In his article, Rethinking Betty Freidan and the Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America, historian Daniel Horrowitz attempts to reexamine and contextualize the narrative of Betty Freidan’s life that she presented to the public in contrast with her published work that complicates her personal struggle with ‘the feminine mystique’. Freidan was committed to portraying herself as a victim of ‘the problem with no name’, but her activism, career as a newswoman for union publications, and personal remarks about her life between 1940 and 1960 suggest that Freidan embraced feminism and social justice long before she began writing The Feminine Mystique. Horrowitz also posits, but could have further developed, that this corrects a larger problem with the historiography of feminism because it neglects the connection between social justice movements of the 1940s and the 1960s. Unfortunately, I felt that the article raised more questions than it could answer.

Horrowitz begins by detailing the accepted historical narrative of Freidan’s life, which is the version that Freidan herself popularized. This makes the organization confusing since Horrowitz has already told us that this version is false in many ways.  He then includes a section about her educational background, makes various claims about how her feminist political consciousness was formed, and details what work she was actually producing during the time when she claimed to be trapped by the feminine mystique.  The volume and speculative language of the evidence that Horrowitz utilizes makes much of Freidan’s biography hard to follow chronologically. He has a bad habit of qualifying his claims, frequently using the words maybe or perhaps and devoting a lot of explanations to counter arguments. This weakens the credibility of his argument because the reader is left unable to draw their own conclusions.  Horrowitz paints a strong picture of Freidan as an activist for women in the public sphere, including working-class white and African American women.  He then details her abrupt, and seemingly inexplicable, shift to an almost exclusively white, middle-class audience. Horrowitz successfully captures the many facets of the narrative, but he fails to connect them in a way that is easy for the reader to understand.

In my personal opinion, I don’t know that Horrowitz was asking the right questions. I wanted to know more about why Freidan abandoned her roots in working-class activism. She railed against female consumer culture in UE Fights for Women Workers, yet ten years later she became a part of that consumer culture. She sold a palatable version of her life story, a lie for all intents and purposes, to the women whom she had warned against consumer culture. I would also like to know what it says about Freidan, and America, that in order to reach a female audience with any political or social capital, Freidan had to transform herself into a non-threatening housewife who had only come to realize ‘the problem with no name’ through a life of feigned complacency. Would we have the modern feminist movement if Betty Freidan had published the Feminine Mystique as a radical left-wing journalist? If not, does this justify Freidan compromising her authenticity as well as her commitment to a more inclusive version of feminism and social justice in order to bring feminism into the popular political lexicon?  Horrowitz touches on these issues, but I wanted more about what we do know about Freidan and what we can say about her without question, rather than a focus on what we might be able to glean from the varying narratives.

– Courtney DeFelice