This feminist classic made me reflect a lot on the church my family attended in high school. Evangelical churches in general were never particularly charitable to women, but certainly that one in particular was not. It had around 500 people at a given service, all middle and upper middle class white families who homeschooled. I think there was maybe one or two whose kids went to a private Christian school, and nobody that I knew of went to public school. Families with three kids were on the smaller side and five was more typical -- though we were two degrees of separation from the Duggars. This was during the Mark Driscoll era, so people dressed stylishly, with teens in Hollister and American Eagle and moms winking that their Buckle jeans were worth every cent. 

There must have been around 30 girls my age and I only knew one besides myself who ended up going to a traditional university, and that girl's family stopped attending before she graduated high school. So in effect, I was the only girl my age in a church of 500 upper middle class white people who had plans to get a 4-year degree. In fact, the only woman I knew who worked full-time was my aunt, and she didn't go to college. Interestingly, I knew multiple women who had college degrees, and one of them explicitly discouraged me from going to college. 

So, what were girls encouraged to do while their brothers went off to law school or whatever? Stay living at home "under their father's protection" until they got married and that "mantle of authority was transferred to their husband." I suppose taking some community college or bible college classes were allowed, as several ended up doing photography, graphic design, and midwifery on the side -- things that they could juggle around their "primary calling" of being a mom and homemaker. 

When Friedan describes the feminine mystique, what its demands and arguments are, I felt sure I had heard it explicitly taught before: That the greatest source of fulfilment and highest calling as a woman was in the home with their children. Ignoring the fact that this has been nearly impossible financially speaking for most families for most of history, it hardly proved true emotionally in my high school church. I found out later that not a few of the women were on antidepressants -- which, no shame if you need those and are prescribed them, but why did moms need them more than dads if both are supposedly "living their highest calling"? Wait, I think I can guess the answer: their sinful nature is causing them to desire something other than God's perfect plan for their life, just like when Eve and Sarah tried to take matters into their own hands instead of trusting God. Perhaps they needed a little synthetic joy to get the godly joy flowing. 

In a community that was trying to emulate 1950s family life ideals, it is no surprise that a psychological malady that afflicted 1950's housewives was appearing decades later...The Problem That Has No Name. I wonder what I would have thought if I had read this back then?

Pair with Jesus and John Wayne