women at the very centre of things.
The third institution, according to Friedan, that plays a major role in the creation and maintenance of the feminine mystique is education. Female readers of a certain age would have had little trouble in recognising the depiction of the dominant ethos that shaped women`s college experience in the 1950s and early 60s. Returning to Smith College for a week - a place where she had found immense intellectual stimulation – the author discovers students who seem to have little real interest in the excitement and rigour of academic study and its relevance to the wider world; they want to succeed but not too much, as to do so would be to become an `oddball` and reduce their chances of catching a husband. However, rather than blaming the young women themselves, Friedan digs below the surface to uncover a `sex-directed` curriculum, designed to encourage adjustment to the feminine role and the stunting of any form of development that would make female students less capable of finding their fulfilment in the home. The Mystique certainly registers the costs of such a curriculum in terms of lost potential and psychological damage but Friedan also seems trapped in the social and cultural mind-set of the times. Having identified college schooling as mainly responsible for blocking and distorting women`s lives, she finally, in `the last analysis` puts the blame on them for not using the `door education could have opened for them. The choice... for the race back home was finally their own`. Radicalism in the post-McCarthy era went only so far then and the fact that Friedan stays within accepted parameters might be one reason, amongst others, for her book`s wide appeal at the time.
Whilst, the exposure of the oppressive cultural power of women`s magazines, advertising and education through the weaving of carefully chosen evidence from women, professionals and academics, is certainly at the centre of The Feminine Mystique`s purpose, Friedan goes further in showing a willingness to critically examine a number of relevant and important thinkers and ideas of the time. In spite of a popular style, which draws on the techniques of fiction and advertising to engage the reader, the book cannot be dismissed as light-weight. In discussing Freud, Mead and several leading sociologists of the day, it provides an astute and forceful analysis of the intellectual foundations of the feminine mystique.
Drawing on Freud`s letters, Friedan emphasises the ways in which he was a product of the patriarchal world he inhabited, regarding women as inferior to men - closer to the world of children than that of adults - and exaggerating the importance of sexual problems as the cause of female unhappiness. This view would not be so significant if it wasn`t so pervasive - settling everywhere `like fine volcanic ash`, influencing the media, education and the academic discipline of Anthropology. In the case of the latter, Friedan indicates how one of its leading practitioners , Margaret Mead, follows Freud in exaggerating the role of biological and anatomical differences in relatively advanced societies like the US; thus, whilst boys and men prove their masculinity by doing, girls and women only have to be to fulfil their feminine nature. Pointing up the contradictions between Mead`s life as a pioneering anthropologist in a mainly male-dominated world and her ideas and mocking the absurdity of the implications of at least some of her views - she made `many American women envy the serene femininity of a bare-breasted Samoan, and try to make themselves into languorous savages, breasts unfettered by civilization`s brassieres` - the author isn`t afraid of taking on one of the academic giants of her day.
23