A book review:

You may not know of her, but according to the back cover, “Betty Friedan is the foremost spokesperson for women’s rights in the world. ” In the last forty years since she wrote The Feminine Mystique, this has proved right.  Amazingly, her book reads like a blueprint for modern culture in America.  There can be little doubt that this book was the catalyst that began the present-day women’s movement. 

But, you say, didn’t the women’s movement start in the late 1800’s or something like that?  Betty didn’t invent the women’s movement, she just crystallized modern sentiment into an instant mix, just add water. Just like Luther’s 95 theses did to the Germans of the 16th century, so her book galvanized into action the oppressed and alienated women of the 20th. She also did more than just write a book.  She co-founded NOW.  NOW is the National Organization for Women, in case you have been asleep in American politics.  In other words, she is the quintessential women’s advocate in the age of self-absorption.

Betty is not a free thinker. Although she claims that women during the 1940’s and 50’s had been brainwashed by what she calls “the feminine mystique,” she apparently was brainwashed by the women’s movement of the 20’s and 30’s. She is definitely a product of her culture. She has an agenda. The communists had promised they would destroy the American family, and they used people like Ms. Friedan to do it. Betty pretended she was just another oppressed housewife with an axe to grind in between dishwashing cycles, and that’s why she wrote her book, but it’s been proven she was actually sympathetic with the communists and only too gladly joined their cause by liberating American housewives.

She did not liberate them, of course. She and her ilk led them down into the trap of self-indulgence and self-fulfillment. The American woman has never been more unhappy and dissatisfied in all the history of the United States. Her critics have tried to reach her and she hears them say, “American women’s unhappiness is merely the most recently won of women’s rights” (pg. 24), but she does not understand that the cause is having too much worldly goods and time (please see Jeremiah 16). “The problem that has no name” as Betty calls it, is a psychological one, related to the roles forced upon modern women by advertisers wanting their share of the New Woman’s wealth. It causes women to be listless and depressed. She feels she speaks for all women when she says, “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.” So ends Chapter One.

She smells a red herring when she looks at the mystique built around the modern woman. But she arrives at the wrong conclusion. She blames the “feminine mystique” for almost every evil in a modern woman’s life. She has her “experts.” They take the form of “behavioral scientists, theoreticians and therapists” (pg. 13). Add to those, mental health workers, psychoanalysts, educators and other such credentialed beings – there can be no resistance. She quotes extensively from their statistical research to prove her point. She does a lot of her own research, especially of women’s magazines (much the same as the ministers of churches do today).

However, she is not above lying to accomplish her goal of truth telling. In Chapter Two, she boldly asserts with evidence she has found in one issue of McCall’s (July 1960) that it “contained almost no mention of the world beyond the home…[and] this was no anomaly of a single issue of a single women’s magazine” (pg. 36). Thanks to a book written by Jim Fordham, The Assault on the Sexes, Betty’s fabrications are exposed for what they are. They show how that this very issue of the magazine did in fact have many articles of things outside the home. If Betty has become the voice of liberated women, she has become, in fact, the role model of selective reporting.

Now we mustn’t characterize Ms. Friedan by calling her a liar. She has a legitimate beef with Hollywood’s casting of women as sexual objects and Madison Avenue’s follow-up at the checkout counter. Betty seems to think this is a new problem, but it has been with us since the beginning, of course. She is more fixated by her paranoia than the women she sees as frozen by the feminine mystique. This problem has been around for years. The feminine mystique is designed and propagated by men who alternately idolize women as goddesses and demean them as grisettes. Poor Ms. Friedan has jumped out of the frying pan into the fire, however, when she rejects woman’s femininity and God-given role. This is the problem of the woman’s movement, and those godless men who sympathize with her know that she and her sisters can destroy the Christian backbone of this country. The “godly” men go along with it without knowing the danger.

