The Feminine Mystique

One mystical footnote: I used to be terribly afraid of flying. After I wrote The Feminine Mystique, I suddenly stopped being afraid; now I fly on jets across the ocean and on one-engine air taxis in the hills of West Virginia. I guess that, existentially, once you start really living your life, and doing your work, and loving, you are not afraid to die. Sometimes, when I realize how much flying I do, I think there’s a possibility that I will die in an airplane crash. But not for quite a while, I hope, because the pieces of my own life as woman with man are coming together in a new pattern of human sex and human politics. I now can write that new book.

A woman from Florida had written to remind me that August 26, 1970, was the fiftieth anniversary of the constitutional amendment giving women the vote. We needed to call a national action—a strike of women to call attention to the unfinished business of equality: equal opportunity for jobs and education, the right to abortion and child-care centers, the right to our own share of political power. It would unite women again in serious action—women who had never been near a “women’s lib” group. (NOW, the largest such group, and the only one with a national structure, had only 3,000 members in thirty cities in 1970.) I remember that, to transmit this new vision to the NOW convention in Chicago, warning of the dangers of aborting the women’s movement, I spoke for nearly two hours and got a standing ovation. The grass-roots strength of NOW went into organizing the August 26 strike. In New York, women filled the temporary headquarters volunteering to do anything and everything; they hardly went home at night.

Mayor Lindsay wouldn’t close Fifth Avenue for our march, and I remember starting that march with the hooves of policemen’s horses trying to keep us confined to the sidewalk. I remember looking back, jumping up to see over marchers’ heads. I never saw so many women; they stretched back for so many blocks you couldn’t see the end. I locked one arm with my beloved Judge Dorothy Kenyon (who, at eighty-two, insisted on walking with me instead of riding in the car we had provided for her), and the other arm with a young woman on the other side. I said to the others in the front ranks, “Lock arms, sidewalk to sidewalk!” We overflowed till we filled the whole of Fifth Avenue. There were so many of us they couldn’t stop us; they didn’t even try. It was, as they say, the first great nationwide action of women (hundreds of men also marched with us) since women won the vote itself fifty years before. Reporters who had joked about the “bra-burners” wrote that they had never seen such beautiful women as the proud, joyous marchers who joined together that day. For all women were beautiful on that day.

It seemed to me the women’s movement had to get out of sexual politics. I thought it was a joke at first—those strangely humorless papers about clitoral orgasms that would liberate women from sexual dependence on a man’s penis, and the “consciousness-raising” talk that women should insist now on being on top in bed with men. Then I realized, as Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, that these women were in part acting out sexually their rebellion and resentment at being “underneath” in society generally, being dependent on men for their personal definition. But their resentment was being manipulated into an orgy of sex hatred that would vitiate the power they now had to change the conditions they resented.

We had to take the torch of equality from the lonely, bitter old women who had been fighting all alone for the amendment, which had been bottled up in Congress for nearly fifty years since women had chained themselves to the White House fence to get the vote

I went to bed relieved that probably a movement wouldn’t have to be organized. At six the next morning, I got a call from one of the top token women in the Johnson administration, urging me not to rock the boat. At eight the phone rang again; this time it was one of the reluctant sisters of the night before, angry now, really angry. “We’ve been told that this conference doesn’t have the power to take any action at all, or even the right to offer a resolution. So we’ve got a table for us all to eat together at lunch, and we’ll start the organization.” At the luncheon we each chipped in a dollar. I wrote the word “NOW” on a paper napkin; our group should be called the National Organization for Women, I said, “because men should be part of it.” Then I wrote down the first sentence of the NOW statement of purpose, committing ourselves to “take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof, in truly equal partnership with men.”

It seemed to me that something more than talk had to happen. “The only thing that’s changed so far is our own consciousness,” I wrote, closing that second book, which I never finished, because the next sentence read, “What we need is a political movement, a social movement like that of the blacks.” I had to take action. On the plane to Washington, pondering what to do, I saw a student reading a book, The First Step to Revolution Is Consciousness, and it was like an omen.

The identity crisis in men and women cannot be solved by one generation for the next; in our rapidly changing society, it must be faced continually, solved only to be faced again in the span of a single lifetime. A life plan must be open to change, as new possibilities open, in society and in oneself. No woman in America today who starts her search for identity can be sure where it will take her. No woman starts that search today without struggle, conflict, and taking her courage in her hands. But the women I met, who were moving on that unknown road, did not regret the pains, the efforts, the risks.

It also is time to stop giving lip service to the idea that there are no battles left to be fought for women in America, that women’s rights have already been won.

Education and re-education of American women for a serious purpose cannot be effected by one or two far-sighted institutions; it must be accomplished on a much wider scale. And no one serves this end who repeats, even for expedience or tact, the clichés of the feminine mystique. It is quite wrong to say, as some of the leading women educators are saying today, that women must of course use their education, but not, heaven forbid, in careers that will compete with men.
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When women take their education and their abilities seriously and put them to use, ultimately they have to compete with men. It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all.

Their desperate need for education and the desperate need of this nation for the untapped reserves of women’s intelligence in all the professions justify these emergency measures