Short Response to Friedan's The Feminine Mystique

While reading an excerpt from Betty Friedman's The Feminine Mystique, I couldn't help but recall the movie Revolutionary Road. The movie, which is a remake of the novel by the same name, follows a couple in the 1950s in a world that is characterized by social norms and steriotypes. Every woman, and the main character April in particular, is the housewife that Friedman describes in The Feminine Mystique: young, mother of 3 or 4, living in the suburbs and waiting on her children and spouse day in and day out. April feels that she is perhaps special, that she and her husband share a secret that they will escape from the monotony of suburbial life and end up living lives they aspire to live. She, like the housewives quoted in Friedman's account, feels alone in her role as mother, wife and homemaker. Certainly the statements of housewives Friedman interviews in The Feminine Mystique would have resonated with her, including one woman's complaint, "My days are all busy, and full, too... It's just like any other wife's day. Humdrum. The biggest time, I am chasing kids" (Friedman 62). Similarly, the main character would have related to the statement of another housewife, "By noon I'm, ready for a padded cell. Very little of what I've done has been really necessary or important" (63).

Movie Clip

The one thing that April has to look forward to is the promise her husband makes that they will move to Paris in the fall and seek out what it is they both wish to do in life. The humdrum of the domestic activities pass more easily, as she has the dream of leaving suburban life for something more fulfilling. However, when she finds out she is pregnant, the dream is shattered and the couple learns they will never leave the monotony of life as they know it. As one twenty-three-year-old mother told Friedman, "It's as if ever since you were a little girl, there's always been somebody or something that will take care of your life: your parents, or college, or falling in love, or having a child, or moving to a new house. Then you wake up one morning and there's nothing to look forward to" (Friedman 57). Once the main character learns Paris will never happen, she attempts to give herself an abortion and tragically dies due to loss of blood at the end of the movie. This depiction of a truly desperate housewife, trapped in the home and slowly losing her ambition and sense of self worth, is the picture of the 1950s housewife that Friedman describes. It is fortunate that women have been able to push beyond this subjugation of women in the home and stake their ground as just as intelligent and deserving of fulfilling lives as their husbands and male counterparts. However, women still have a ways to go before the feminism movement can be identified as a success.