By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 11/7/2009 8:27 PM
There's just one more episode in this season's Madmen on A and E. It's late November, 1963. President Kennedy has just been shot. Betty Draper is deeply estranged from her husband. Actually, for three years she has been wondering around in a vague state of ennui, perfect and beautiful but simultaneously dying to be heard but having simultaneously having nothing to say. 10 months before the President was shot, in late February 1963, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was published.
I am preoccupied with this: will Betty Draper pick up a copy of Betty Friedan's book, and if she does what will happen? I imagine she will see herself in Friedan's description of "the problem that has no name"—the housewife who feels empty and unfulfilled, dissatisfied with her (allegedly) prescribed lot of taking care of—and belonging to-- her husband and children. The scriptwriters could, in fact, have used Friedan's description as a basis for Betty's painfully wrought character.
Some critics of Friedan's work claim she overstated her case. That more women were involved in satisfying work than she suggests, and that fewer women were generally miserable. By the way, we psychoanalysts should remember that Freud and psychoanalysis were blamed for some of the malaise suffered by the Betty Draper's of 1963, and I think that taint on our profession has not yet been fully erased.
What's weird to me is I don't know what to make of all this. I can't identify with Betty Draper's feelings nor her life. A preteen when she lived and Kennedy was shot, I never was thwarted professionally. My mother and her friends, who pursued part time work as real estate agents, speech pathologists and the like ("after the kids were in school") seemed pretty content. How could a phenomenon so profound, so destructive, as pervasive meaninglessness in the lives of one half of the population, disappear from sight in a few short years? (and I do recognize we're talking about upper middle class suburban white women, primarily). I do know women, who were already starting their adult lives in 1963, who missed out. They clearly "should have been" a writer, or lawyer, or doctor. It's written all over them.
While pondering these questions, and not finding any terrific answers, I have heard recent news reports that finally, there is significant slowing of population growth globally, bringing us close to the replacement rate long viewed as an essential achievement if we are to fight hunger and climate change. The main reason is thought to be the development of opportunities for women, and a decrease in infant mortality rates.
Perhaps these changes are so profound and so slow that we can only see them in retrospect. Middle class young adult women today can't see themselves as having anything but choices. |