Daniel Horowitz. Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American
Left, The Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1998. 354 pp. $30.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-55849-168-7.
Reviewed by Katherine M. Osburn (Tennessee Technological University)
Published on H-Women (January, 2000)
Deconstructing Betty Friedan
now since the publication of the Feminine Mystique and
until I started writing the book, I wasn’t even conscious
of the woman question.” (Friedan in The Feminine Mystique , 10th Anniversary Edition, New York, Dell Publishing Co.: 1974, p. 1.) Knowing from the onset of
the book that Friedan rejects its major premises immediately draws the reader into the narrative, for one wonders
what Horowitz will argue that Friedan repudiated.
In her 1963 feminist classic The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan condemned the limited and unsatisfying
gender roles of the post-World War II era. Her passionate plea for expanded public roles for women was especially effective because she spoke as one who had been
trapped and nearly suffocated by the role of the suburban
housewife. While historians of post-war gender studies have argued that gender roles were far more complex
than those portrayed in The Feminine Mystique, Friedan’s
personal narrative of the bored middle-class housewife
turned activist has been accepted as a model for the evolution of feminist consciousness in the second-wave feminist movement. Daniel Horowitz’s study suggests that,
like the book she wrote, Friedan herself is far more complex than the persona she has created.
Horowitz is a superb biographer, immersing his subject in the currents of history. He provides the reader a
clear sense of the places and periods that shaped young
Bettye (the spelling she used until graduate school) Goldstein (Friedan). He recreates her childhood in Peoria,
Illinois as the bright daughter of a prosperous Jewish
merchant whose wealth gave the family social standUsing an extensive collection of Friedan’s papers ing above Peoria’s poorer Jews, but whose Jewishness
archived at Smith College, Horowitz argues for a multi- marginalized them from the rest of the middle class. In
causal view of second-wave feminism: “Though most this context of social alienation, Bettye was drawn into
women’s historians have argued that 1960s feminism the leftist critique of capitalism that was popular among
emerged in response to the suburban captivity of white some intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. Writing for
middle-class women during the 1950s, the material her high school newspaper, Goldstein published columns
in Friedan’s papers suggested additional origins–anti- and book reviews that addressed workers’ rights and critfascism, radicalism, and labor union activism of the icized fascism. She even wrote a satire on women’s lim1940s” (p. 7). His unauthorized biography weaves the ited career choices that she modeled on the parable of the
strands of these “isms” into an compelling account that grasshopper and the ant. Despite her precociouness in
functions exceptionally well on many levels: as biogra- high school, Goldstein did not develop into a fully comphy, as historiography of feminism, and as social move- mitted, politically active social critic until she went to colment history. Betty Friedan herself, however, has pub- lege.
licly rejected the story Horowitz tells in this biography.
During her years at Smith College (1938-1942) and
She has stood by her 1973 statement that “it is a decade
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later in graduate school at Berkeley, (1942-1943), Bettye Goldstein embraced many progressive causes. She
became an outspoken advocate of labor unions and a
critic both of fascism and of U.S. involvement in Britain’s
struggle against fascism (because Britain was an imperialist nation and therefore an unworthy ally). During
her senior year, Goldstein studied at the Highlander Folk
School in Monteagle, Tennessee, which trained labor activists. Returning to Smith, she supported the successful unionization of the campus maids. Upon graduation,
Goldstein went to Berkeley to pursue a doctorate in psychology, but left after only one year. Horowitz directly
challenges Friedan’s later account of why she ended her
graduate studies so abruptly. In the Feminine Mystique
and elsewhere, Friedan claimed that she had won a lucrative and prestigious fellowship that would have allowed
her to finish her studies, but that her then boyfriend pressured her to turn it down because he felt threatened by
her success. Friedan claims she chose love over career because the Mystique had already exerted its hold on American women. According to Horowitz, however, Friedan
left for a combination of reasons because “she was apparently unable to combine activism and academic work
or to find the kind of leadership position and attention”
that she had held at Smith (p. 88). Fear of being unable
to find an academic position as a Jewish woman and her
desire to help the struggle against fascism by helping organize workers (she abandoned her earlier isolationism
after Pearl Harbor), also contributed to her decision to
leave Berkeley and begin a career as a journalist.
outlined her support of equal pay for equal work, condemned discrimination against women, and documented
the appalling conditions of Latina and African American
factory workers. In 1953 her UE pamphlet UE, Women
Fight for a Better Life! UE Picture Story of Women’s Role in
American History, Friedan addressed the childcare problems that women factory workers faced. According to
Horowitz, she left UE due to a complex tangle of sexism,
economics, and cold war politics. Friedan, however, has
given versions of the event that support her contention
that gender was the primary issue in her departure: that
she was fired because she was pregnant with her second
child and her union failed to live up to its promise of a
maternity leave, and that she left full time employment
(with relief) because it was too arduous to combine work
with caring for two small children. Horowitz again argues that sexism was only part of the picture–that McCarthyism had “dramatically reduced the membership of
UE [and that] the union had to cut its staff” (p. 141). According to Horowitz, Friedan may also have volunteered
to quit because she had less seniority. The actual circumstances of the firing remain murky, but it is clear that, on
some level, Friedan was simply worn down by trying to
juggle her personal and professional lives.
