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circumstances, I was enrapt. Four decades later, millions ofindividual transformations later, there is still so much to learn fromthis book about how sex and home and work and norms are used totwist the lives of women into weird and unnatural shapes. It set off asocial and political explosion, yet it also speaks to the incompleterebuilding of the leveled landscape. “Giving a name to the problemthat had no name was the necessary first step,” Friedan concludes inthe epilogue. “But it wasn’t enough.” Much, much more wasnecessary to change our lives. But as a first step, this one isextraordinary. As a writer, I say, “Brava!” As a beneficiary of thegreatest social revolution in twentieth-century America, theresurgence of feminism that began with The Feminine Mystique, I amobliged to add, “Many, many thanks.”

MetamorphosisTwo Generations LaterAs we approach a new century—and a new millennium—it’s themen who have to break through to a new way of thinking aboutthemselves and society. Too bad the women can’t do it for them, orgo much further without them. Because it’s awesome to consider howwomen have changed the very possibilities of our lives and arechanging the values of every part of our society since we brokethrough the feminine mystique only two generations ago. But it can’tgo on in terms of women alone. There’s a new urgency coming fromthe changing situation of men, threatening to women unless men breakthrough. Will women be forced to retreat from their empoweredpersonhood, or will they join with men again in some new vision ofhuman possibility, changing the man’s world which they fought sohard to enter?Consider the terms of women’s new empowerment, the startlingchanges since that time I wrote about, only three decades ago, whenwomen were defined only in sexual relation to men—man’s wife, sexobject, mother, housewife—and never as persons definingthemselves by their own actions in society. That image, which Icalled “the feminine mystique,” was so pervasive, coming at us fromthe women’s magazines, the movies, the television commercials, allthe mass media and the textbooks of psychology and sociology, that

each woman thought she was alone, it was her personal guilt, if shedidn’t have an orgasm waxing the family-room floor. No matter howmuch she had wanted that husband, those children, that split-levelsuburban house and all the appliances thereof, which were supposedto be the limits of women’s dreams in those years after World War II,she sometimes felt a longing for something more.I called it “the problem that had no name” because women wereblamed then for a lot of problems—not getting the kitchen sink whiteenough, not pressing the husband’s shirt smooth enough, thechildren’s bedwetting, the husband’s ulcers, their own lack oforgasm. But there was no name for a problem that had nothing to dowith husband, children, home, sex—the problem I heard from somany women after I served my own time as a suburban housewife,fired from a newspaper job for being pregnant, guilty anyway aswomen were made to feel then for working outside the home, thatthey were undermining their husband’s masculinity and their ownfemininity and neglecting their children. I was not quite able tosuppress the writing itch, so, like secret drinking in the morningbecause no other mommy in my suburban world “worked,” Ifreelanced for women’s magazines, writing articles about women andtheir children, breast feeding, natural childbirth, their homes andfashions. If I tried to write about a woman artist, a political concern,“American women won’t identify,” the editors would say. Thoseeditors of women’s magazines were men.All the terms in every field and profession then were defined bymen, who were virtually the only full professors, the law partners,the CEOs and company executives, the medical experts, theacademicians, the hospital heads and clinic directors. There was no“woman’s vote” women voted as their husbands did. No pollster orpolitical candidate talked about “women’s issues” women were nottaken that seriously, women didn’t take themselves that seriously.Abortion was not a word printed in newspapers; it was a sleazycrime that shamed and terrified and often killed women, and whosepractitioners could go to jail. It was only after we broke through thefeminine mystique and said women are people, no more no less, andtherefore demanded our human right to participate in the mainstreamof society, to equal opportunity to earn and be trained and have ourown voice in the big decisions of our destiny, that the problems ofwomen themselves became visible, and women began to take theirown experience seriously.

Consider, in the summer of 1996, that the women athletes takingthe Olympic medals—from tennis, track and field, to soccer,basketball, kayak, mountainbike—in every possible competition,were virtually the main show, the target of prime-time television. Inmy growing up, or my daughter’s, there were no women playing inmajor sports—no serious athletic training for girls in schools, onlyboys—until the women’s movement demanded and won an end to sexdiscrimination in education, including athletic training, in Title 9 ofthe Civil Rights Act as Title 7 banned discrimination in employment—equal opportunity to work, and play, to the limit of one’s ability,for women and men.Consider in 1996 that the issue of abortion as women’s choicewas the crucial issue splitting the Republican party. Long since thewomen’s movement declared the basic right of a woman to choosewhether or when to have a child, long since the Supreme Courtdeclared that right as inalienable as any right specified in theConstitution and Bill of Rights, as they were originally written of byand for the people that were men, long since the Democratic partycommitted itself to the right to choose, and long since thefundamentalist Religious Right has been fighting a vicious rearguardaction, harassing and bombing abortion clinics. The Republican partywon elections in the past inflaming fears and hate over the issue ofabortion. In 1996 their platform’s demand for a constitutionalamendment criminalizing abortion again, putting the fetus over the lifeof the woman, alienated many Republican women and men, a lastdesperate attempt to turn the clock back. As it became clear thatwomen, now registered to vote in increasing majority over men,would elect the next president of the United States, not just choice butissues like family leave, the right to women not to be forced out ofhospitals less than 48 hours after giving birth, the right of parents totake time off to take children to the dentist, or for a parent-teacherappointment became serious political business.While some media, ads, and movies may still try to define womenonly or mainly as sex objects, it’s no longer considered chic or evenacceptable by much of America. Far from being unspeakable andinvisible, sexual abuse of women and less overt forms of sexualharassment are now considered serious enough crimes to bring downa senator or Supreme Court justice or even a president. In fact, themedia’s, political muckrakers’, and even feminists’ obsession withsuch charges, which originated as an expression of women’s new

