politics and prose? >> brusquely gramm is the collateral with his wife of the well-known washington independent bookstore politics and prose. we look forward to continuing our relationship with you. >> next, stephanie siegel, steady at the evergreen state college reports on the generation of american women who were introduced of the feminist politics in the early 1960's. she cites the 1963 publication and readership of the feminine mystique as a transfer this moment for many women to begin to question their familial and professional role. this is about 75 minutes.

>> i chose the title for this book from the very first paragraph of the book the feminine mystique, and i want to start by reading and then i will check to you. the problem lay buried, and spoken for many years the book in the mind of american women. it was a strange string, sense of dissatisfaction. it struggles alone as she made the bed, shop for groceries, matched soup cover materials and eight peanut butter sandwiches with her children chauffeured scouts, lead behind her husband of mine. she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question is this all? people who read the book at the time 50 years later can sometimes still quote those words. sometimes she went on, a woman would try to blot out that feeling with a tranquilizer. sometimes she thought the problem was with her husband or

what she needed to decorate her house or move to a better neighborhood or even have an affair but more of the naturally according to the women that i interviewed when i was working on this book they thought the problem was them themselves and they could only be solved by fixing themselves that the big their physicians or psychiatrists if they could afford one to tell them what was and how to make it go away. and her book is an extended the plea to convince women that their feelings are legitimate, the problem with no name was that we live in a culture that did not allow women as allowed men to gratify the need that was just important as sex contrary to what we hear nowadays sometimes, but feminism was about the need to grow and fulfill their potential as human

beings. denied that commission to pursue that goal, ridicule of the attempted to do it, many women develop hundreds that none could fill. the response to the book was absolutely electric. i was able to track down 188 women and men who had read the feminine mystique when it first came out and the quote whole sentences and passages often they could remember exactly where they were and what made them feel. the things i thought were wrong with me i realized might suddenly be right with me. one of the intellectual giants i know as i would never have imagined her to be so insecure she said not saying punished

selfish when and are punished she flushed her tranquilizers' on the toilet. but you know when people first hurdle was looking for individuals that read the feminine mystique about scores of letters from people absolutely sure they had read the book, with the comments made it clear that they have not, they had a wildly different memories of what it said. one fan of the book said it documented all of the ways that women are discriminated against in phil law and economics and even in fact friedan barely mentions those issues and encourage women to seek fulfillment by indulging in the me first consumerism or going after these ambitious careers and ideas she explicitly convinced. one is this is the book the witold women to bring their bras

although i hope everyone knows in this building that no such thing ever happens. in the world where we didn't know it was sexism or chauvinism is its title conjured up images and that became a kind of receptacle for people's hopes and fears about feminism and family life to the point that people actually read it and think very much like the bible the no what it says. and as it happens i was one of those people. i was approached to do this biography of the feminine mystique and i instantly said my mother talked about it so often and i said great, you know, somehow i had truly come to think i read the book because i had heard about it so much from my mother and other people and books that i read so i said okay and i assigned it to my class and sat down to read it and half

way through the first chapter realized i had never read it and i couldn't believe first of all how dated it was and in so many ways but also how modest proposals for change were, how one controversy will be the ideas were. but i think that's the real story. that's the reason it's important to capture this period and to understand what went on. why it seems so radical and stirred up so much emotion on both sides of the story for friedan to say as she previewed an excerpt from her book and good housekeeping back in 1961 and you know how the magazines like to use, generate the most provocative titles ever well, this was a really provocative one. the title said women are people, too. today that doesn't sound particularly provocative page turner titles, but at the time this wasn't considered self-evident.

