Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution · 1963
Did The Feminine Mystique cause second-wave feminism?
The seminar question: “Was The Feminine Mystique a cause of second-wave feminism, or a symptom of changes that were already under way?”
By 1945 women in the United States, Britain and France could vote, yet the law still treated them as second-class citizens: in 1961 three Southern states barred women from juries. Married women entered paid work in growing numbers while the suburban homemaker became the ideal, and The Feminine Mystique appeared in February 1963.
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Winning the vote had changed less than its campaigners hoped, because the law still treated a woman first as a wife and mother and only second as an individual citizen. The clearest test was the jury. In 1957 Gwendolyn Hoyt of Tampa, Florida, struck her husband with a baseball bat during a quarrel, and he died. An all-male jury convicted her of murder, because Florida placed women on jury lists only if they registered to serve, and few ever did. In Hoyt v. Florida (1961) the Supreme Court upheld the rule, reasoning that woman was “still regarded as the center of home and family life.” On the map Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina are charcoal because they excluded women altogether; the grey-tan states exempted women for their sex alone, so that their juries stayed overwhelmingly male. A duty that only volunteers performed turned out to be a right that most women never exercised.
The short answer
- The vote without equality. The first wave had concentrated its energy on the ballot, on the assumption that political power would bring legal equality with it. It did not, because older laws and customs survived the Nineteenth Amendment of 1920, which gave women the vote. Married women in some states still needed a court’s or a husband’s permission to run a business or manage their own property, jury rules kept women out of the jury box, and pay scales openly set lower rates for women. The gap between formal citizenship and daily treatment was the raw material of the second wave.
- A contradiction inside the suburban ideal. Post-war culture celebrated the full-time homemaker at the very moment when the economy needed women’s labour, because the service sector, offices and shops were expanding. By 1960 about a third of married women held paid jobs, usually in low-paid, sex-segregated work, while magazines, advertising and television still presented domesticity as women’s natural destiny. Women experienced both pressures at once, and the strain between them made the inequalities of work and law feel personal.
- Education without outlets. More women than ever were attending college, yet graduates were widely expected to marry, leave work and devote themselves to their families. Friedan’s Smith College classmates had studied economics, literature and science and were now running households in the suburbs. Educated women had both the skills and the expectations to notice discrimination, and the social confidence to write, organise and lobby against it, which is why the movement’s first leaders came disproportionately from this group.
- Ideas that crossed the Atlantic. Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that women were made “the Other”, defined only in relation to men, gave the coming movement a theory of why inequality persisted after the vote. Her book was condemned by the Vatican, read in an abridged English translation from 1953, and absorbed by a generation of American and British readers. It allowed feminists to treat inequality as a social construction, something produced by institutions and upbringing, and therefore as something that politics could change.
THE TURNING POINT
The Feminine Mystique, 19 February 1963. Friedan’s book is the hinge of this chapter because it turned thousands of private disappointments into a public argument with a name. It began as a questionnaire for her Smith College reunion in 1957, grew through five years of interviews, and sold more than a million copies within a few years. Thousands of readers wrote to Friedan to say that they had believed they were alone. The Commission and the Equal Pay Act were already under way, so the book’s contribution was a shared diagnosis for women who would never attend a conference. A grievance that cannot be named cannot be organised, and this was the moment it acquired a name.
What it changed
A language for consciousness-raising. Friedan’s idea that individual unhappiness had social causes became the starting point of the small “consciousness-raising” groups of the late 1960s, in which women compared their experiences and concluded that personal problems had political roots. The phrase “the problem that has no name” passed into the language and made it possible to discuss housework, marriage and ambition as public questions.
A network ready to act. The Commission’s state offshoots brought together hundreds of experienced women in law, unions, universities and government. In June 1966 they met in Washington and found that they could not even pass a resolution urging enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the new law against sex discrimination at work. A group of them founded the National Organization for Women on the spot. The infrastructure of a movement existed before the movement had an organisation of its own.
Equal pay in law, unequal pay in fact. The Equal Pay Act outlawed paying a woman less than a man for the same job, but it did nothing about jobs that were segregated by sex, and in 1963 most were. Women’s earnings stayed at about 60 per cent of men’s for the next fifteen years. The gap between the law and the paypacket made Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned sex discrimination in hiring and promotion, the next battleground, and pushed activists toward strikes and lawsuits.
A movement defined by one group of women. Because the first texts of the second wave spoke for educated, married, middle-class women, the movement’s early agenda reflected their concerns: careers, professional schools and escape from the home. Women who had always worked, and women whose main problems were racism, poverty or forced sterilisation, found that the movement did not describe them. That gap would become the movement’s deepest internal argument, because a feminism built on one group’s grievances could not speak for women whose problems were different.
The full answer, argued
The case for symptom is strong. Married women were already entering paid work in large numbers, the Pill was already on sale, Kennedy’s Commission was already collecting evidence of discrimination, and the Equal Pay Act passed four months after the book appeared, so the structural pressures that produced the movement predate it. Historians such as Meyerowitz and Horowitz also show that Friedan described only one group of women and was drawing on a decade of earlier writing about women and work. Yet the case for cause is real, because movements need more than grievances: they need a shared interpretation that tells people their problem is common and political. The flood of letters to Friedan suggests that the book supplied this to readers who would never have joined a commission. The most persuasive answer is that the book was a catalyst, a trigger acting on conditions already present. The transferable lesson is that structural change makes protest possible, but it usually takes an act of naming, by a writer, a martyr or an event, to turn possibility into mobilisation.
An interesting fact
The man who translated The Second Sex into English in 1953, Howard Parshley, was a professor of zoology at Smith College, the same college whose graduates Betty Friedan surveyed in 1957. Parshley was hired by the publisher Knopf, whose editors reportedly expected a scientific study of sex, and he cut somewhere between a tenth and a sixth of the text and rendered several of Beauvoir’s philosophical terms in ways scholars later criticised. English readers had to wait until 2009 for a complete translation, by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, so the book that launched a generation of feminism in English was read for more than fifty years in an abridged form.
This is the study layer of Origins of second-wave feminism, chapter 1 of Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015; the full index of the atlas is here.
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