Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

24

DAUGHTERS AND LOVERS

‘La famille Sartre’ was the name given to the group of writers and intellectuals around the philosopher/novelist/playwright. This was not without irony, certainly so far as his chief companion, Simone de Beauvoir, was concerned, for by the late 1940s their ménage was fairly complicated. The couple had met in 1929, at the Lycée Janson de Sadly, where de Beauvoir took courses to become a trainee teacher (together with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lévi-Strauss). She easily attracted attention to herself by virtue of her exceptional cleverness, so that she was eventually accepted into the elite intellectual bande at the school, led by Sartre. This began the long-term and somewhat unusual relationship between these two – unusual in that no sooner had they begun their affair than Sartre told de Beauvoir that he was not attracted to her in bed. This was less than flattering, but she adjusted to the situation and always considered herself his main companion, even to the extent of helping him to procure other lovers, as well as acting as his chief spokesperson after he developed his theory of existentiadsm.¹ For his part, Sartre was generous, supporting de Beauvoir financially (as he did several others) when his early novels and plays proved successful. There was no secret about their relationship, and de Beauvoir did not lack admirers. She became the object of a powerful lesbian passion from the writer Violette le Duc.²

Sartre and de Beauvoir were always irked by the fact that the world viewed them as existentialists – and only as existentialists. But on occasion it paid off. In spring 1947, de Beauvoir left France for America for a coast-to-coast lecture tour where she was billed as ‘France’s No. 2 existentialist.’ While in Chicago she met Nelson Algren, a writer who insisted on showing her what he called ‘the real America’ beyond the obvious tourist traps. They became lovers immediately (they only had two days together), and she had, she later admitted, achieved her ‘first complete orgasm’ (at the age of thirty-nine).³ With him, she said, she learned ‘how truly passionate love could be between men and women.’ Despite her dislike of America (a feeling she shared with Sartre), she considered not returning to France. As it was, when she did return, it was as a different woman. Until then she had been rather frumpy (Sartre called her ‘Castor,’ meaning Beaver, and others called her La Grande Sartreuse). But she was not unattractive, and the experience with Algren reinforced that. At that stage nothing she had written could be called memorable (articles in Les Temps modernes and All Men Are Mortal), but she returned to France with something different in mind that had nothing to do with existentialism. The idea wasn’t original to her; it had first been suggested for her by Colette Audry, a longstanding friend who had taught at the same school as de Beauvoir, in Rouen.⁴ Audry was always threatening to write the book herself but knew her friend would do a better job.⁵ Audry’s idea was a book that investigated the situation of women in the postwar world, and after years of prevarication de Beauvoir seems to have been precipitated into the project by two factors. One was her visit to America, which had shown her the similarities – and very great differences – between women in the United States and in Europe, especially France. The second reason was her experience with Algren, which highlighted her own curious position vis-à-vis Sartre. She was in a stable relationship; they were viewed by all their friends and colleagues as ‘a couple’ (‘La Grande Sartreuse’ was very revealing); yet they weren’t married, didn’t have sex, and she was supported by him financially. This ‘marginal’ position, which distanced her from the situation ‘normal’ women found themselves in, gave de Beauvoir a vantage point that, she felt, would help her write about her sex with objectivity and sympathy. ‘One day I wanted to explain myself to myself. I began to reflect all about myself and it struck me with a sort of surprise that the first thing I had to say was “I am a woman.” ‘At the same time, she was reflecting something more general: 1947 was the year women got the vote in France, and her book appeared at almost exactly the time Alfred Kinsey produced his first report on sex in the human male. No doubt the war had something to do with the changed conditions between men and women. De Beauvoir began her research in October 1946 and finished in June 1949, spending four months in America in 1947.⁶ She then went back to la famille Sartre, the work a one-off, at a distance from her other offerings and, in a sense, from her. Years later a critic said that she understood the feminine condition because she herself had escaped it, and she agreed with him.⁷