empowerment, now begins to seem almost diversionary. In the focuson sexual harassment, sexual politics has become obsessed with whatmay in fact be a dangerous symptom of increasing male rage andfrustration over economic anxieties, job downsizing, stagnant wages,and career impasse or decline. Sexual politics, we remind ourselves,started out as a reaction against the feminine mystique. It was anexplosion of women’s pent-up anger and rage against the put-downsthey had to accept when they were completely dependent on men, therage they took out on their own bodies and covertly on husbands andkids. That rage fueled the first battles of the women’s movement, andsubsided with each advance woman made toward her ownempowerment, her full personhood, freedom.But sexual politics now feeds the politics of hate and the growingpolarization of America. It also masks the real threats now towomen’s empowerment and men’s—the culture of corporate greed,the downsizing of jobs hitting even college-educated white males,with nearly a 20 percent loss of income in the last five years, to saynothing of minority, blue-collar, and those with less education. 1 Abacklash from the men, egged on by media and political hatemongers,can make scapegoats of women again. But women are no longer thepassive victims they once felt themselves to be. They cannot bepushed back easily into the feminine mystique, though some veryshrewd women like Martha Stewart are making mega-millions onelaborate do-it-yourself decor and cuisine, selling pretend femininemystique pursuits as chic new choices.The fact is women are now carrying some 50 percent of theincome-earning burden in some 50 percent of households.2 Womenare now nearly 50 percent of the labor force.3 Fifty-nine percent ofwomen work at jobs outside the home, including the mothers of youngchildren.4 And women’s wages are now about 72 percent of men’s. 5They are not equal at the top; most of the CEOs, law partners,hospital heads, full professors, cabinet members, judges, and policechiefs are still men. But women are now represented in all levelsbelow the very top. And more Americans now work for companiesowned or run by women than by the Fortune 500.But it’s troubling to learn that the closing of the earnings gendergap has come only one-third (34 percent) from increases in women’searnings; most of it (66 percent) is accounted for by a drop in men’searnings.6 And while more and more women have entered the labor

force in these years, more and more men have dropped out or beenforced out.It is men, first minority men, now white men, first blue-collar,now middle management, who have been the main victims ofcorporate downsizing. Because it’s the blue-collar and middlemanagement jobs held mainly by men that have been eliminated, notjust by technology but in the short-term interests of increasing thestock-market price by getting rid of men’s higher wages and benefits.Women’s service jobs, in areas such as the health professions, arethe part of the economy that is growing, but those jobs areincreasingly being “contracted out,” put on a temporary or contingentbasis without benefits.Many women’s jobs, especially those contingency jobs, are notbrilliant careers, but poll after poll shows women today feelingpretty good about their complex lives of job, profession, and theirvarious choices of marriage and motherhood. Women feel that zeststill, with so many more choices than their mothers had, since theybroke out of the feminine mystique. But the sexual politics that helpedus break through the feminine mystique is not relevant or adequate, iseven diversionary, in confronting the serious and growing economicimbalance, the mounting income inequality of wealth, now threateningboth women and men.Men, whose very masculine identity has been defined in terms oftheir score in the rat race, knocking the other guy down, can no longercount on that lifetime climb in job or profession. If they themselvesare not yet downsized out, brothers, cousins, friends, co-workershave been. And they are more dependent now on wives’ earnings.The real and growing discrepancy affecting both women and men isthe sharply increased income inequality between the very rich—thetop 10 percent, who now control two-thirds of America’s wealth—and the rest of us, women and men. In the last decade, 80 percent ofAmericans have seen their incomes stagnate or decline.7 The onlyreason more families are not pushed into poverty is that both womenand men are working. But in the present culture of greed, where all ofus are told we can get rich in the stock market, it’s easier to deflectthe anxiety and insecurity that is growing among Americans, womenand men, according to the polls—despite the booming stock marketand corporate profits and the Dow Jones Index going through the roof—into sexual politics, and racial and intergenerational warfare.Easier to deflect the rage by turning women and men, black and