Betty has her account of history: Having been silenced for all the years since the end of WWII, women were longing to get back to the 1930’s when they were able to break free of their isolated oppression.  Evidently, Ms. Friedan bases her knowledge on pulp fiction published in 1939 (pg. 38f). In the 1950’s, when she was formulating her hatred of the feminine mystique, Betty found only non-fictional propaganda aimed at getting women to love their domestic roles. True, Dr. Spock et al are to be despised, but Ms. Friedan had no recourse but fictional women’s liberation stories published in the ‘20’s and ‘30’s. We call those stories “romance stories” today, and there seems to be no shortage. Once again, she reports only facts that support her own propaganda. She never discusses Biblical solutions because she is a humanist.

Betty Friedan should have a humanist award named after her. It will honor each year the person who showed the most ability in setting up a straw man and knocking it down. Betty has set up the feminine mystique monster by piecing together, Frankenstein-style, a most unlikely but totally believable enemy of womankind. At every turn the mystique treads underfoot the gullible female. Betty proves this over and over again using her editorializing genius by reconstructing what someone actually said to what she wants him or her to say.  She loves to put in quotes “things she remembers someone having said,” but does not bother to prove it from the source. She relies extensively on her research that shows that women’s magazines refused to give any credit to female intellect.  We have already shown how suspect her findings are. Then she knocks down the straw man/monster with her rhetoric. The monster is either “the problem that has no name” or “the feminine mystique.” It is a terror that produces the housewife. Or maybe the housewife is the monster. If that is unclear, one thing is very clear: The housewife role is to be obliterated from history and the minds of women forever, if there is to be any forward progress of mankind (oops, I mean “humanity”).

If Betty was right about the evil the feminine mystique creates, then she has every reason to condemn it. According to her, the feminine mystique:

…has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

…prescribes a living death where self is engulfed in passive conformity and meaningless work.

…prevents women from doing the work of which they are capable.

…makes sex the only frontier available to women.

…causes women to use sex or sexual fantasy to fill needs that are not sexual.

…encourages women to ignore the question of their identity.

…says they can answer the question “who am I?” only by saying “Tom’s wife”…

This all leads to confusion.  She calls this confusion “identity crisis.”  She found this term in her psychology book.  Did I neglect to tell you she got a degree in psychology?  “It is my thesis that the core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity – a stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique.  It is my thesis that as the Victorian culture did not permit women to accept or gratify their basic sexual needs, our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role” (pg. 77).

Martin Luther suffered such an identity crisis, according to her (pg. 78).  Going on with the thought she says, “…the identity crisis in one man’s life may reflect, or set off, a rebirth, or new stage, in the growing up of mankind.” By this, we see a subtle link in her mind between the Reformation and Women’s Lib. These crises happen not only to individuals but to the human race as a whole, at the beginning of the birth of new social consciousness or some other allusion to new age thought. This is a substitute, evidently, for the real birth of baby boys and girls by real women, which she sees as accomplishing nothing fulfilling.  This crisis in the identity of women came about 1850, according to the historian Betty. 

She gives the reader a synopsis of the women’s rights movement beginning in the mid-1800’s. She tells us what part of Sigmund Freud’s theories and practice to accept and what to reject. She seems obsessed with Victorian-Freudian counterpoint, but then again, as I will restate, she is a product of her culture. She correctly intuits that Freud’s ideas have hindered women from maturing into their potentialities, but she nevertheless believes what he wrote. In Chapter Six, she shows her understanding of the tendency of scientists to make the facts fit their conclusions. She is able to judge them correctly, but not able to apply the lesson to her own intellect.

Betty seems antagonistic toward the phrase “anatomy determines destiny” invented by Freud. She fights against this in Chapter 6 and even implicates Margaret Mead in continuing the mystique by her anthropological promotion of femininity by function.  It becomes clear that Betty is actively fighting against biology and hates her predestined role as a woman. No wonder she is so embittered.  She gives passing lip service to biology but comes up with an evolutionary paradigm shift to kick it out of predominance:  “It is not to deny the importance of biology to question a definition of woman’s nature that is based so completely on her biological difference from man. Female biology, woman’s ‘biological career-line’, may be changeless – the same in Stone Age women twenty thousand years ago…but the nature of the human relationship to biology has changed. Our increasing knowledge, the increasing potency of human intelligence, has given us an awareness of purposes and goals beyond the simple biological needs of hunger, thirst, and sex.” (pg. 143). Once she is freed from these needs, the New Woman evolves beyond her biological urges by refinement a la Betty’s gospel.