in fact it was considered a terrible mistake leading experts explicitly argued because this is a direct quote for the society to regard its citizens as people rather than as primarily male and female who occupy different roles and have completely different natures. so sometimes today, you know, we get kind of worn down by the stress of juggling work and family like a lot of people in this room but we forget the price people pay when they didn't have to balance work and family, and in fact when they were penalized when they tried to do so, when women who wanted a meaningful work life were accused of suffering from a bad case that's what they were told. when men who wanted to get more involved in child care and again, direct quote from a 1950 loss is theologist were suspected of having a little too much fat on the inner find. so i'm going to spend most of my

time here talking about the price that women pay for this division and why they responded so much, but i do want to get to the point very briefly as to what the man paid as well because men pay a price for this division, too. i think most people have a very good idea of the obstacles of the working women back in the 1960's. it was okay to go to work by the way in fact women health wise were often called parasites. if they stayed at home when their children were grown but what they were not supposed to do is to get what to of the leading psychiatrists called courier which they define as a job prestige. they were not supposed to go for anything they would pay well enough to threaten their husband or interest them well enough to threaten their primary connecticut. the first thing if a woman wanted to work or had to work in those days she had to open the paper to the help wanted female section, and i went through the

entire april, 1963 ad in the new york times and the help wanted female. they were for receptionists, pretty looking cheerful gals. one of them come and this was repeated a couple of times what must have high standards you must be a really beautiful. so the legal job act. some did request a college grad but the requirement was inevitably accompanied with one other which i did you can bet must have good typing skills. once hired women were paid less for its ackley the same work as well as 1970 a woman working full-time with a college degree and this is true for black male college graduates earned less than a white male high school graduate. if she married and became pregnant or if the airline industry put on a few pounds or reached the ripe old age of 30.

when one airline found -- there was a maternity leave i just discovered one of maternity leave, one airline in the 1960's said if a woman had a miscarriage or her child died within the first year she could get her job back. there was no recourse against a woman being fired because she failed to put out or she complained when someone felt her up, not until 1993 the sexual harassment on the job made it legal. i could go on about this and i do go on about it in one of the chapters of my book, but what i want to do is turn to something that i think surprises most modern audiences even more, and it's to understand in the culture where as rebecca points out we are always being invited to participate in the mauney wars people seem to think the prevalence of working women and the reform of feminism have undermined the prestige of homemaking. i want to point out how little

security and social respect stay at home wives and mothers had before friedan and the women's movement came along. the 1930's and 40's and the 1950's were a period when americans were being subjected to this attack on motherhood and stay at home moms. suns were being told it to snap the silver cord of a psychiatrist said their mothers tried to wrap them in. husbands were encouraged to stand up for themselves and reassert the authority they were losing in an increasingly feminized white-collar world. in 1942, philip wylie coined the word "momism," and the tyranny of women who kept their sons tied to the apron strings, that their husbands to an early grave because they insist on them by adding even more consumer items and about their self sacrificing and demanded that politicians listen to their moralizing.

it's no momism, communism -- you know, momism was a domestic side of the threat of communism and the reason that 2.5 million american men had been found unfit for military service. it was the mall this. and one road that mom and her paul i have killed as many men as a thousand german machine guns. this idea about the probable effect of the stay at home mothers and be involved why of this into the grocery stores, the beauty shops, the suburban homes accusing overprotective moms of creating everything from homosexual lobby to fascism and won the ladies' home journal article said that were's mom hadn't been so overprotective history might have taken a different course.

what was even more consuming i talk to women who read this and kind of demoralizing so these ideas were not just coming from the reactionaries, they are contemptuous of women and as the button down organization man they despised, liberals like ferdinand lundberg who wrote the book the rich and super rich and the critique of capitalism was just as condemning of mothers as the right wingers were who called for the return to manliness and people liked and rand celebrated the masculine aggression. they all blamed the problems they saw, the different problems they saw in modern society on the same source, the women. there was a 1956 book the crack in the picture window that just a serrated modern suburbia but what was the problem according to him? the matriarchal society that the typical husband, a woman boss,

inadequate, money terrified and the typical wife and nagging blog. this was in taiwan and rhetoric that was around and you know what was so pervasive that friedan evin incorporated and some of it in her riding including the totally repugnant and now discredited notion that overly devoted monster in their sons into homosexuals and of course she used it to turn the discourse on its head and say in order to avoid this we should actually let women have some interests of their own. but the lack of respect for mom's is what permeated the culture, and the lack of rights for homemakers i think was on a modern women. in 1963 only eight states gave a wife any legal claim to her husband's earnings for property. the other 42 she supposedly had the right to be properly supported but what was so, give the house that such leeway when

one enterprising kansas woman sued in court to get her well off husband to install running water in her kitchen, the kansas supreme court rebuffed her in all but four states the man had the right to decide where the couple legally was a resident and in fact if the man moved and the wife refused to follow she could be charged with desertion and in the divorce system that will then he could actually win a divorce for her and you had a rotten marriage, too bad, marital rape was the legal because a woman's marriage vows or permanent consent to sexual intercourse. marriage counseling told women that almost any medical problem the experienced from into the devotee to domestic violence resulted from a failure of their femininity. infidelity check if you keep yourself groomed enough.