white, young and old, against each other than to openly confront theexcessive power of corporate greed.I would like to see women and men mounting a new nationwidecampaign for a shorter work week, as over half a century ago, laborfought for the 40-hour week, now perhaps a 30-hour week, meetingthe needs of women and men in the childrearing years who shouldn’tbe working 80-hour weeks as some do now. A six-hour day, parentsat work while kids are at school, also fitting the needs of men andwomen who from youth on will have to combine work with educationand further training, and people over sixty who we know now neednew ways to continue contributing their experience to society ratherthan draining it as candidates for nursing homes. More jobs foreverybody, and new definitions of success for women and men.The old wars still divide us. In the Mitsubishi plant in Normal,Illinois, ten miles from Peoria where I grew up, a group of womenhave filed the largest lawsuit in sexual harassment history, againstmen alleged to have subjected them to mauling of buttocks andbreasts and obscene name-calling, “slut” and “whore,” as well asrefusing to give them the training and support they needed in theirnontraditional jobs. In that part of Illinois, with the Caterpillar strikelost, those Mitsubishi jobs were the only good jobs left. The menwere clearly threatened as women began to take those jobs. I wasproud of NOW, the National Organization for Women (which Ihelped start when I saw we needed a movement to get beyond thefeminine mystique and participate as equals in the mainstream ofsociety), when it went to Japan to be joined by forty-five Japanesewomen’s organizations to take on Mitsubishi in its own base. Butwomen’s victory over male abuse can’t last, isn’t solid, until thecauses of that insecurity and rage are addressed by and for womenand men.Still, the new power of women is being felt all over the worldnow as was made clear in 1995 at the Beijing conference. When theauthoritarian Chinese government could not get the Olympics, itwelcomed the UN World’s Women’s Conference, expecting thewomen to shop and pose in pretty pictures against picturesqueChinese backdrops. When 40,000 women from women’sorganizations, in movement all over the world, demanded visas, andprotested at Chinese embassies when they were denied, the Chinesegovernment tried to wall off the nongovernment conference into an

isolated suburb. But they could not stop the women of the world.Told they could demonstrate only at a children’s playground, womenfrom Tibet who had been denied visas brought CNN to thatplayground and, shrouded in black, took their story to the wholeworld. Hillary Rodham Clinton asserted “women’s rights are humanrights” to the whole world. The official delegates to that UNconference were, of course, women now, empowered women, wheretwenty years ago they were men or wives and secretaries of maleofficials who took their government’s seats at the crucial votes. Thewomen this time not only declared a woman’s right to control herown sexuality and her childbearing as a universal human right, butdeclared the genital mutilation of little girls a crime against humanity.Under the feminine mystique, men all over the world took for grantedtheir right to beat or abuse their wives. Now, in the United Statesand, after Beijing, in the world, they no longer can assume that right.In the United States, the Department of Justice has set up an office totrain police to deal with violence against women.Violence against women seems to be increasing in the UnitedStates, partly because women are reporting as abuse what they usedto accept passively as private shame, but maybe also because men’sincreasing frustration and desperation is being taken out on women.Studies and reports from California, Connecticut, and elsewhereshow an increase in sexual abuse and violence against women, aswell as suicide, child abuse, and divorce, in the face of corporatedownsizing, and the lack of community, the dwindling of time andconcern for larger purposes in the “me” decade. But women’sconcerns now go beyond their own security. It was concern for theirfamilies, and not only their own families but those poorer orotherwise less fortunate, that motivated American women in 1996 torise up against the Republican’s threats to cut Medicare, Medicaid,welfare, Social Security, student loans, child immunizations, and theprotection of the environment. Co-opting feminist rhetoric did not getwomen’s votes for politicians who threatened the welfare ofchildren, old people, the sick, and the poor. Abstractions of “balancethe budget” did not mask for women the danger of gutting governmentprograms that protect children and older people, the sick and thepoor, to provide tax cuts for the rich. A decade after the women’smovement, a study by the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers Universityshowed that the addition of even two women to a state legislaturechanges the political agenda, not just in the direction of women’s

rights, but to basic concerns of life—the lives of children, olderpeople, the poor, and the sick.And so, paradox or full circle, or transcendent thesis, in thesethirty-odd years, women breaking through the feminine mystique totheir own political and economic participation and empowerment inthe mainstream of society are not becoming more like men but areexpressing in the public sphere some of the values that used to beexpressed or allowed only in the private nurture of the home. Themystique we had to rebel against when it was used to confine us tothe home, to keep us from developing and using our full personhoodin society, distorted those real values women are now embracing,with new power and zest, both in the privacy of the home and in thelarger society. And in so doing, they are changing the political andpersonal dimensions of marriage and families, home and the societythey share with men.Marriage, which used to be a woman’s only way to socialfunction and economic support, is now a choice for most women aswell as for men. It no longer defines a woman completely as it neverdid a man; she often keeps her own name now or husband and wifetake each other’s hyphenated. In breaking through the femininemystique, some early feminist radical rhetoric seemed to declare waron marriage, motherhood, family. The divorce rate of those 1950sfeminine mystique marriages exploded from the 1960s to the 1980s.Before, no matter who went to court, it was only the man who had theeconomic and social independence to get a divorce. Since then,women in great numbers can and do get

primer into the advanced course in seizing control of our own lives. I plead guilty on this count. I expected to revisit this book as I would a period piece, interesting, worthy of notice and of homage, yet a little dated and obvious as well. The daughter of a quiet and contained housewi