Betty is just part of an educated but vulgar culture who cannot understand their newfound wealth. 

Along with millions of other American women, she doesn’t know what to do with it. She has been trained by society to be aggressive and to seek her own good. Because she is not of the nobility, she cannot believe or understand the privilege of rank. She is reduced to wallowing about in martyrdom/persecution delusions, but she can empower the myth because she is an educated middle-class female. “Higher education” she calls it. She is not satisfied with that rank and privilege, but she cannot attain to nobility because, due to biology, she is born below that mark. So she goes on and on about women’s rights, because she thinks this understanding started with the human race about the middle of the nineteenth century. The noble women would laugh at her; the poor of the world are too busy trying to get enough food cooked and clothes washed for their families (much to the disdain of Betty). Betty is a snob of no rank who promises women of no rank a chance at nobility.  She calls this nobility human potential, because she has nothing left once she rejects God’s offer of nobility.

Betty seems to have one overwhelming thought: Being a housewife is the curse of all curses. But she is not of noble rank. The noblewoman ran a large household, including her own progeny, but the more successful she was, the more control she exerted over the maids and the butlers and the other servants. However, Betty is not capable and she rails against domestic roles for women instead. Her idea of success is anything outside the sphere of the home. She despises the idea that women must normally occupy role of housewife, and should be freed up to pursue the same self-indulgence of their husbands.

Betty’s book more or less verifies her paranoid idea that women have been sucked in by scheming scientists, educators, and even women’s rights advocates – the very “experts” from which she verifies her godless views.  She is confused, all right, but a champion needs only to sound authentic to lead people into certain defeat.  At least she seems to be consistent with her own paranoia when she denounces Hollywood and Madison Avenue for creating the feminine mystique in the first place.  If she could reason the thing through and see it for herself, she would see that the truly fatal mystique is the one of her own making, one that creates “a vague, undefined wish for ‘something more’ than washing dishes, ironing, punishing and praising children” (pg. 61). 

She spends chapter after chapter returning to her favorite paranoid thesis:  “The unremitting attack on women which has become an American preoccupation in recent years…mom is a pretty safe target, no matter how correctly or incorrectly her failures are interpreted… No one has ever been blacklisted or fired for an attack on ‘the American woman’ …[for the husband it was] safer to take it out on his wife and his mother than to recognize a failure in himself or in the sacred American way of life.” (pg. 203).  She blames this all on an organized effort in this country to brainwash women to be homemakers under the guise of higher education and goes so far as to say, “It has not happened in other countries.” (pg. 184). “And so the woman made her mistaken choice. She ran back home again to live by sex alone, trading in her individuality for security.  Her husband was drawn in after her, and the door was shut against the outside world” (pg. 204). These are the ramblings of a true paranoid.

Continuing in her paranoid theme: “Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives” (pg. 207).  She seems to spot the great evil of covetousness that grows around her own soul, but has been duped into believing that housewifery is to blame for the whole thing.  She has no idea how it happened, but she goes on to fantasize that the heads of General Motors and Macy’s got together and voted on the following: “Gentlemen…we’ve got to keep them housewives, and let’s not forget it” (pg.207). “Of course, it didn’t happen quite like that.  It was not an economic conspiracy directed against women.  It was a by-product of our general confusion lately…(pg.207). She is to be commended for picking up on that anyway.

More paranoia:  “For fifteen years and longer, there has been a propaganda campaign, as unanimous in this democratic nation as in the most efficient of dictatorships, to give women ‘prestige’ as housewives” (pg. 255, remember this was written around 1960).

