The World Split Open by Ruth Rosen Read Free Book Online Page B

men had; 66 percent of women had prepared meals versus 37 percent of men. Additionally women with children spent twice as much time caring for them as men with children.
    Democrats win both houses of Congress in the midterm elections and Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) becomes the first female speaker of the House of Representatives.

Part One:

R EFUGEES FROM THE F IFTIES

Chapter One

D AWN OF D ISCONTENT
    â€œUntil I was twenty-eight,” wrote the poet Anne Sexton, “I had a kind of buried self who didn’t know she could do anything but make white sauce and diaper babies. I didn’t know I had any creative depths. I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children. I thought the nightmares, the visions, the demons would go away if there was enough love to put them down. I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out. The surface cracked when I was about twenty-eight. I had a psychotic breakdown and tried to kill myself.” 1
    Anne Sexton was a deeply troubled artist, but many housewives shared her depression and her demons. More than a few women secretly experienced the fifties as a private nightmare, something observant daughters of the time noted with alarm. Sensing the bitterness and disappointment of so many adult women, these daughters came of age eagerly mapping escapes from what they regarded as the claustrophobic constraints of the fifties. “As we grew older,” one woman explained, “we saw our mothers—our role models, the women we were to become—thwarted in their efforts toward self-realization and expression. A deep and bitter lesson, this one—and one we couldn’t take lightly. It reverberated through the core of our beings, and we resolved not to let it happen to us; we resolved to be different.” 2
WOMEN AT HOME
    In 1963, a housewife and former labor union journalist named Betty Friedan published the results of interviews she had conducted with other women who had been educated at Smith College. In the privacy of their suburban homes, these housewives had revealed the depths of their despair to her. Blessed with good providers, nice homes, and healthy children, they puzzled over their unhappiness. Not knowing that other women shared their troubles, they experienced them as personal and blamed themselves for their misery. Friedan called this inchoate unhappiness “the problem that has no name.”
    To quell their conflicts, some of the interviewees gulped tranquilizers, cooked gourmet meals, or scrutinized their children as though they were rare insects. In search of stimulation, some housewives had sought out sexual affairs or volunteered their time to churches, schools, and charitable organizations. Some women stuffed their houses with shiny new laborsaving devices. Yet, despite these material comforts, something still seemed to be missing. Many of these educated women, Friedan discovered, had nurtured dreams that were never realized, but also never forgotten. The postwar conviction that women should limit their lives exclusively to home and hearth had tied them to the family, closed other opportunities, and crushed many spirits. Friedan dubbed this powerful belief system “the feminine mystique,” and her book
The Feminine Mystique
became an instant best-seller.
    In many ways, Betty Friedan’s background made her an ideal person to expose such domestic unhappiness to the American public. Born and reared in Peoria, Illinois, Betty Goldstein graduated from Smith College in 1942, already well versed in left-wing ideals of social justice and economic equality. After college, she joined the swirling intellectual and political world of leftist politics, worked as a journalist, and in 1947 married