De Beauvoir relied on her own experience, supported by wide reading, and she also carried out a series of interviews with total strangers. The book is in two parts – the French edition was published in two volumes. Book I, called Facts and Myths, provides an historical overview of women and is itself divided into three. In ‘Destiny,’ the female predicament is examined from a biological, psychoanalytic, and historical standpoint. In the historical section women are described, for example, in the Middle Ages, in primitive societies, and in the Enlightenment, and she closes the section with an account of present-day women. In the section on myth she examines the treatment of women in five (male) authors: Henri de Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Paul Claudel, André Breton, and Stendhal. She did not like Lawrence, believing his stories to be ‘tedious,’ though she conceded that ‘he writes the simple truth about love.’ On the other hand, she felt that Stendhal was ‘the greatest French novelist.’ The second volume, or book 2, is called Women’s Life Today and explores childhood, adolescence, maturity, and old age.⁸ She writes of love, sex, marriage, lesbianism. She made use of her impressive gallery of friends and acquaintances, spending several mornings with Lévi-Strauss discussing anthropology and with Jacques Lacan learning about psychoanalysis.⁹ Algren’s influence is as much evident in the book as Sartre’s. It was the American who had suggested she also look at black women in a prejudicial society and introduced her not only to black Americans but to the literature on race, including Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. Initially she thought of calling her book The Other Sex; the title used, The Second Sex, was suggested by Jacques-Laurent Bost, one of the premiers disciples of Sartre, during an evening’s drinking in a Left Bank café.¹⁰

When The Second Sex appeared, there were those critics (as there are always those critics) who complained that she didn’t say anything new. But there were many more who felt she had put her finger on something that other people, other women, were working out for themselves at that time, and moreover that, in doing her research, she had provided them with ammunition: ‘She had provided a generation of women with a voice.’¹¹The book was translated into English very early, thanks to Blanche Knopf – wife of the publisher Alfred – whose attention had been drawn to the book by the Gallimard family when she was on a visit to Paris. Conscious of the great interest among American students in the bohemia of the Left Bank at the time, both Blanche and Alfred believed the book was bound to be a sound commercial proposition. They were right. When the book was released in America in February 1953, it was by and large well received, though there were several reviewers – Stevie Smith and Charles Rodo among them – who didn’t like her tone, who thought she ‘carried the feminist grievance too far.’¹² The most interesting reaction, however, was that of the editors of the Saturday Review of Literature, who believed the book’s theme was too large for one reviewer and so commissioned six, among them the psychiatrist Karl Menninger, Margaret Mead, and another anthropologist, Ashley Montagu. Mead found the book’s central argument – that society has wasted women’s gifts – a sound one but added that de Beauvoir had violated every canon of science in her partisan selection of material. Above ad, however, de Beauvoir’s book was taken seriously, which meant that the issues it raised were considered soberly, something that had not always happened. De Beauvoir’s strange idea that women represented ‘the other’ in society caught on, and would much infuse the feminine movement in years to come. Brendan Gill, in a review entitled ‘No More Eve’ in the New Yorker, summed up his reaction in a way others have noted: ‘What we are faced with is more than a work of scholarship; it is a work of art, with the salt of recklessness that makes art sting.¹³

When Blanche Knopf had first come across The Second Sex, on her visit to Paris, her appetite had been whetted on being told that it read like ‘a cross between Havelock Ellis and the Kinsey Report.¹⁴ Havelock Ellis was old news; Studies in the Psychology of Sex, begun in 1897, had ceased publication as long ago as 1928, and he had been dead since 1939. The Kinsey Report, however, was new. Like The Second Sex, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male reflected a changed, postwar world.