I really have to commend her for the following: “No more surprising, the subversion of women’s lives in America to the ends of business, than the subversion of the sciences of human behavior to the business of deluding women about their real needs” (pg.207).  If Betty Friedan could only realize the real truth behind what she correctly states!  Psychology and its spin-offs have indeed duped us, but did we make the tie to “the ends of business” as she aptly puts it?  And what is Betty’s end?  What goal besides slavery into an ever increasing “identity crisis”?  Her means are psychological, her methods devious, but can she be labelled “hypocrite”? I think she is true to form, a product of her culture.  The true hypocrites are those who claim to be Christians and pastors, but believe in and utilize Ms. Friedan’s philosophy of women’s potentialities.  They are the true hypocrites and they are found in the churches.

Jesus did not come to give us identity. He came to destroy the works of the devil, which are the lies that hold us in bondage. The lies come from the lips of women like Ms. Friedan, who is deceived herself. She promises them freedom, but bondage occurs. Just look at what feminism has done to the church and families throughout this country and Europe.  Our identity is our self-image, our self-esteem. The false prophets love to extol the value of our identities and how God so loves them that he gave his Son for them.  His Son, on the other hand, says, “Unless a man forsakes everything, including his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

Speaking against women who may be happy as housewives she says, “Happiness is not the same thing as the aliveness of being fully used” (pg. 255). Is she secretly jealous that someone has found herself useful as a housewife and is experiencing some happiness as a result?  She does not know what being alive means, although her statement could not be truer when taken in context of serving Christ.

Another quote for which she is to be commended.  “Into this mental vacuum [formed by housewifery] have flooded an endless line of books on…advice on the techniques of ‘married love…The results could have been almost predicted.  To the great dismay of men, their wives suddenly became ‘experts,’ know-it-alls…impossible to compete with, and very hard to live with…With a snap course in home economics or marriage and family under her belt…the young American wife – easily, inevitably, disastrously – began to dominate the family even more completely than her ‘mom’” (pg. 257).

According to Betty, the housewife role is capable of all evil. It nurtures the sexual perversion that has happened in the “last fifteen years” (Chapter 11). It causes a sick “symbiosis” of mother with her children that dehumanizes the children and makes them incapable of finding reality outside the mother’s influence (Chapter 12).  She likens a nice home to a “Comfortable Concentration Camp” where the mother is herself trapped in the role of prisoner in her own camp. Because they have accepted the role of housewife, “they have given up their adult frame of reference to live at the lower level of food and things” (pg. 307). If this is true, then a great evil it is! 

She finally begins to develop the main purpose of the book in Chapter 13. She begins the new gospel (old lie) of self-actualization. This is the same lie told to the woman in the Garden of Eden story. “You shall be like gods!” she was promised. And so, Betty believes it, too.  She doesn’t call it godhood, of course. That’s non-scientific, goodness no! It is “some positive growth tendency within the organism.”  Without bothering us with the details of that, she affirms “The premise is that the man is happy, self-accepting, healthy, without guilt, only when he is fulfilling himself and becoming what he can be” (pg.310). So there you have it. The new age mentality in a nutshell, brought to bear using emotional appeals to women who feel every word of Betty as her own, craftily delivered by the master of deceit.

Instead of adapting or being adjusted to the old ways, the new woman must go beyond the constraints of the feminine mystique by having faith in herself. She must launch the new age.  “The problem that has no name, from which so many women in America suffer today, is caused by adjustment to an image that does not permit them to become what they now can be” (pg. 311).  In all the previous evolutionary stages, women had been bound by their biological makeup, but now, with the new psychology, they can pull their psyche out of mythological status and grow into the goddesses they really are. I am rewording her, but then, she is a scientist; I am not.  Going on, “It is the growing despair of women who have forfeited their own existence, although by so doing they may also have escaped that lonely, frightened, feeling that always comes with freedom.”  Betty is a lonely, frightened person wandering around in her darkness called freedom.