are you a really good housekeeper? domestic pilots? 80 you are so efficient and aggressive that your husband feels some periodic need to reestablish his manhood. this was in a journal published by the american medical association in 1964. now i'm not saying that all homes were marked by that kind of dysfunction. many husbands of course treated their wives very well. many homemakers were quite content, but again, when you actually look at the definition of content, i think what most modern women and men would be shocked by what was considered to be a happy marriage to month before the feminine mystique to the newsstand scallop conducted a major poll in december, 1962, and purported to find women were the american housewives were the happiest people on earth.

, what did it take to make sure they're happy? one woman interviewed said being stored in a tremendous part of the and feminist, but gives her pleasure. a woman needs a master's les relationship with your it is a husband and wife or boss and a secretary, and even sentences describing how happy women are that they have all the rights they wanted the just didn't care to use them, gal luft evin noted that it's hard to interview all these women because some of the husbands wouldn't let them talk to the interviewer. it's no wonder homemakers in the 1950's, some homemakers in the 1950's at last from all income groups were extremely insecure about their role in society. they were actually more likely than the women who worked outside of the home to suffer loss of steam and depression, and the -- ironically though, the ones who were the most likely to turn this inward and

to really feel depressed or the people that we might think at first glance would have been the homemakers who would have been the most comfortable. women who had chosen to give up their jobs or other education in order to become wives and mothers because they thought that is how they would find the most happiness and the believe the got to find all their satisfaction with in the homes. these women were more likely be in any other to devalue their own worth. the even assess their own child-care skills more negatively than either less educated less fortunate stay at home mothers or equally educated working moms. today moms who did work outside of the home were more confident in their child-rearing skills than these middle class home workers. and so i sent out as i listen to these women talk i set out to figure out why were these women

so responsive, why did they feel so lost? and it seems to me that what friedan did is have its biggest impact on women who were part of a generation caught between the two worlds. most women went to college in those days either considered themselves feminist or were already quite atypical in their lives and they continued to be after the got their education. they did expect they would go to college and use the were no side. suddenly it has become respectable and even desirable

for a woman to go to college but not to use her education after words for anything but to be a wife and mother. every year assured the incoming freshmen what would happen to them in this school was this would become educated to be splendid wives and mothers. and during this period women were told that if one of the main points of going to college was to get your mrs degree and if you failed to get that degree to take that to agree that instead it was offered, the bachelor's degree you got instead might be a permanent feet that he would be just left without. the only high your degree was called the advice book as a bright new trend of getting your ph.d., putting hubby, a lot of

women in this audience younger women's draw dropped. women could seriously. women who went to college were less likely to drop out before graduation than men. but by the 1950's and early 60's they were twice as likely to drop out as men. women were dropping out. it wasn't natural to like your education very much directly to homemaking. women who attended college in the 1950's and the early 1960's were especially likely to to be taught for scientific so-called scientific views of the psychiatrists and functional sociologists and and one to the

morning and life and she found in the kitchen to the ticket and industry psychological psychiatrist said women to give up their aspirations, voluntarily. it allegedly because a normal woman finds her greatest satisfaction and her husband's achievement. magazines targeted to both blue-collar women and middle class women in that era and also educated black women it was the one targeted to educated white middle class women who were the most likely to promote the views of the freudian psychologists and other human behavior experts about what are healthy and unhealthy gender roles and so the result was that the educated housewives who didn't feel what they have learned with their education had taught them they ought to be feeling were more