The generation that came back from World War II settled down almost immediately. They took opportunities to be educated, they got married – and then proceeded to have more children than their parents’ generation: this was the baby boom. But they had seen life; they knew its attractions, and they knew its shallows. Living in close proximity to others, often in conditions of great danger, they had known intimacy as few people experience it. So they were particularly aware that there was a marked gap between the way people were supposed to behave and the way they did behave. And perhaps this gap was greatest in one area: sex. Of course, sex happened before World War II, but it wasn’t talked about to anywhere near the same extent. When the Lynds carried out their study of Middletown in the 1920s, they had looked at marriage and dating, but not at sex per se. In fact, though, they had chronicled the one important social change that was to alter behaviour in this regard in the 1930s more than anything else: the motor car. The car took adolescents out of the home and away from parental supervision. It took adolescents to meeting places with their friends, as often as not the movie houses where Hollywood was selling the idea of romance. Most important of all, the car provided an alternative venue, a private area where intimate behaviour could take place. All of which meant that, by the late 1940s, behaviour had changed, but public perceptions of that behaviour had not kept up. It is this which mainly accounts for the unprecedented reception of a dry, 804-page academic report that appeared in 1948 under the title Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male. The author was a professor of zoology at the University of Indiana (not so far from Muncie).¹⁵ The medical publisher who released the book printed an initial run of 5,000 copies but before long realised his error.¹⁶ Nearly a quarter of a million copies were eventually sold, and the book spent twenty-seven weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Alfred Kinsey, the professor of zoology, became famous and appeared on the cover of Time magazine.¹⁷

The scientific tone of the book clearly helped. Its elaborate charts and graphs, methodological discussions of the interviewing process, and consideration of the validity of ‘the data’, set it apart from pornography and allowed people to discuss sex in detail without appearing prurient or salacious. Moreover, Kinsey was an unlikely figure to spark such controversy. He had built his reputation on the study of wasps. His interest in human sexuality had begun when he had taught a course on marriage and the family in the late 1930s. He found students hungry for ‘accurate, unbiased information about sex,’ and indeed, being a scientist, Kinsey was dismayed by the dearth of ‘reliable, non-moralistic data’ concerning human sexual behaviour.¹⁸ He therefore began to amass his own statistics by recording the sexual practices of students. He subsequently put together a small team of researchers and trained them in interviewing techniques, which meant they could explore a subject’s sex life in about two hours. Over ten years he collected material on 18,000 men and women.¹⁹

In their study Sexuality in America, John d’Emilio and Estelle Freedman say, ‘Behind the scientific prose of Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male lay the most elaborate description of the sexual habits of ordinary white Americans (or anyone, for that matter) ever assembled. In great detail, Kinsey tabulated the frequency and incidence of masturbation, premarital petting and coitus, marital intercourse, extramarital sex, homosexuality, and animal contacts. Avoiding as far as possible the moralistic tone he disliked in other works, Kinsey adopted a “count-and-catalogue” stance: how many respondents had done what, how many times and at what ages. His findings proved shocking to traditional moralists.’²⁰ His study of the male revealed, for example, that masturbation and heterosexual petting were ‘nearly universal, that almost nine out of ten men had sex before marriage, that half had affairs, and that over a third of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience.’ Virtually all males had established a regular sexual outlet by the age of fifteen, and ‘fully 95 per cent had violated the law at least once on the way to orgasm.’²¹ A second volume in the series, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, was published in 1953 and caused a similar storm. Although the figures for women were lower (and less shocking) than for men, six out of ten had engaged in masturbation, half had had sex before marriage, and a quarter had had affairs.²² Taken together, Kinsey’s statistics pointed to a vast hidden world of sexual experience sharply at odds with publicly espoused norms. The reports became cultural landmarks.²³ But perhaps the most interesting reaction was the public’s. In general there was no shock/horror reaction from middle America. Instead, opinion polls suggested that a large majority of the public approved of scientific research on sexuality and were eager to learn more. Undoubtedly, the revelation of a wide divergence between ideals and actual behaviour alleviated the anxiety of many individuals as to whether their own private behaviour set them apart from others.

In retrospect three of Kinsey’s findings were to have sustained social, psychological, and intellectual effects, for good or ill. The first was the finding that many – most, when considering males and females – indulged in extramarital affairs. A decade after the studies were published, as we shall see, people began to act on this finding: whereas hitherto people had just had affairs, now they didn’t stop there, and divorced in order to remarry. The second was the finding that there was a ‘distinct and steady increase in the number of females reaching orgasm in their marital coitus.’²⁴ Looking at the age of the women in his sample, Kinsey found that most of the women born at the end of the nineteenth century had never reached orgasm (remember Simone de Beauvoir not achieving it until she was thirty-nine), whereas among those born in the 1920s, most of them ‘always achieved it [orgasm] during coitus.’ Although Kinsey was unwilling to equate female orgasm with a happy sex life, publication of his findings, and the solid size of his sample, clearly encouraged more women who were not achieving orgasm to seek to do so. This was by no means the only concern of the women’s movement, which gathered pace in the decade following Kinsey, but it was a contributing element. The third important finding that proved of lasting significance was that which showed a much higher proportion of homosexual activity than had been anticipated – a third of adult men, it will be recalled, reported such experiences.²⁵ Here again Kinsey’s report seems to have shown a large number of people that the behaviour they thought set them apart – made them odd and unusual – was in fact far more common than they could ever have known.²⁶ In doing so, the Kinsey reports not only allayed anxieties but may have encouraged more of such behaviour in the years that followed.

