Rachel Shteir—
Writing about Betty Friedan and her famous book that expanded women’s lives, The Feminine Mystique, I often admired the zeal with which she tried to expand her own. She was DIY project, pioneer, escape artist. One well-known shape this self-improvement, for lack of a better word, took was her great book, published in 1963. Another was her activism, founding many organizations for women’s justice. But there was a third branch of activity, driven by the rush to live in a way that was different from her mother. Her desire to get out, which began before she could even articulate it, never aimed just at Miriam Goldstein, her mom, a housewife. It envisioned not only new conversations and principles, but living arrangements and brick and mortar structures where women could find solitude. Rooms of their own as it were. So insistent was the drive to create new feminine mystique-proof physical spaces that she sometimes sounded like a transcendental romantic, not the twentieth-century crusader she became.
Like many young people, Friedan first experienced new ways of living when she arrived at Smith College in 1938. When she wrote, years later, that at Smith she no longer felt like a freak, she referred less to the modest house she grew up in in Peoria, Illinois or the room she shared with her younger sister, Amy than to her hometown’s prejudices and conformity. At Smith, she met young women who believed reading, writing, and arguing were the central organizing principles of life. Still, I believe that domestic arrangements played a role.
At Smith, a women’s college where she ate, drank, fought, and wrote, she lived in Chapin House, a residential college, with other brilliant young things. Then, in the summer of her junior year, she was exposed to yet another type of home when she spent some time at Highlander Folk School, a socialist camp. Squeezed together for a short time with other young leftists, she was able to reflect on how her parents and her economy had thus far shaped her identity.
The importance of other sorts of co-habitation arrangements seemed to recede until Friedan got married, when the idea of doing the opposite of what her mother had done moved to the forefront of her mind. For her that meant continuing to work, even after she had children. But it also meant finding domestic groupings modeled after what she had experienced at Smith—a like-minded tribe, larger than the nuclear family. The apotheosis of this phase was Parkway Village, in Queens, a housing complex for U.N. workers and veterans that the Friedan’s lived in in the 1950s. The proximity to other families allowed women to help other women, watching other peoples’ children in the courtyard. But by the middle of the decade, Friedan gave up that neighborly spirit when she and the family moved to an enormous Victorian house in Grandview-on-Hudson, near what used to be known as The Tappan Zee Bridge.
She liked decorating the house. But it also trapped her. She began to develop some of the ideas about the “problem that had no name” that she famously critiqued in The Feminine Mystique. Many, like those about women’s stereotypes and her aversion to waxing the kitchen floor, are well-known. A less known one is about the need for a new kind of housing offering women a respite from their families. “There wasn’t any place where she could get out of the kitchen, away from the children…” she writes about one woman in the Chapter titled ‘Housewifery Expands to Fill The Time Available.’ And: “there was no door at all between kitchen and living room,” she writes about another.1
She was not just anti-kitchen, however. She wanted women, including herself, to have a space, which she did not think was possible in the suburbs. And so she was drawn back to urban life. After The Feminine Mystique was published, she moved the family back to Manhattan, to an apartment in The Dakota. Yet a single-family apartment, as it turned out, was not enough. She greatly admired Habitat ‘67 in Montreal, the apartments designed by the Canadian Israeli architect Moshe Safdie, who piled cement cubes atop one another to make 148 individual residences sharing common space. (A decade later, she would experience similar delight when she saw Arcosanti, another utopian modernist project designed by Paolo Soleri in the Arizona desert.)
A utopian community Friedan had mixed feelings about was Esalen, which she visited in the summer of 1969. Although Esalen introduced her to new forms of psychiatry, she was disappointed that the Human Behavioral Movement reproduced the gender roles she had criticized. After her divorce, Friedan would try to start her own commune in the Hamptons. She would live in 9G— a planned coop, with individual apartments and communal space on the Upper West Side, designed by the architect Judith Edelman.
When she became interested in Israel, Friedan briefly alit on kibbutzim as the answer to American women’s anomie. But she became disenchanted when she saw that, as at Esalen, women fell—or were pushed—into the same domestic roles as the housewives she wrote about two decades earlier.
Writing about Betty Friedan and her famous book that expanded women’s lives, The Feminine Mystique, I often admired the zeal with which she tried to expand her own. She was DIY project, pioneer, escape artist. One well-known shape this self-improvement, for lack of a better word, took was her great book, published in 1963. She also toiled away in activism, founding many organizations for women’s justice. But Friedan additionally seized upon a third branch of activity, driven by the rush to live differently from her mother. Her desire to get out, which began before she could even articulate it, never aimed just at Miriam Goldstein, her mom, a housewife. It envisioned not only new conversations and principles, but living arrangements and brick and mortar structures where women could find solitude. Rooms of their own as it were. So insistent was the drive to create new feminine mystique-proof physical spaces that she sometimes sounded like a transcendental romantic, not the twentieth-century crusader she became.
1. This is from the 2001 edition, intro by Anna Quindlen. The first quote is p 349 and the second quote is p 337.
Rachel Shteir is an award-winning essayist, writer, and critic, and is head of the Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism Program at the Theatre School at DePaul University. She is the author of Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show, Gypsy: The Art of the Tease, and The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting. She lives in Chicago, IL.
Between Memory and History