The 50th anniversary reprint of The Feminine Mystique has spawned many re-examinations of Betty Friedan’s ground-breaking book, which is often pin-pointed as the first call to arms for second-wave feminists. Pre-dating equal pay legislation, abortion rights and sex discrimination laws, the book lambasted a society where women still couldn’t get bank loans without a husband’s signature, and where the perfectly-turned out Betty Draper figure was likely to be blunting her dissatisfaction with a handful of valium when the kitchen door was closed.
However, when Ms. Magazine recently surveyed its readers about the effect of The Feminine Mystique, many said the book's rallying cry to women trapped in the role of dependent housewives feels dated for today’s young feminists. It seems Friedan’s polemic serves more as an evocative portrait of a troubled generation of housewives, rather than as a guidebook for modern women.
To a member of the generation that might be called “fourth-wave” feminists, my mother’s fights for the right to wear trousers or cohabit before marriage strike me as mere historical battles. This is not because I’ve fallen victim to the attractive and anaesthetising fiction that feminism’s work is done – it’s more that I believe today’s young women face such a spectrum of obstacles that one single book can no longer address them.
The complex concept of “intersectionality”, for example, was unfamiliar to Friedan and her generation, whereas today’s feminists are much more aware of how race, class, sexuality and gender presentation are woven into the tapestry of problems that women face. Feminism Is For Everybody (2000) by “bell hooks” (the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins) echoes Friedan’s concerns that women’s labour in the home remains unpaid and unappreciated, but she points out that much of second-wave feminism involved demanding rights for already privileged white women, while “black females [remained] at the bottom of the economic totem pole”.
Friedan was also initially hostile toward the “lavender menace” of lesbianism within the feminist movement, and transgender voices went unheard in the feminist movement well into the third wave. Books such as Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl (2007) and Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaws (2010) have since addressed the need for feminists to support those who reject the socially imposed "gender binary".
While Friedan gave a nod to her generation’s imprisonment inside “brassieres with false bosoms of foam rubber” (although no feminist ever actually burned a bra – urban myth), today’s young women face a much wider and more intense onslaught on their self image.
Modern feminists such as Laurie Penny have observed how, after women freed themselves from girdles and “falsies”, society soon pushed them back towards dieting obsessions and size-zero aspirations. In her most recent book Meat Market (2011), Penny rails against a culture which urges women to “slim down, to take up less space, to shrink ourselves”.
These issues were not yet articulated by the second wave of feminist writers, but they were explored more by the third wave – e.g. in Naomi Wolf’s Beauty Myth (1991) and Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight (1993). Today they are more central than ever to modern feminism as the pressure to possess “the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, and the arms of Michelle Obama” (Tina Fey) escalates.
The contraceptive pill had only been on the market for two years when Friedan was writing, and it couldn’t legally be prescribed to unmarried women in the UK til 1974. A society where “good girls don’t” is but a fairy tale to women of my generation, who confidently navigate the world of contraception and non-marital sex, but many feminists would argue that the pressure to be perpetually sexually available has replaced society’s insistence on female chastity. In 2006’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy bemoaned the “porning” of female sexuality whereby women are sold pole-dancing lessons as the road to empowerment. And in 2009 Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Friedman published Yes Means Yes!, a collection of essays challenging the dominant social myths that enable and excuse sexual violence.
One area in which modern feminists are perhaps experiencing the same nausea as their 1960s counterparts is reproductive rights. As 2012 saw a record number of “anti-choice” bills introduced in the US, feminists found themselves marching for women’s right to bodily autonomy once again (sample placard – “I Can’t Believe I Still Have to Protest This S***!”).
Feminist speculative fiction such as Hillary Jordan’s When She Woke (2011) envisions an America where Republicans' dreams have come true and abortion is illegal. The book is all the more terrifying because of how much more closer its dystopian landscape appears than when Margaret Atwood published her repro-rights warning, The Handmaid’s Tale, in 1985.
Although UK reproductive rights appear safer, feminist groups have still been dismayed by unprecedented attempts by Conservative MPs to restrict abortion access, and the death of Savita Halappanavar saw Irish abortion rights back on the agenda. Despite its generally tongue-in-cheek tone, Caitlin Moran’s light-hearted take on modern feminism, How To Be A Woman (2011), contains a thought-provoking chapter on her decision to have an abortion, a rare voice of honesty about a subject that often remains cloaked in shame.
Whether pondering where the opposite sex fit into all this in Shira Tarrant’s Men & Feminism (2009), or protesting the increasing sexualisation of our young girls in Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls (2010), it’s apparent that the modern feminist writer’s work is never done. Now supported by a cast of bloggers, tweeters and YouTube activists, today’s Betty Friedans are likely to be taking on many problems with many names. But it’s indubitable that any feminist who picks up a pen today has her foremothers to thank for getting that extremely heavy ball rolling in the first place.
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