Rereading Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan had a thing about floor care. Mopping the linoleum, scrubbing the bathroom tile, vacuuming a mere twice weekly -- this humdrum trope runs through "The Feminine Mystique" with the insistent drone of a "new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor." The relentless but unsatisfying demands of the crumb-free floor encapsulated Friedan's famous "problem that has no name," the unspoken sense of dissatisfaction churning in the kitchens of America and the minds of American women in the mid-20th century. As Friedan summed it up, "What kind of woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor?"

To which, on picking up "The Feminine Mystique" four decades later, my initial response was: You're supposed to wax the floor?

I write this not to belittle Friedan's metaphor but rather to revel in its obsolescence. For to reread the "The Feminine Mystique," as I did after Friedan's death last weekend, is to be reminded of the transformation of American women -- indeed, American society -- in the 43 years since the publication of her then-shocking manifesto. There have been remarkable advances, and not just in the technology of no-wax floors.

This change -- the long way that women have, in fact, come -- is easy to forget, in part because we are still picking our way unsteadily along the path that Friedan helped cut, still enmeshed in work-vs.-family debates that are at once stale and impassioned.

Women -- at least those with the luxury of choice -- agonize endlessly over part-time vs. full-time vs. staying at home; whatever option we select, we tend to second-guess the decision. We search for the elusive holy grail of work-life balance -- off-ramps and on-ramps and flextime and job-sharing. We alternate between acceptance and despair at the still-inequitable allocation of family tasks. We have a seat, more often, at the table, but are surprised, too often, to look up and find no other women there. We choose the mommy track but lament the glass ceiling.

All of which is to say: The role of women in the America of 2006 is complicated and messy and not apt to be resolved anytime soon, if at all. The more pertinent question, though, is: Compared to what? I can argue that the glass now is half-empty or half-full, and I've done both, depending mostly on how smoothly things are running in our chaotic, grimy-floored household. But reentering the world of "The Feminine Mystique" is an oddly comforting exercise in time travel.

In the long-gone world depicted by Friedan, the life of the American woman is a cruelly binary one: The women she describes feel forced to choose between work and home; their failure to be fully contented with the latter is taken as evidence of neurosis, or worse.

"Each suburban wife struggled with it alone," Friedan writes in her opening paragraph. "As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night -- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question -- 'Is this all?' " And there is no contrary role model. "I never knew a woman, when I was growing up," Friedan writes, "who used her mind, played her own part in the world, and also loved, and had children."

Friedan's diagnosis is characteristically, even offensively, overblown: She compares housewives resigned to their suburban imprisonment to inmates in "their comfortable concentration camps." The feminine mystique, she says, "has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive."

Yet her prescription for these women is remarkably un-strident, even balanced. "Marriage and motherhood are an essential part of life, but not the whole of it," she writes. Women "need to create a new life plan, fitting in the love and children and home that have defined femininity in the past with the work toward a greater purpose that shapes the future." Friedan understood, as many of her more radical successors did not, that work without family could feel as empty as the converse.

I remember, not so long after "The Feminine Mystique" was published -- and before, probably, I had even a bra to burn -- announcing definitively to my mother that I would not be having children. My intention, I'm sure, was mostly to shock her; I suspected even then that my preteen certitude might not last. But my declaration derived in part from the prevailing mind-set that family was merely an annoying impediment to anyone who wanted to do Serious Work.

Now that I am, thankfully, the mother I vowed I would never be, I watch my children -- two daughters -- and wonder how they will manage these tensions. And I find myself these days feeling oddly hopeful. At dinner the other day, my fifth-grader eagerly described the bottle rocket she was making in science class. As it happened, her group of three was all girls; one's mother a research scientist, the other's a partner in a major law firm. They had decorated their rocket, my daughter said, with neon pink duct tape and named it "Feminism."

Somehow, I think, Betty Friedan would have been pleased.

marcusr@washpost.com