Page 54 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

48 CULTURAL STUDIES

For the feminine mystique to have ‘brainwashed’ American women of
nonsexual human purposes for more than fifteen years, it must have filled
real needs in those who seized on it for others and those who accepted it
for themselves…. There were many needs, at this particular time in
America, which made us pushovers for the mystique: needs so compelling
that we suspended critical thought.
(1992:160)

The scare quotes around ‘brainwashed’ signal an awareness that the idea of mind-
manipulation is, after all, only a metaphor. The rigid conspiratorial division into
Them and Us cannot be maintained, and Friedan must instead look to an account
of the hegemonic orchestration of women’s needs and desires. But these needs
are ‘so compelling’ that ‘critical thought’ is suspended, making the acceptance of
the feminine mystique a seduction scene in which a woman’s desires are so intense
that she is no longer able to think straight: she becomes a ‘pushover’, an easy
conquest. In this way Friedan’s rhetoric works repeatedly contain the dangerous
possibility that women may be cooperating with the enemy, by the implicit
reassertion of a picture of women as victims of a male conspiracy.
Though at times in danger of undermining itself, Friedan’s appropriation of
the cold war language of a brainwashing conspiracy does succeed in producing a
transcoding metaphor which conjoins the ‘personal’ aspect of women’s lives to
the ‘political’ realm of national issues. This strain of imagery produces an
account of sexual politics which reinterprets all aspects of personal experience into
a coherent causal story of patriarchal institutions conspiring to keep women
trapped in domesticity. In many ways, then, Friedan’s appropriation of cold war
scenarios formed a break-through for feminism in its recognition of the political
dimension of personal experience.
What makes her use of these culturally available narratives even more
problematic, however, is that at the same time that The Feminine Mystique
borrows from a Hollywood version of cold war politics, it also develops an
attack on the culture industry. Nowhere does Friedan revel more in the narrative
technologies of the thriller than in the chapter in which she gains access to the
secret files of an advertising agency boss. Friedan states clearly whom she holds
responsible for the brainwashing of women. Contrary to what we might expect
(given the vehemence of her attack on Freud), ‘the practice of psychoanalysis…
was not primarily responsible for the feminine mystique’. ‘It was’, she declares,
‘the creation of writers and editors in the mass media, ad-agency motivation
researchers, and behind them the popularizers and translators of Freudian
thought’ (1992:111).
In seeking to lay the blame for social ills on a deliberate conspiracy by the
practitioners and managers of the culture industry, Friedan participates in the line
of analysis developed by the Frankfurt School and anti-Stalinist intellectuals
such as Dwight MacDonald. More specifically, Friedan draws on Vance
Packard’s Hidden Persuaders. Like Packard, she is horrified at the potential power