Kinsey’s immediate successor was a balding, well-tanned obstetrician-gynaecologist based at the Washington University Medical School in Saint Louis, Missouri, named William Howell Masters, born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of well-to-do parents. Bill Masters’s approach to sex research was very different from Kinsey’s. Whereas Kinsey was interested in survey research, Masters was above all a biologist, a doctor, interested in the physiology of the orgasm and orgasmic dysfunction in particular, in order to discover how sexual physiology might affect infertile couples and what could be done to help them.²⁷

Masters had been interested in sex research since 1941, when he had worked with Dr George Washington Corner at the Carnegie Institute of Experimental Embryology in Baltimore. Corner, the mentor of Alfred Kinsey as well of Masters, later discovered progesterone, one of the two female sex hormones.²⁸ Masters carefully prepared himself for his career in sex research – he knew that he was playing with fire and needed to be, as it were, ‘above suspicion’ professionally before he even began in the area. Throughout the 1940s he collected degrees and academic qualifications and published solid research on steroid replacement and the correct dosages for men and women. He also got married. In 1953, after both Kinsey reports had been published, he finally approached the board of trustees at his own university to request that he might study human sexual behaviour. The university was not enthusiastic, but Kinsey had established a precedent, and on grounds of academic freedom Masters was given the go-ahead a year afterward. Early on, he established that there were few books to which he could turn, and so he was soon back before the university chancellor requesting permission to mount his own first piece of research, a one-year study of prostitutes (as people who knew something about sex). Again he was given the go-ahead, but only on condition that he worked with a review board that consisted of the local commissioner of police, the head of the local Catholic archdiocese, and the publisher of the local newspaper.²⁹ Gaining their approval, Masters spent eighteen months working with both male and female prostitutes in brothels in the Midwest, West Coast, Canada, and Mexico, investigating a variety of sexual experiences, ‘including all known variations of intercourse, oral sex, anal sex, and an assortment of fetishes.’³⁰ He asked the prostitutes how their sex organs behaved during intercourse, and what they had observed about orgasm. In the next phase of his research, and in the greatest secrecy, Masters opened a three-room clinic on the top floor of a maternity hospital associated with the university. Apart from the office, the two back rooms were separated by a one-way mirror through which, in time, Masters filmed 382 women and 312 men having sex, providing footage of 10,000 orgasms.³¹

As his researches continued, Masters realised he needed a female partner, the better to understand female sexual physiology and to ask the right questions. And so, in January 1957 he was joined by Virginia Johnson, a singer who had no degree, which Masters believed might help her frame different questions from himself. She became just as dedicated to ‘the cause’ as he was, and together they devised many new pieces of equipment with which to further their research; for example, there was one for measuring blood-volume changes in the penis, and ‘a nine-inch-long clear Lucite phallus with a ray of cold light emanating from its glans so that the camera lens inside the shaft’ could inspect the vaginal walls for what that might reveal about female orgasm. At that stage the main mystery of sex was felt to be the difference in women – promulgated by Freud, among others – between the clitoral and the vaginal orgasm.³² Kinsey had come out against such a distinction, and Masters and Johnson, too, never found any evidence for Freud’s theory. One of their first findings, however, was confirmation that whereas the penis was capable of only one orgasm at a time, with a refractory period in between, the clitoris was capable of repeated climax. This was an important development, ‘on an almost Copernican scale,’ in John Heidenry’s words, for it had consequences both for female psychology (sexual fulfilment was no longer modelled on that of the male) and in sex therapy.³³ In a highly contentious area, Masters and Johnson’s most controversial innovation was the employment of surrogates. Prostitutes were used at first – they were available and experienced – but this provoked objections from senior figures in the university, and so they advertised for female volunteers from among students.

