The Problem That Has No Name

Lisa

Rating: really liked it
"The Problem That Has No Name" - today we would probably not see it in the utter meaninglessness and boredom of the isolated housewife in Betty Friedan's description, as the pendulum of time has once again swung and moved towards more equality between men and women - at least in my privileged part of the world.

Why do I recognise the desperation anyway then?

Why do I know countless educated women today, working full-time in highly skilled jobs, while raising children and decorating homes and cooking dinners and going to the gym to keep fit and beautiful in their forties and fifties - feeling that problem without a name lurking underneath the polished surface?

I suspect the answer is that there is no such thing as a happy life lived within the unquestioned "ideal" of the conventional family, where partners promise to love each other and belong to each other until death does them part. As if that is promisable. A promise given to be broken despite best of intentions, best of ambitions, best of ideas.

Sometimes when I get most frustrated about the bitter unfairness of denying people same-sex marriage out of tradition or piety, I wonder if the solution is not to abolish marriage as a legal concept completely, rather than allowing it to all lovers. It would take away the absurdity of impossible commitment, of property rights to other human beings' thoughts and acts and time. It would end inequality effectively, forcing individuals to acknowledge their true needs and wishes rather than societal expectations. After all, we would still be able choose to live with another human being forever, as long as the choice is free and mutual, - so the abolishment would not take away any benefits from true lovers.

Imagine a world without marriage! Would it be without love? Hardly. Only people would not stay beyond the "best before" date in hopelessly loveless relationships labelled "marriage" in order to show they "can make it work". What for?

I think Betty Friedan's argument against American housewifery actually is an argument against the subduing of one individual to please another at the expense of individual rights, regardless of whether the individual is male or female, straight or gay, young or old, monogamous or polygamous...

Feminism is just one way of fighting for freedom to choose. Domesticated humanity is the problem that has no name.

RuthAnn

Rating: really liked it
Recommended, but you might as well read The Feminine Mystique, I think

I bought this slim Penguin Modern months ago, and I should have read it immediately. Reading older feminist writings makes me discouraged on one hand because WHY haven't things changed more?! But it also gives me a sense of unity and solidarity: there is work to be done, and we are all in it together. After reading these 50 pages, I see that Rebecca Solnit stands on the shoulders of Betty Friedan, and now I need to read The Feminine Mystique and all of that second-wave feminism. Heck, I need to read the first wave! Give me all your feminist, suffragist writings, and let's all smash the patriarchy together.

Ria

Rating: really liked it
''She was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: 'Is this all?' ''



2 excellent essays. the first one is better than the second one. i'm not planning on reading The Feminine Mystique because Betty acts like rich white suburban housewives were the most victimized group in America but this one is fine.

Kirsty

Rating: really liked it
The 41st book in the Penguin Moderns series is Betty Friedan's The Problem That Has No Name.  The selected work in this volume was first published in her seminal The Feminine Mystique (1963), in which Friedan 'gave voice to countless American housewives... and set the women's movement in motion'.  In The Problem That Has No Name, one finds the titular essay, as well as a piece entitled 'The Passionate Journey'.

I have read criticism about Friedan's work before, and other tracts which mention her, but this was my first taste of her original work.  Friedan notices a marked shift between the 1920s and 1950s in the priorities of women in the United States: 'A century earlier, women had fought for higher education; now girls went to college to get a husband.  By the mid fifties, 60 per cent dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bat.'  This denotes a crisis in society; few women decided to pursue careers for their own fulfilment, working instead to support their families.

Friedan's work is all-encompassing, and she is very understanding of Everywoman.  The first essay begins in the following way: 'The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women.  It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States.  Each suburban wife struggled with it alone.  As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slip-cover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: "Is this all?"'  As the title of this work suggests, Friedan suggests reasons as to why a name had never before seen given to 'this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women...'.  The 'problem that has no name' consisted of the many women believing that any individuality they once had was swallowed up as soon as they became wives and mothers.

Useful statistics have been woven in throughout The Problem That Has No Name, in order to reinforce or better illustrate Friedan's points.  She also makes use of the many interviews which she has conducted with females all across America, discussing various problems which they had with their husbands or children.  It is in these instances that her profession of magazine journalism really shows.  She notes the point at which she began to notice signs of something buried within widespread society, and common for so many different women: 'But after a while I began to recognize the telltale signs of this other problem.  I saw the same signs in suburban ranch houses and split-levels on Long Island and in New Jersey and Westchester County; in colonial houses in a small Massachusetts town; on patios in Memphis; in suburban and city apartments; in living rooms in the Midwest.'  In the 1960s, Friedan notes that news outlets began to report on 'the actual unhappiness of the American housewife.'  Although she does not talk about her own life in detail, Friedan also touches upon her own experiences of bringing up her children during this period.