Betty has not merely identified problems. She has solutions. The first solution (Step One) is to “know that housework is not a career but a chore to be done quickly and efficiently” (pg. 344). Wow! What insight.  It took 344 pages to stir us up to this?  But she goes on! Step Two: “Know that marriage is not the fulfillment of a woman’s life.”  That’s all very well if she meant what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 7:40 “But she is happier is she so remains [unmarried] in my judgment…” But oh, no, that’s not what Betty means. She means the Last Step, “The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way.” Thus spake Zarathustra.

Betty’s solution makes it almost mandatory for the woman to find a job outside the home. “…but when a man works at home, his wife keeps the children strictly out of the way, or else.” What is needed is “A no-nonsense nine-to-five job, with a clear division between professional work and housework…” (pg. 350). “A woman must say ‘no’ to the feminine mystique very clearly indeed to sustain the discipline and effort any professional commitment requires…Even the traditional resistance of religious orthodoxy is masked today with the manipulative techniques of psychotherapy” (pg. 351). “Even to a woman of less orthodox tradition, the most powerful weapon of the feminine mystique is the argument she rejects her husband and her children by working outside the home.  If, for any reason, her child becomes ill or her husband has troubles of his own, the feminine mystique, insidious voices in the community, even the woman’s own inner voice [italics mine] will blame her ‘rejection’ of the housewife’s role” (pg. 352).

In her life’s work of researching the problem that has no name, Ms. Friedan found that “there was one thing that produced frustration in all women of this time who tried to adjust to the housewife image.” What was it? “The key to the trap, is of course, education” (pg. 357). “The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women…” “…education was the key to the problem that has no name only when it was part of a new life plan, and meant for serious use in society…” (pg. 362). Housewifery is of no serious use in society, that’s for sure. “The problem that has no name – which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities – is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease” (pg. 364). Finally, the “problem that has no name” has been identified!

Her final solution: “A massive attempt must be made by educators and parents – and ministers, magazine editors, manipulators, guidance counsellors – to stop the early-marriage movement, stop girls from growing up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ stop it by insisting…that girls develop the resources of self…” (pg. 364). “Drastic steps must now be taken to re-educate women who were deluded or cheated by the feminine mystique…What is needed now is a national education program, similar to the GI bill, for women who want to continue or resume their education.”  And so it came to pass…

In her Epilogue, Betty shares how she started NOW. She also bares the fact that once the power of her book was felt, she knew the sex-role relationships had to go and that the women’s movement was just the first step of that evolutionary change. So sex roles have to go. Period. The right to birth control and abortion are all part of this new power.  Maternity leave, child-care centers, all of the modern taken-for-granted government mandates, all are subsequent to Betty’s book.

Betty is herself obviously gifted with intellect and drive, but insight is lacking. God says, “I will destroy the wisdom of the ages, and nullify the intellect of the intelligent” (Isaiah 29:14). Paul summed it up thusly: “Has not God made nonsense of the world’s wisdom? Because the world by its wisdom did not know God, God in his wisdom chose the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.” (1 Cor. 1:18f).

Sisters (and brothers), if you have been taken in by what Betty correctly terms “manipulative techniques of psychotherapy,” then I suggest you turn to the God whom Betty rejects. He is your Father, according to Jesus. The women’s movement is part of a larger, Satanic, deception that is coming all over the face of the earth. In order to serve the Lord Jesus Christ, we must recognize the enemy’s agenda and techniques. If you have bought into this “women’s freedom” delusion, then you had better realize the danger you are in. 

As Peter puts it, “For by means of overwhelming, vain, speeches, they allure through the lusts of the flesh the ones who have actually escaped from those who live in error. While they promise them freedom, they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by whom a person is overcome, by him also he is brought into bondage. For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning. For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them. But it has happened to them according to the true proverb: ‘A dog returns to his own vomit," and, ‘a sow, having washed, to her wallowing in the mire’” (2 Peter 2:18-22).  

- Chris Simonson

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