likely than any other group to turn this inward into feeling a special kind of misery and self doubt and to think it must be their own inadequacies. it tend to have the most emotional resonance for these middle class women with slightly more education than usual. and especially the not exclusively to those who had or aspired to more education than was normal in those days, and in fact when i was working on this would that bothered me a lot because she didn't feel with working-class women, she didn't deal with african-american women, but the more i work on this book the more i learned a lesson that perhaps i should have learned, you know, before i reached this age its common enough in your 20s when you have these morrill hierarchies, but the more i began to realize that you actually don't have to make a virtue hierarchy of who's

paying accounts for more. yes, the pain of a working-class woman or low-paying factory worker or clerk who had an ax saucing job at work and then he quickly exhausting at home or the pain of a black woman who couldn't protect her kids from racism no matter if both she and her husband were working and no matter how educated they were coming out as different and more immediate in some ways more urgent than the stress facing a middle class woman as a homemaker finding out that she didn't believe it was as good as she knew it ought to be. but i don't think the pain of those homemakers' was trivial or should be discounted, and it was it was more bewildering because the new the and privileges. they wrote to me when they first heard i was doing this book and they said i don't have much sympathy for the board middle class housewives.

they are always very recently when their parents had moved up and had been sent to college. they knew they were privileged come over and over again they would say to me one in particular would say there were black children being beaten for trying to go to school down south. they were children in appalachia with the lisalyn from ponder and many will say i would have given my i.t. a home like you have, you ungrateful person she said to her husband, you know, just treat her like a dog she is still on grateful to you. so these people were just terrible about the way they were feeling and you don't feel you have a right to have some pain in some ways it is more demoralizing and in many ways friedan anticipated the bill

clinton feel your pain, the oprah approach. however, unlike the self-help books that followed her, she said like the self-help books you are not alone. your opinion is valid. it's okay to feel this way. your not abnormal. but she also said the fact that you feel this way is a symptom of a larger social and political problem. so one of my -- to one of the women i talked to said it myself in the first self-help book i read the was the last 1i needed once i got that message down to read now friedan has rightly been criticized for ignoring the special needs of the working-class white women and african american women and i felt some fascinating research on won't go into about the difference is in those groups. black women in particular though i really want to mention because of course it is true they often have to work even if they were college graduates. and a lot of people have argued

and i believe before i reread in the book that the problem with friedan's neglect of african-american women all the more ironic because she had been a civil rights activist and was working to integrate her own neighborhoods that she just ignored them completely in this book which was very sad but the real problem is not as i believed when i first read this and many people have said black women would have loved to lead the lives of these women were leading and to get out of the demeaning low-paid domestic work that they were stuck in in this period and that friedan and polymer leader help to get them out with when they can activists and the national organization for women. they were also much more likely than white women to seek work and community activism as a central part of their identity.

it wasn't my feminist but black leaders of the 20's and 30's who first raised the demand that a woman should have a sweetheart identity as a wife and mother, as a quote provider for her family and as a community leader and activist when you ask black women and white women who were in college what are you going to college for the white women would say to be better wives and mothers, the black women were almost always say to be better members, not just to get a job but to be better members of the community. so, i came to see the tragedy of friedan's orientation to this on this exclusive group was that she could have pointed to the example to this demoralized group that didn't think it was possible to say yes there are women who can be wives and mothers and that identity as workers and community activists and in support of that let me mention the findings of this is

theologist bart landry who found that a poor white middle class moms were the least likely to work outside the home and black upper-middle-class, upper-middle-class, the ones who could have afforded to stay home or the most likely to work outside the home, and in a white family when a husband didn't want his wife to work outside the home 90% of the whites didn't do so but that was true for only about half of the black wives whose husbands approved and were less likely to disapprove so this could have been a model for her. i'm not saying the african-american community was unevenness paradise even below year once told us he thought women should be in the kitchen and that was the proper place. but i've come to believe that was the real problem with the book is her inability to explain to these white middle class women that there were other models in the world and that isn't the only problem with the book. it's terribly dated and its use of evidence and a homosexual one

is the one i find so terribly offensive. she didn't adequately credit the intellectual and political of the ideas and she later allowed to be given an occasionally claimed a little too much credit for launching the second wave of the feminists and older generations of feminists and in tenaciously working on behalf of gender inequality long before friedan started writing the feminine mystique. ..