As they developed their studies, and techniques of therapy, some of the early results were published in professional journals such as Obstetrics and Gynecology — they planned a large book later on. In November 1964, however, the secrecy they had maintained for a decade was blown away when they were attacked in the pages of Commentary by Leslie Farber, a psychoanalyst who sniggered in print, questioning their motives.³⁴ Their response was to bring forward publication of Human Sexual Response to April 1966. The book was deliberately written in a nonsensationalist, even leaden, prose, but that proved no barrier; the first printing sold out in a week, and eventually sales topped 300,000.³⁵ Fortunately for them, the Journal of the American Medical Association pronounced their work worthwhile, and so most of the mainstream press treated their findings with respect. The long-term importance of Masters and Johnson, coming on top of Kinsey, was that they brought out into the open the discussion of sexual matters, throwing light on to an area where there had been darkness and ignorance before. Many people objected to this change on principle, but not those who had suffered some form of sexual dysfunction and misery for years. Masters and Johnson found, for example, that some 80 percent of couples who sought treatment for sexual dysfunction responded almost immediately, and although there were relapses, the progress of many was excellent. They also found that secondary impotence in men – caused by alcohol, fatigue, or tension – was easily treated, and that one of the effects of pornography was to give people exaggerated expectations of what they might achieve in the sex act. Far from being pornography, Human Sexual Response put pornography in its place.

The Second Sex, the Kinsey reports, and Human Sexual Response all helped change attitudes. But they were themselves also the fruit of an attitude change that was already taking place. In Britain, this change was particularly acute owing to the war. During wartime, for example, there was in Britain a marked rise in illegitimate births, from 11.8 percent in 1942 to 14.9 percent in 1945.³⁶ At the same time, a shortage of rubber meant that sheaths (as condoms were then called) and caps were both in short supply and substandard. Simultaneously, the main problem in the family Planning Association was subfertility. There was so much concern that, in 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill broadcast to the nation about the need to encourage ‘our people … by every means to have large families.’ This worry eventually led to the appointment, in 1944, of a Royal Commission on Population. This did not report until 1949, by which time concerns – and behaviour – had changed. The commission found, for example, that in fact, after falling continuously for half a century, family size in Britain had been comparatively stable for twenty years, at about 2.2 children per married couple, which meant a slow population increase over time.³⁷ But it also became clear to the commission that although central government did not seem concerned about birth control (there was no provision in the new National Health Service, for example, for family planning clinics), the population at large, especially women, did take the matter very seriously indeed; they well understood the link between numbers of children and the standard of living, and they had accordingly extended their knowledge of contraception. This was yet another area of sexual behaviour where there had been many private initiatives, though no one was aware of the wider picture. In particular, the commission concluded that ‘the permeation of the small family system through nearly all classes had to be regarded as a fundamental adjustment to modern conditions in which the most significant feature was the gradual acceptance of control over the size of one’s family, particularly by means of contraception, as a normal part of personal responsibility.’³⁸

