The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan Read Free Book Online Page A

fiction heroines. Among behavioral scientists, theoreticians and therapists in the field, I owe a great debt to William Menaker and John Landgraf of New York University, A. H. Maslow of Brandeis, John Dollard of Yale, William J. Goode of Columbia; to Margaret Mead; to Paul Vahanian of Teachers College, Elsa Siipola Israel and Eli Chinoy of Smith. And to Dr. Andras Angyal, psychoanalyst of Boston, Dr. Nathan Ackerman of New York, Dr. Louis English and Dr. Margaret Lawrence of the Rockland County Mental Health Center; to many mental health workers in Westchester County, including Mrs. Emily Gould, Dr. Gerald Fountain, Dr. Henrietta Glatzer and Marjorie Ilgenfritz of the Guidance Center of New Rochelle and the Rev. Edgar Jackson; Dr. Richard Gordon and Katherine Gordon of Bergen County, New Jersey; the late Dr. Abraham Stone, Dr. Lena Levine and Fred Jaffe of the Planned Parenthood Association, the staff of the James Jackson Putnam Center in Boston, Dr. Doris Menzer and Dr. Somers Sturges of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Alice King of the Alumnae Advisory Center and Dr. Lester Evans of the Commonwealth Fund. I am also grateful to those educators valiantly fighting the feminine mystique, who gave me helpful insights: Laura Bornholdt of Wellesley, Mary Bunting of Radcliffe, Marjorie Nicolson of Columbia, Esther Lloyd-Jones of Teachers College, Millicent McIntosh of Barnard, Esther Raushenbush of Sarah Lawrence, Thomas Mendenhall of Smith, Daniel Aaron and many other members of the Smith faculty. I am above all grateful to the women who shared their problems and feelings with me, beginning with the 200 women of Smith, 1942, and Marion Ingersoll Howell and Anne Mather Montero, who worked with me on the alumnae questionnaire that started my search.
    Without that superb institution, the Frederick Lewis Allen Room of the New York Public Library and its provision to a writer of quiet work space and continuous access to research sources, this particular mother of three might never have started a book, much less finished it. The same might be said of the sensitive support of my publisher, George P. Brockway, my editor, Burton Beals, and my agent, Martha Winston. In a larger sense, this book might never have been written if I had not had a most unusual education in psychology, from Kurt Koffka, Harold Israel, Elsa Siipola and James Gibson at Smith; from Kurt Lewin, Tamara Dembo, and the others of their group then at Iowa; and from E. C. Tolman, Jean Macfarlane, Nevitt Sanford and Erik Erikson at Berkeley—a liberal education, in the best sense, which was meant to be used, though I have not used it as I originally planned.
    The insights, interpretations both of theory and fact, and the implicit values of this book are inevitably my own. But whether or not the answers I present here are final—and there are many questions which social scientists must probe further—the dilemma of the American woman is real. At the present time, many experts, finally forced to recognize this problem, are redoubling their efforts to adjust women to it in terms of the feminine mystique. My answers may disturb the experts and women alike, for they imply social change. But there would be no sense in my writing this book at all if I did not believe that women can affect society, as well as be affected by it; that, in the end, a woman, as a man, has the power to choose, and to make her own heaven or hell.
     
    Grandview, New York
    June 1957–July 1962

The Feminine Mystique

The Problem That Has No Name
     
    T he problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at