young woman, a wife and mother raising three
sons? Times have changed greatly since those
decades, and young Americans today live in a
culture that is fundamentally different in terms
of how women’s roles in society are perceived.
Women today do not have to undertake the
ruthless stripping away of misleading cultural
stereotypes that Rich and the women of her
generation were forced to undertake.
In her seminal bookThe Feminine Mystique
(1963), Betty Friedan refers precisely to this cul-
tural myth as ‘‘the feminine mystique,’’ a set of
ideas about women’snatureand correct roleinlife
that had been universally adopted, even by
women themselves, during the two decades fol-
lowing the end of World War II. According to the
underlying premise of the feminine mystique,
there are innate differences between men and
women not only in biology but also in emotional
and psychological make up. A woman finds her
fulfillment in being a wife and a mother. This is
her preordained ‘‘feminine’’ role. As Friedan puts
it, as long as this view prevails, ‘‘there is no other
way for a woman to dream of creation or of the
future. There is no way she can even dream about
herself, except as her children’s mother, her hus-
band’s wife.’’ A woman’s task is to make sure that
her husband is happy, and this will also ensure
that she keeps him. Her job is to clean the house,
cook the meals, and raise the children while her
husband pursues his career, earns all the money,
and makes all the important decisions. Belief in
the feminine mystique created a situation, Friedan
points out, in which the drudgery, the endless
repetitive routine of housework, was the only
‘‘career’’ available to women. This meant that a
woman’s mental horizons were necessarily nar-
row. Women were not interested in the wider
world, the world of politics and social issues,
which was the domain of men. InThe Feminine
MystiqueFriedan tells a story about when she sat
in on a meeting of mostly male magazine writers
and editors. One editor of a women’s magazine
explained that his readers were not interested in
national or international affairs; they were only
interested in reading about family and home.
Aftera guest speaker hadtalkedabout the nascent
civil rights movement and how it might affect
the upcoming presidential election, one editor
remarked, ‘‘Too bad I can’t run that story. But
you just can’t link it to woman’s world.’’
The cultural myth of the feminine mystique
was thus relentlessly reinforced by the mass
media. A year after the publication of her ground-
breaking work, Friedan was commissioned byTV
Guideto write an article about how women were
represented on television. For two weeks, Friedan
watched television, morning, afternoon, and eve-
ning. After watching women in commercials,soap
operas, situation comedies, and game shows and
noting their almost complete absence in serious
dramas or documentaries, she concluded in her
essay that ‘‘television’s image of the American
woman, 1964, is a stupid, unattractive, insecure
little household drudge who spends her martyred,
mindless days dreaming of love—and plotting
nasty revenge against her husband.’’ In the article,
which was later included in her collectionIt
Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s
Movement, Friedan calls for radical change: ‘‘Tel-
evision badly needs some heroines. It needs more
images of real women to help girls and women
take themselves seriously and grow and love and
be loved by men again.’’
Over forty years later, many of the changes
in the media’s presentation of women that fem-
inists such as Friedan called for have taken
place. Today, one can switch on the television
and see any number of series about successful
women lawyers, doctors, forensic scientists, ath-
letes, and even action heroines who dish out
violence to the bad guys as efficiently as any
man. In the sphere of current events, there may
be as many female news anchors as men, and
women TV journalists regularly file reports from
dangerous war zones. But in those far-off days in
the 1950s and early 1960s, millions of American
women, if they had time to watch any televi-
sion at all (after spending so many hours scrub-
bing and waxing floors, running the washing
machine, and trying to make themselves beauti-
ful so that their husbands wouldn’t leave them),
would have seen this uniform, thoroughlyIN CREATING MYTHS ABOUT WOMEN, MENHAVE ALSO CREATED MYTHS ABOUT THEMSELVES,
WHICH MEANS THAT BOTH SEXES ARE EQUALLY
TRAPPED IN A WEB OF ILLUSIONS ABOUT GENDER AND
IDENTITY.’’
Diving into the Wreck