Yet why should we listen to Friedan about any of this? It is indisputable that, over five decades later, the “feminine mystique” of the stay-at-home mother no longer has a strong hold on the cultural imagination. When Betty Friedan blamed “the feminine mystique” for women’s lack of “a sense of human identity, the firm core of self or ‘I,’” she was noticing the same kind of thing. Those on the narcissistic spectrum tend to lack a sense of self. Rather, he postulated what I call the “narcissistic spectrum” American culture by the 1970’s was marked by pervasive symptoms of narcissism, such that low-level narcissistic tendencies were the default and not the exception. What to make of this? Such a pathologization of stay-at-home mothers would make most women bristle today, as would Friedan’s labeling of their homes as “comfortable concentration camps.” And today’s reader rightly winces at the pervasive classism of the book, in which the paradigmatic (white) woman lives in a posh, mid-century-modern house, and the paradigmatic (white) man is an executive escaping into the city.Īnd yet there is something quite true that Friedan does not get much credit for noticing: the widespread existence of what Christopher Lasch sixteen years later would label “a culture of narcissism.” As I have pointed out elsewhere, Lasch’s observation was not a matter of moralism, nor did he conflate everyday narcissism with the pathological variety, which is a distinct phenomenon beyond the purview of his book.

“There are aspects of the housewife role that make it almost impossible for a woman of adult intelligence to retain a sense of human identity, the firm core of self or ‘I’ without which a human being, man or woman, is not truly alive.” “It is urgent to understand how the very condition of being a housewife can create a sense of emptiness, non-existence, nothingness, in women,” she wrote. In Friedan’s view, cultural expectations that normed female roles of marriage, mothering, and homemaking, roles that she collectively termed “the feminine mystique,” ate away at a woman’s sense of self.

This led her to conclusions that she later published in the surprising 1963 best-seller, The Feminine Mystique.

Betty Friedan became concerned with the problem of female identity in the 1950’s.

The feminism mystique