Page 52 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

46 CULTURAL STUDIES

As the search continues, so the little voice of doubt—presumably the one which
also speaks to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe—becomes more insistent as
the pieces of the puzzle fit together:

These were fine, intelligent American women, to be envied for their
homes, husbands, children, and for their personal gifts of mind and
spirit. Why were so many of them driven women? Later, when I saw this
same pattern repeated over and over again in similar suburbs, I knew it could
hardly be a coincidence.
(1992:207)
Friedan reads coincidences as signs of a conspiracy. She finds ‘many clues by
talking to suburban doctors, gynaecologists, obstetricians, childguidance
clinicians, pediatricians, high-school guidance counsellors, college professors,
marriage counsellors, psychiatrists, and ministers’ (1992:28). What the clues
reveal is a concerted effort by welfare, educational and media institutions to
manipulate women in the postwar period into returning to a life of domesticity,
despite the gains which Friedan attributes to the ‘first wave’ of late Victorian and
early twentieth-century feminism.
In trying to ‘fit together the puzzle of women’s retreat to home’ (1992:181),
Friedan develops the notion of the feminine mystique. It amounts to a
devastating ideology, part of a cunning and ruthlessly efficient programme to
persuade women to forgo self-fulfilment through careers in favour of home-
making and child-rearing. Friedan describes, for example, how ‘Freudian
theories were used to brainwash two generations of educated American women’
(1992:109). Even more disturbing, the ‘feminine mystique has brainwashed
American educators’ (1992:155), those very college professors who themselves
brainwashed their women students into expecting no more than a home and a
husband out of life.
In developing an account of a conspiracy to brainwash American women into
domesticity, Friedan draws on one of the key terms of cold war politics. The
word (which is a translation of a Chinese phrase) came into popular usage in the
USA in the wake of the scandal that only Americans among the Allied troops
captured in Korea had apparently succumbed to the enemy programme of
propaganda and indoctrination. Although a US Army report on the incident
concluded that it was mainly poor morale that accounted for the disproportionate
rate of collaboration in the American contingent, it was popularly believed that
brainwashing must be a deadly, efficient technique of psychological warfare
(Brown, 1963/1983; Bromley and Richardson, 1980). The term conferred a
scientific legitimacy on suspicions that no American soldier in his right mind
would wittingly choose the alien ideology of Communism; the only thing that
could account for the shocking sight of American servicemen cooperating with
the enemy was the belief that their minds had been taken over by force. The
concept of brain-washing became popularized in novels and films such as The