Page 53 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

NAMING THE PROBLEM 47

Manchurian Candidate (1959/1962), which portrayed the assassination of a
presidential candidate by a brainwashed US Army officer.
In The Feminine Mystique the idea of brainwashing creates a picture of
women as innocent victims of a scientific process of mind-manipulation by
external forces. Friedan describes ‘American housewives around forty [who]
have the same dull lifeless look’ (1992:222); similarly, she writes about the
‘vacant sleepwalking quality in a thirteen year-old girl in a Westchester suburb’,
a zombified child who acted ‘like a puppet with someone else pulling the strings’
(1992:246). These descriptions were familiar from accounts of the brainwashed
soldiers in Korea. In the same way that accounts of brainwashing in Korea
played down un-American leanings, so too does Friedan’s book imply that any
undesirable beliefs which would seem contrary to the best interests of women (as
defined by Friedan) must have been planted into their brains by the feminine
mystique. Although Friedan seems to open up the possibility that women might
have complicitous and ‘politically incorrect’ desires, the notion of external
infiltration in fact serves only to confirm her faith in the fundamental innocence
and rationality of women. ‘It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the
suburban housewife,’ Friedan writes, ‘but the chains that bind her in her trap are
chains that are made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete
truths and unreal choices’ (1992:28). The feminine mystique, on this view, is
merely a set of false beliefs, which can easily be set straight once the relevant
facts are produced. Not only is lengthier education conducive to more and better
orgasms, Friedan claims, but it is the only thing that will really break these mind-
forged manacles. Although she may be infiltrated by bad ideas, for which the
media, the psychologists and the professors are to blame, the American
housewife is still fundamentally her own woman: such is the hidden persuasion
of The Feminine Mystique.
Yet at crucial moments in Friedan’s text this conspiracy scenario—which
relies on a clear separation of inside and outside, self and other, victim and
perpetrator—becomes compromised. If a woman is brainwashed into the false
ideals of the feminine mystique by external influence, Friedan suggests, then she
could also be conditioned into accepting a ‘new identity’. The concluding
chapter of The Feminine Mystique adopts the imagery of brain-washing in its
proposals for the creation of the New Woman: ‘drastic steps must now be taken
to re-educate the women who were deluded or cheated by the feminine
mystique’; there is also talk of ‘a concentrated six-week summer course, a sort of
intellectual “shock-therapy”’ (1992:323–4). If positive images of femininity as
much as negative ones are to be implanted from without, then there is precious
little left that could constitute an essential core of authentic personality. 2
In a similar fashion, Friedan acknowledges that ‘a mystique does not compel
its own acceptance’, suggesting that there must have been some form of
collaboration: