Analyzing Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique'

For years the philosophical debate has raged on. Emotions or intellect? Romanticism, a philosophy with an emphasis on emotion, instinct, and idealism, holds the idea that the world and everything in it is more than the sum of its parts, and holds that there are some things that are not fully discoverable or observable. On the other side we are faced with the philosophy of the enlightenment. Enlightened thinking holds that anything that exist can be discovered through logic, reason, and observable evidence. If something cannot be indicated by empirical evidence then it must be assumed to not exist and that tradition is only useful if it serves a purpose of some sort. In The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan urges readers to abandon a romantic approach and the idea of some ethereal “feminine mystique” for an enlightened one. Contrasting, in Varieties of Religious Revival Reinhold Niebuhr attributes the rise in religious interest to a failing of enlightened thinking and a necessary move to a more romantic, religious way of thinking.

Friedan and Niebuhr describe
Niebuhr sees it as an obstacle while Friedan sees it as the only way to truly gain freedom. Friedan says “She [women] must learn to compete then, not as a woman, but as a human being. Not until a great many women move out of the fringes into the mainstream will society itself provide the arrangement for their new life plan.” (297) This rejection of tradition, upholding of individualism, and rejection of an idealistic “mystique” perfectly encapsulates many of the values of the enlightenment and is what Friedan upholds as the only way for women to be free. (296) “The secular alternatives … have been refuted by history… They answered the [meaning of existence] question in terms of simple rational intelligibility.” (299) Niebuhr describes both enlightenment, and the fact that it has failed to adequately answer the big questions in