Artificial contraception was an issue that split the church. The Anglican Church voted to approve it in 1918, but the Roman Catholic Church has not done so yet. So it is an especially poignant fact that Dr John Rock, the chief of obstetrics and gynaecology at Harvard Medical School and the man who, in 1944, became the first scientist to fertilise a human egg in a test tube and was one of the first to freeze a human sperm for up to a year without impairing its potency, was a Catholic. His initial aim was to effect the opposite of contraception, and help infertile women conceive.³⁹ Rock believed that administering the female hormones progesterone and oestrogen might stimulate conception but also stabilise the menstrual cycle, enabling all religious couples to use the theologically sound ‘rhythm method.’⁴⁰ Unfortunately the action of these hormones was only partly understood – progesterone, for example, worked because it inhibited ovulation, but exactly how was not clear. But what Rock did notice was that when he administered progesterone to a number of so-called infertile women, although the progesterone didn’t appear to work at first, a substantial number became pregnant as soon as the treatment was stopped.⁴¹ Enlisting the aid of Dr Gregory Pincus, a Harvard biologist also interested in infertility, he eventually established that a combination of oestrogen and progesterone suppressed gonadotrophic activity and consequently prevented ovulation. Conception therefore could be prevented by taking the chemicals on the right days, so that the normal process of menstruation was interfered with. In 1956 the first clinical trials were organised by Rock and Pincus among two hundred women in Puerto Rico, since birth control was still unlawful in Massachusetts.⁴² When the nature of his work became known, there were attempts to have Rock excommunicated, but in 1957 the Food and Drug Administration in the United States approved the Rock-Pincus pid for treating women with menstrual disorders. Another trial followed, this time with a sample of nearly nine hundred women, the results of which were so promising that on 10 May 1960 the FDA sanctioned the use of Enovid, a birth-control pid manufactured by G. D. Searle & Co. in Chicago.⁴³ The development rated two inches in the New York Times, but it was enough: by the end of 1961 some 400,000 American women were taking the pid, and that number doubled the next year and the year after that. By 1966 six million American women were on the pid, and the same number across the rest of the world.⁴⁴ Some idea of the immediate success of the pid can be had from the British statistics. (Britain had a long tradition of family planning, with well-informed and proselytising volunteers, a residue of the benign end of the eugenics movement in the early years of the century. This made its statistics excellent.) In 1960, in family Planning Association clinics, 97.5 percent of new birth control clients were advised to use the cap (the pid wasn’t available in Britain until 1961); by 1975, 58 percent were advised to use the pid.⁴⁵ What the research into sexual statistics showed above all was that public perceptions of intimate behaviour were, by and large, wrong, outdated. People had been changing privately, silently, in countless small ways that nonetheless added up to a sexual revolution. This is why de Beauvoir, Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson had sold so wed; there was the thrill of recognition among the hundreds of thousands who bought their books.

Publishers and writers could read the signs, too. The 1950s saw several works of literature that were far franker about sexual matters than ever before. These tides included Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1953), J. P. Donleavy’s Ginger Man and Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (both 1955), William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), and Aden Ginsberg’s 1956 poem Howl. Howl and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the latter available in France since 1929, both became the subject of celebrated obscenity trials, in the United Kingdom and in the United States, in 1959; both eventually escaped censorship on the grounds that they had redeeming artistic merit. Curiously, Nabokov’s Lolita avoided the courthouse, perhaps because he did not use such explicit obscenities as the other authors did. But in some ways his theme, the love of a middle-aged man for an underage ‘nymphet,’ was the most ‘perverse’ of ad.

But then Nabokov was an extraordinary man. Born in Saint Petersburg into an aristocratic family who had lost everything in the revolution, he was educated at Cambridge, then lived in Germany and France until he settled in America in 1941. As well as writing equally vividly in Russian and English, he was a passionate chess player and a recognised authority on butterflies.⁴⁶ Lolita is by turns funny, sad, pathetic. It is a story as much about age as sex, about the sorrow that comes with knowledge, the difference between biological sex and psychological sex, about the difference between sex and love and passion and about how love can be a wound, imprisoning rather than liberating. Lolita is the butterfly, beautiful, delicate, with a primitive life force that an older man can only envy, but she is also vulgar, a far from idealised figure.⁴⁷ The middle-aged ‘hero’ loses her, of course, just as he loses everything, including his self-respect. Although Lolita realises what is happening to her, it is far from clear what, if anything, rubs off. Has the warmth in him created the coldness in her; or has it made no difference? In Lolita the sexes are as far apart as can be.

The final report of these years built on the earlier investigations and events to produce a definite advance. This was Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, which appeared in 1963. After graduating from Smith College, Friedan (née Goldstein) lived in Greenwich Village in New York, working as a reporter. In 1947 she married Carl Friedan, moving soon after to the suburbs, where Betty became a full-time mother, ferrying her children to school each day. She liked motherhood well enough, but she also wanted a career and again took up journalism. Or she tried to. Her fifteenth college reunion came round in 1957, and she decided to write an article about it for McCall’s magazine, using a questionnaire she had devised as the basis for the information.⁴⁸ The questions she asked chiefly concerned her classmates’ reactions to being a woman and the way their sex, or gender, had affected their lives. She found that ‘an overwhelming number of women felt unfulfilled and isolated, envying their husbands who had other lives, friends, colleagues, and challenges away from home.’

