Did The Feminine Mystique cause second-wave feminism?

The short answer

• The vote without equality. The Nineteenth Amendment secured women’s vote in 1920, but the expectation that political power would bring legal equality was left unfulfilled. Older rules survived: in some states married women needed a court’s or a husband’s permission to run a business or manage property, jury rules excluded women, and pay scales openly assigned them lower rates. These everyday restrictions supplied grievances for a movement that would look beyond the ballot.
• A contradiction inside the suburban ideal. Offices, shops and services were expanding and needed women’s labor. By 1960 about a third of married women had paid jobs, usually low-paid work segregated by sex. Yet magazines, advertising and television celebrated the full-time homemaker and presented domesticity as women’s natural destiny. Women who encountered both expectations could see the distance between the ideal and the conditions in which they worked.
• Education without outlets. College offered more women an education, but graduates were widely expected to marry, leave work and devote themselves to family. Friedan’s Smith classmates had studied economics, literature and science; many were now running suburban households. Their education shaped their expectations and gave them skills and social confidence to recognize discrimination, write, organize and lobby. The movement’s first leaders came disproportionately from this group.
• Ideas that crossed the Atlantic. Why might inequality survive the vote? Beauvoir’s account of women as “the Other”, defined in relation to men, suggested an answer in institutions and upbringing. The Vatican condemned her book, but an abridged English translation reached American and British readers from 1953. Her argument gave feminists a way to understand inequality as socially constructed and therefore open to political change.

What it changed

A language for consciousness-raising. Women in the small “consciousness-raising” groups of the late 1960s compared experiences and found political roots in personal problems. Friedan’s account had helped make that connection available: “the problem that has no name” entered the language, and housework, marriage and ambition became subjects for public discussion.

A network ready to act. State commissions had brought together hundreds of experienced women from law, unions, universities and government. At their Washington meeting in June 1966, they could not pass a resolution urging enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the new law against sex discrimination at work. Some participants founded the National Organization for Women on the spot. The connections made through the commissions now supported an independent organization.

Equal pay in law, unequal pay in fact. The Equal Pay Act addressed unequal pay for the same job, while leaving the division of jobs by sex untouched. Most jobs in 1963 were segregated in that way, and women’s earnings stayed at about 60 percent of men’s for the next fifteen years. Activists pursued strikes and lawsuits and pressed for enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned sex discrimination in hiring and promotion.

A movement defined by one group of women. The early texts centered educated, married, middle-class women, and their concerns with careers, professional schools and escape from home shaped the agenda. Women who had always worked, or who faced racism, poverty or forced sterilization, could find their own problems missing. Their differing experiences would become a deep argument within the movement over whom its demands should serve.