Men do not have the same expectations put on a woman.

Forced domesticity on women is still a disgustingly corrosive idea in media. There was an advertisement at the start of lockdown issued by the UK government (1) that encouraged these ideas. There was another particularly bad advertisement from only a couple years ago that did the same thing (2). We clearly have not moved as far from it as we think.

(1) UK Government. “STAY HOME. SAVE LIVES.” BBC News. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-55844367

(2) Mr. Clean. Advertisement of Mother’s Day campaign, 2011. It’s Nice That. http://www.itsnicethat.com/news/advertising-standards-authority-gender-stereotypes-report-180717

Friedan made the distinction that “chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.” There is no shame in domesticity. There is no shame in truly enjoying motherhood. The only shame should come from encouraging these harmful stereotypes that serve to prevent women from living fulfilling lives.