But McCall’s turned her article down: ‘The male editor said it couldn’t be true.’ She took it back and submitted the same piece to Ladies’ Home Journal. They rewrote the article so it said the opposite of what she meant. Next she tried Redbook. There the editor told her agent, ‘Betty has gone off her rocker.’⁴⁹ He thought only ‘neurotic’ women would identify with what she was saying. Belatedly, Friedan realised that what she had written ‘threatened the very raison d’être of the women’s magazine world,’ and she then decided to expand what she had discovered about women into a book.⁵⁰ To begin with this had the title The Togetherness Woman, later changed to The Feminine Mystique. By the feminine mystique, Friedan meant the general assumption that women liked being housewives and mothers at home, having no interest in wider social, political, or intellectual matters, nor feeling a need for a career. She was surprised to find that it had not always been so, that the very magazines that had turned down her articles had, until World War II, printed very different material. ‘In 1939 the heroines of women’s magazine stories were not always young, but in a certain sense they were younger than their fictional counterparts today…. The majority of heroines in the four major women’s magazines (then Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and Women’s Home Companion) were career women…. And the spirit, courage, independence, determination – the strength of character they showed in their work as nurses, teachers, artists, actresses, copywriters, saleswomen – were part of their charm. There was a definite aura that their individuality was something to be admired, not unattractive to men, that men were drawn to them as much for their spirit and character as for their looks.’⁵¹

The war had changed all that, she felt. Going away to war had been supremely fulfilling for a whole generation of men, but they had returned to the ‘little women’ waiting at home, often raising a family deliberately conceived before the man went away. These men returned to good jobs or, via the GI bid, good educational opportunities, and a new pattern had been set, not helped by the flight to the suburbs, which had only made women’s isolation more acute. By 1960, however, Friedan said that women’s frustration was boiling over; anger and neuroses were at an unprecedented level, if the results of the questionnaire she had sent out were to be believed. But part of the problem was that it had no name; that’s where her book came in. The problem with no name became The Feminine Mystique.

Friedan’s attack was wide-ranging and extensively researched, her anger (for the book was a polemical but calmly marshalled thesis) directed not just at women’s magazines and Madison Avenue, for portraying women as members of a ‘comfortable concentration camp,’ surrounded by the latest washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and other labour-saving devices, but also at Freud, Margaret Mead, and the universities for making women try to conform to some stereotypical ideal.⁵² Freud’s theory of penis envy, she thought, was an outmoded way of trying to say that women were inferior, and there was no credible evidence for it. She argued that Mead’s anthropological studies, although describing differences between women of differing cultures, still offered an ideal of womanhood that was essentially passive, again conforming to stereotypes. She made the telling point that Mead’s own life – a career, two husbands, a lesbian lover, an open marriage – was completely at variance with what she described in her writings, and a much better model for the modern Western woman.⁵³ But Friedan’s study was also one of the first popular works to draw attention to the all-important nuts-and-bolts of womanhood. She explored how many women got married in their teens, as a result of which their careers and intellectual lives went nowhere; she wondered how many supported their husbands in a ‘qualification’ – she ironically called it the Ph.T. (putting husband through [college]).⁵⁴ And she was one of the first to draw attention to the fact that, as a result of these demanding circumstances, it was always the mother who ended up battering and abusing her children.

Friedan’s book hit a nerve, not just in its mammoth sales, but also in that it helped spark the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. This commission’s report, when it appeared in 1965, detailed the discriminatory wages women were earning (half the average for men) and the declining ratio of women in professional and executive jobs. When the report was buried in the Washington bureaucracy, a group of women decided they had to take things into their own hands. Betty Friedan was one of those who met in Washington to create what someone at the meeting called ‘an NAACP for women.’⁵⁵ The acronym eventually became NOW, the National Organization of Women. The modern feminist movement had begun.⁵⁶