Granted, Friedan may have placed excessive faith in work, which is not always a privilege. Manning a supermarket checkout till can be every bit as monotonous and soul-destroying as scrubbing the kitchen floor. For many women today, a job is a joyless fiscal necessity. For a woman who does thankless cold-calling for telemarketers, baking her family a plum tart at the weekend may provide one of her few creative outlets.
Hence the recent emergence of women keen to restore the role of housewife and mother as a legitimate, defensible life choice. Fair enough, should her partner willingly assume the bread-winning burden, any contemporary woman can still embrace the feminine mystique. But in that case Friedan’s warnings are as germane today as they were 50 years ago: Go in with your eyes open.
Spoiled but mysteriously disconsolate, Betty Draper is exiled from the world that we career women now inhabit. With the division of labor in the household so stark, she has little real comprehension of what her husband gets up to on Madison Avenue. She loves her children, but she’s lonely, unfocused and tortured by existential confusion about what, exactly, all this ostensibly blissful domesticity is in the service of. So any woman seriously considering the new “freedom” to choose housewifery and motherhood as a substitute for a demanding career should watch every episode of Mad Men back to back, perusing the re-issue of The Feminine Mystique during the adverts.
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