Many people credit a renewed interest in feminism to the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963. For her book, Friedan interviewed some 200 of her former college classmates and found that there was a difference between the reality of these women’s lives and the images they found in women’s magazines. She calls this difference the feminine mystique. In the following section, Friedan addresses an identity crisis experienced by many white, middle-class women.
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I discovered a strange thing, interviewing women of my own generation over the past ten years. When we were growing up, many of us could not see ourselves beyond the age of twenty-one. We had no image of our future, or ourselves as women.
I remember the stillness of a spring afternoon on the Smith campus in 1942, when I came to a frightening dead end in my own vision of the future. A few days earlier, I had received a notice that I had won a graduate fellowship. During the congratulations, underneath my excitement, I felt a strange uneasiness; there was a question that I did not want to think about.
“Is this really what I want to be?” The question shut me off, cold and alone, from the girls talking and studying on the sunny hillside behind the college house. I thought I was going to be a psychologist. But if I wasn’t sure, what did I want to be? I felt the future closing in—and I could not see myself in it at all.
I took the fellowship, but the next spring, under the alien California sun of another campus, the question came again, and I could not put it out of my mind. I had won another fellowship that would have committed me to research for my doctorate, to a career as professional psychologist. “Is this really what I want to be?” The question now truly terrified me.
The question was not important, I told myself. No question was important to me that year but love.
I discovered, talking to Smith seniors in 1959, that the question is no less terrifying to girls today. Only they answer it now in a way my generation found, after half a lifetime, not to be an answer at all. . . . I asked the ones around me what the planned to be. The engaged ones spoke of weddings, apartments, getting a job as a secretary while husband finished school. The others, after a hostile silence, gave vague answers about this job or that, graduate study, but no one had any real plans.
The feminine mystique permits, even encourages, women to ignore the question of their identity. The mystique says they can answer the question “Who am I” by saying “Tom’s wife . . . Mary’s mother.” But I don’t think that mystique would have such power over American women if they did not fear to face this terrifying blank which makes them unable to see themselves after twenty-one.
In my generation, many of us knew that we did not want to be like our mothers, even when we loved them. We could not help but see their disappointment. Did we understand, or only resent, the sadness, the emptiness, that made them hold too fast to us, try to live our lives, run our fathers’ lives, spend their days shopping or yearning for things that never seemed to satisfy them, no matter how much money they cost? Strangely, many mothers who loved their daughters—and mine was one—did not want their daughters to grow up like them either. They knew we needed something more.
