The Feminine Mystique

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1963

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-9

Chapters 10-11

Chapters 12-13

Chapter 14

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary: “The Crisis in Women’s Identity”

To explore the insidious effects of the feminine mystique further, Friedan offers her own years as a young woman as an example. She describes the promising path that she was on in college, winning one fellowship and then another, the second of which would have committed her to doctoral studies in psychology. While contemplating the decision, she took a walk with a boy she saw as a potential romantic interest. He told her, “Nothing can come of this, between us. I’ll never win a fellowship like yours” (68). After hearing this boy’s matter-of-fact insecurity at the thought of dating a woman who surpassed him in his professional life, Friedan turned down the fellowship, fearful that if she continued on her current trajectory, she would never have a family.

She uses this anecdote from her life to illustrate the entire problem of the feminine mystique: Women absorb the belief that they exist to become a wife and mother and that any alternative is a failure—a rejection of their femininity. To veer off this path requires an enormous leap of faith because women have so few examples of what an alternative life might look like. As Friedan puts it, “The truth is […] an American woman no longer has a private image to tell her who she is, or can be, or wants to be” (70). While American men have no trouble imagining what their adult lives might look like if they happen to never marry, women can imagine only blank voids.

Friedan compares the feminine mystique to Victorian gender restrictions. Victorian ideology prevented women from admitting or satisfying their sexual needs; any woman who did was labeled a whore, the opposite of the virginal ideal. Similarly, the feminine mystique prevents women from satisfying their need to “grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings” (77). Because of this limitation, many women feel that they lack a sense of self—that they cannot define their own personalities.

Chapter 4 Summary: “The Passionate Journey”

Friedan realizes that many people in mid-century America regard the country’s most prominent first wave feminists as “man-eaters” who advocated for women simply out of hatred for men. To counter this narrative, Friedan wants to explain their true goals and achievements.

Starting with famous 19th-century feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Friedan describes women who did not want to destroy men but rather share in the rights and opportunities available to them. To reinforce this point, she reminds readers of other social movements that prominent feminist women advocated for in the past, such as the abolition of slavery and the labor movement. Their support of causes such as these demonstrates devotion to increased rights for all, not a myopic hatred of men.

According to Friedan, after women won the right to vote in 1920, many people considered the feminist movement over; they supposed that it had accomplished its foremost goal and could now disband. As decades passed, popular opinion began to conceptualize the feminist movement as a humorous relic of the past—the impassioned cause of a few eccentric, masculinized women. Friedan describes her contemporary moment as one in which only a slim minority imagine women as needing further rights and opportunities.

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

Chapters 3-4 are both concerned with situating Friedan’s present in historical context. To do this, she highlights similarities between her present and the repressive Victorian era. Even before the major countercultural trends of the late 1960s, most of Friedan’s contemporaries would have considered their society much more liberal than the Victorians’. Freud’s theories about sex were relatively common knowledge, especially among college-educated Americans. Similarly, Alfred Kinsey’s studies on sexuality were not just well-known but even reported on by some media sources (more on this in a later chapter). With sex more openly discussed among academics and laypeople alike, the 1960s must have seemed to the average American like a much less repressive environment than the previous century.

However, Friedan emphasizes that openness about sexuality is not the only metric for measuring a society’s repressiveness. She insists that American society is not nearly as distinct from the Victorian era as it would like to believe. However, in contrast to 21st-century America, where the idea that men and women remain unequal is relatively common, Friedan could not assume that a majority of readers would be open to her argument. She therefore spends her early chapters laying the groundwork for the very idea that a conversation about women’s rights and opportunities is valid.

In a similar vein, Friedan chooses to reframe feminist icons like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony for her readers, who may associate such figures with aggressive, man-hating attitudes. While such women would later feature in gender studies programs in colleges and universities (which would in turn lead to broader coverage of feminist icons in K-12 education), they did not have this status at the time of the book’s publication. In attempting to reform her readers’ ideas about such women, Friedan is in dialogue with Freud; she perceives the shadow that Freud cast on women in general and on famous feminist figures in particular as so distorting that she devotes her entire next chapter to dismantling it.