The dissatisfaction of women is a major theme in the second essay too, but from an historical perspective which focuses on the path to women's rights.  'The Passionate Journey' begins: 'It was the need for a new identity that started women, a century ago, on that passionate journey... away from home.'  Of this journey, which women felt compelled to make in order to keep a grasp on their personal individuality, and to try and escape from societal confines, Friedan writes: 'Theirs was an act of rebellion, a violent denial of the identity of women as it was then defined.  It was the need for a new identity that led these passionate feminists to forge new trails for women.  Some of these trails were unexpectedly rough, some were dead ends, and some may have been false, but the need for women to find new trails was real.'  This essay is a real celebration of what women have achieved.

Friedan's writing style is highly accessible, and she takes a clear point of view throughout.  Her prose is highly engaging and quite easygoing, despite the wealth of information which she denotes.  She is incredibly perceptive of womankind, viewing them as individuals rather than as a singular collective, and recognising that many women who were suffering silently during the period which she examines did so for myriad reasons.  The Problem That Has No Name is an empowering tome, and I will certainly be reading the rest of The Feminine Mystique at some point.  Despite the fact that it was published over five decades ago, Friedan's work is still highly relevant in the twenty-first century.

Anne

Rating: really liked it
I would recommend this (or preferably, the full Feminine Mystique) to anyone interested in how western feminism fared after the first wave's main objective (the vote) was reached. When Friedan wrote her text in the early sixties, women's general standard of living was in some important ways worse than the 1920s. This little book convincingly shows us that human rights' advancements are not linear, but rather that we have to stay vigilant when it comes to freedom.

EDIT

I'm listening to Rebecca Traister's Good and Mad and apparently Friedan was not very enlightened when it comes to... anyone who's not a white married middle-class housewife and mother, so it seems. Another nice thing about Traister's book is that it introduced me to Florence Kennedy, a very badass feminist.

Imogen Kathleen

Rating: really liked it
This was a long-overdue read, and has motivated me to finally pick up The Feminine Mystique.
I am enjoying the modern classics more than the little black classics so far.

melmarian

Rating: really liked it
"Feminism was not a dirty joke. The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a stage of evolution far short of their human capacity. 'The domestic function of woman does not exhaust her powers,' the Rev. Theodore Parker preached in Boston in 1853. 'To make one half the human race consume its energies in the functions of housekeeper, wife and mother is a monstrous waste of the most precious material God ever made.' "

Georgie Holmes

Rating: really liked it
“we can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home””

A very insightful read - I am so accustomed to the “third wave” feminism i’ve experienced my entire life that i take what i read in this book for granted everyday.

grace dodd

Rating: really liked it
I am not an American housewife or woman fighting for the right to vote; I am not a black woman who has watched her children sold into slavery or even a mother at all. Yet somehow I relate to the struggles Betty outlines through every one of these women, somehow I see parts of myself in every single one.

Vienna

Rating: really liked it
Two great essays that made me learn a lot about the history of feminism. This one everyone should read in my opinion. Highly recommend it!

Abantika(hiltonjenkin)

Rating: really liked it

This Penguin Modern Classic features two essays from the very popular book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, who is said to have set second wave of feminism in motion.

This book talks about THE American Dream, where women were pushed back to the kitchen in 1960s America. About how she was perceived as a mother and a wife but never as herself. How even, she failed to recognize herself as a separate and complete individual from husband and children.

How she was robbed off all her ambitions. How passion was a humiliating word to be associated with a woman. And how depression and frustration became a national phenomenon among the American housewives before it was widely acknowledged.

It's a very important piece to read. If you are trying to feminist literatures I'll suggest you go for these extracted texts. It builds up the hunger for the main fat book which or else may seem a bit intimidating.

Gabrielle Gonzales

Rating: really liked it
A great introduction to the history of the feminist movement. However it's just that: an introduction. I found myself struggling to find a clear line of argumentation and disappointed myself expecting solutions from Friedan, but I suppose I'll just need to get a hold of The Feminine Mystique for that.

Mae

Rating: really liked it
5/5 very good very informative

Rebecca

Rating: really liked it
Exploring and understanding the emptiness felt by housewives in America during the 1960s, this little book is a really interesting read, especially if, like me, you don’t know a great deal about the first two waves of feminism. 5 stars!

My full review: https://whatrebeccasread.wordpress.co...

Babs

Rating: really liked it
Two fantastic pieces of writing. The soul destroying life of an American housewife and the passionate journey of American women's fight for the vote.

Sad to say that even though these were published in 1963, one can still see that similar problems have evolved for our merry 21st century ☹️