The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique’s foremost theme is the inner conflict that women face between fulfilling the societal expectation to devote themselves to their sexual role and fulfilling their own desires to develop all parts of their personhood. When Friedan talks about pressure to fulfill a “sexual role,” she is not referring to women feeling pressured to have sex constantly. Rather, she refers to women’s biological capacity for reproduction. Her argument is that post-World War II America oriented women’s entire identity around their ability to bear children. Women were encouraged to craft their personhood around their families—to identify as someone’s wife and someone’s mother. As Friedan writes of women in her generation, “They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights […] All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children” (2).

Friedan claims that this societal emphasis on women’s sexual roles deprives them of the opportunity to develop as people as fully as men do. This argument may sound simple, but it asks women to do more than support a specific political cause or throw their weight behind a particular piece of feminist legislation.