Like so many others in the post-war period, the
Friedans fled to suburbia in 1950 where Betty became
a community activist and a freelance writer while she
raised her three children. During these years she also
entered therapy to combat her increasing sense of unhappiness. Friedan has given contradictory accounts of
her life in the suburbs, noting that she often felt trapped
and yet she was also able to step back from career pressures and experience personal growth. Friedan’s time in
suburbia hardly mirrored the inane experiences of consumerist housewives driven by the Mystique. Even after
the Friedans moved again to a more affluent suburb in
1956, Friedan associated with thoughtful and stimulating
people such as Herbert Gutman and C. Wright Mills, continued to research and write, worked for the Democratic
Party, and taught courses in writing at New York University and the New School for Social Research. Horowitz
then analyzes how Friedan created the Feminine Mystique
and authored a new narrative for her life.
Goldstein’s work as a journalist reflected her interest in radical social critique, including women’s rights.
Her first position was as a Popular Front labor journalist for the Federated Press (1943-1946), where, in 1946,
she wrote an article on the formation of the Congress
of American Women. In discussing her departure from
the Federated Press, Horowitz challenges Friedan’s later
“Mystique” account that she lost her job to a returning
vet, arguing instead that, while “sexism played some role
in the loss of a job” her political radicalism was also a
key issue (p. 120). With the end of the war and the onset
of McCarthyism, the Federated Press moderated its assaults on capitalism and fired its more outspoken writers
like Goldstein. From 1946-1952 Goldstein worked for the
This leads to the really interesting story in this book,
UE News, “the official publication of the United Electriwhich
is the contradictions between the persona Friedan
cal, Radio, and Machine Workers of America” (p. 121).
created
for herself in 1963 (a woman who became an
She married Carl Friedan in 1947 and continued to work
activist
because
she was trapped by stultifying gender
after the birth of her first child.
roles of the post-war middle class) and her past life
In 1952 she published a thirty-nine page pamphlet en- as an activist. Horowitz suggests that Friedan’s selftitled UE Fights for Women Workers in which she clearly constructed identity was “puzzling” to him. “It is pos2
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sible,” he wrote in his introduction, “that Friedan has an
explanation of her own life that, for one reason or another, I cannot fathom” (p. 14). Despite his claim that he
really doesn’t understand Friedan, Horowitz provides a
thoughtful, multi-faceted analysis of why she might have
interpreted her life as she did. He suggests that Friedan,
an “outsider” all of her life, may have reinvented herself
out of a desire to be more accepted. He posits that her
therapy may have caused her to see a sharp break between her earlier years and her experiences as a housewife so that she believed that “her radicalism involved
nothing more than dabbling and that she had no genuine interest in women’s issues” (p. 247). Finally, he
argued that many 1940s radicals retreated from Popular Front activities because they were disillusioned by
Stalin’s horrific behavior and emotionally battered by
McCarthyism. Moreover, the hypocrisy of sexist progressive men and the failure of 1940s social movement
to address adequately women’s issues may also have encouraged Friedan’s disaffection. Disillusionment with
leftist causes may have encouraged Friedan to view her
actions as a popular front activist as somehow inauthentic.
servative critics of feminism ammunition to discredit
the movement. In Horowitz’s interpretation, some of
Friedan’s language reflected a fear of red-baiting that lingered from watching her associates persecuted during
the McCarthy years.
While evidence of her radical past is clear in the documents of her life, Horowitz is also prepared to accept
that perhaps Friedan might simply have a different interpretation of their significance. Horowitz cautions that
he could be misunderstanding Friedan’s meaning when
she uses terms like “feminism” or maybe that the two of
them did not “share the same view of cause and effect”
(p. 14). Horowitz balances deftly between arguing that
Friedan’s life was not exactly what she claimed and acknowledging the power of the subjective in Friedan’s accounting of her journey. “Though she may have been under the sway of the Feminine Mystique briefly,” he writes,
“her sense of being trapped was enormously powerful”
(p. 164). Thus, Horowitz avoids the simplistic interpretation that Friedan is a conscious hypocrite.
The question of how each of us remembers and retells
the past is crucial to the historian. Friedan clearly sees
Horowitz also blames McCarthyism for Friedan’s her life very differently than does Horowitz. This led
passionate defense of her “trapped housewife” identity Horowitz to conclude rather wryly that “In the end,
Friedan’s story of the trajectory of her life is enough to
as her objective reality. He notes Friedan’s response to
tempt anyone to embrace post-modernism. Its emphaan American Quarterly article where he first exposed her
involvement in Popular Front activities in the 1940s. In a sis on contradictions, omissions, narrative disruptions,
speech at American University, Friedan remarked, “some unstable texts, as well as on the tendency to of texts
historian recently wrote some attack on me in which to work against themselves, makes more understandable
he claimed that I was only pretending to be a subur- Friedan’s story of her life” (p. 247). In deconstructing
that story through his wonderfully lucid and absorbing
ban housewife, that I was supposed to be an agent.” (p.
narrative, Horowitz has made a significant contribution
15) In reply, Horowitz asserted that, “I made clear that
she was a suburban housewife, but one whose experi- to our understanding of the complex origins of secondence was marked by discontent, nonconformity, ambiva- wave feminism.
lence, and very real professional achievement” (p. 15).
Copyright (c) 2000 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This
This latter portrayal is far richer and more complex than work may be copied for non-profit educational use if
Friedan’s portrait, so why has Friedan so adamantly re- proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other
butted it? Horowitz argues that, in part, she feared permission, please contact [email protected].
that exposing her earlier left activities might give conIf there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at:
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Citation: Katherine M. Osburn. Review of Horowitz, Daniel, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique:
The American Left, The Cold War, and Modern Feminism. H-Women, H-Net Reviews. January, 2000.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3698
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