Disagreement
Immediately after its publishing, The Feminine Mystique was the recipient of much backlash against feminism. Significant numbers of women responded angrily to the book, which they felt implied that wives and mothers could never be fulfilled.[31] "Women who valued their roles as mothers and housewives interpreted Friedan's message as one that threatened their stability, devalued their labor, and disrespected their intelligence."[32] In a Letter to Editor in McCall's, one woman wrote, "All this time I thought I was happy, and a nice person. Now I discover I've been miserable and some sort of monster in disguise—now out of disguise. How awful!"[33] Another said, "Mrs. Friedan should save her pity for those who really need it—the half starved, oppressed people in the world."[34] When women critical of the work were not expressing personal offense at Friedan's description of the housewife's plight, they were accusing her of planning to destroy American families.[31] Jessica Weiss quoted in her paper, "If the mothers, (or housewives as we are called) took this advice, what would become of our children? Or better yet, the future of the world."[34]
Historian Joanne Meyerowitz argues that many of the contemporary magazines and articles of the period did not place women solely in the home, as Friedan stated, but in fact supported the notions of full- or part-time jobs for women seeking to follow a career path rather than being a housewife.[35] These articles did, however, still emphasize the importance of maintaining the traditional image of femininity.[36]
Author and publication process
Daniel Horowitz, a Professor of American Studies at Smith College, points out that although Friedan presented herself as a typical suburban housewife, she was involved with radical politics and labor journalism in her youth, and during the time she wrote The Feminine Mystique she worked as a freelance journalist for women's magazines and as a community organizer.[37][38]
The W. W. Norton publishing house, where Betty Friedan's work was initially circulated to be published as a book also generated some criticism. In fact an employee under the alias "L M" wrote in a two-page memo that[36] Friedan's theoretical views were "too obvious and feminine", as well as critiquing her approach by suggesting it to be unscientific.
Excluded groups of women
In addition, Friedan has been criticized for focusing solely on the plight of middle-class white women, and not giving enough attention to the differing situations encountered by women in less stable economic situations, or women of other races or trans women. According to Kirsten Fermaglich and Lisa Fine, "women of color—African American, Latina, Asian American and Native American women—were completely absent from Friedan's vision, as were white working-class and poor women."[18] Despite being written during the Civil Rights Movement, Friedan's text "barely mentions African-American women."[39] In her Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Black feminist bell hooks writes "She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife. She made her plight and the plight of white women like herself synonymous with a condition affecting all American women. In so doing, she deflected attention away from her classism, her racism, her sexist attitudes towards the masses of American women. In the context of her book, Friedan makes clear that the women she saw as victimized by sexism were college-educated white women".[40]
Friedan has also been criticized for prejudice against homosexuality.[41][42] In part, this criticism stems from her adherence to the paradigmatic belief at the time that "bad mothers" caused deviance from heteronormative and cisnormative society.[43]
Despite these criticisms, her "language aimed at white American middle-class women won large numbers of supporters to the feminist cause," implying perhaps that Friedan's decision to exclude other groups was deliberate in mobilizing a group of women that had in some cases not thought of the improvement of their rights.[18]
