Page 56 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

50 CULTURAL STUDIES

conspiracy directed against women’. Similarly, having spelled out the insidious
uses to which pseudo-Freudian theories were put in 1950s America, Friedan
disavows the possibility that they amount to a conspiracy. ‘It would be
ridiculous,’ she admonishes the reader, ‘to suggest that the way the Freudian
theories were used to brainwash two generations of educated American women
was part of a psychoanalytical conspiracy’ (1992:109).
But why is Friedan so adamant in rejecting the notion of a conspiracy? Her
vehemence must be read in part as a rhetorical manœuvre to bring under control
the figurative language through which her argument has proceeded. In other
words, she must insist that it would be ‘ridiculous’ to believe in a conspiracy
theory, precisely because her text has already opened up that possibility. It must
also be noted that for left-liberal intellectuals in the post-McCarthy—but pre-
Kennedy assassination—context in which The Feminine Mystique was written,
conspiracy theories were still the mark of an unacceptable political demonology
(Hofstadter, 1967; Rogin, 1988). Perhaps also motivating Friedan’s explicit
rejection of conspiracy is an awareness that her analysis of the political
dimension of women’s personal experience was in danger of not being taken
seriously as a work of scholarship. Not only does Friedan excoriate the culture
industry, but she also seeks to avoid contamination by mass cultural forms and
figures in her own text. The book opens up the possibility of a conspiracy theory
of sexual politics, only for that conclusion to be denied. In summary, then, we
might say that The Feminine Mystique offers an account of what would come to
be known as patriarchy as if it were a conspiracy, without ever fully cashing out
the metaphor into literal fact.

The language of conspiracy
In the decades following The Feminine Mystique, however, the various
figurations of conspiracy in popular feminist writing increasingly became
statements of fact. In her survey of ‘proto-feminist’ fiction of the 1960s, Paulina
Palmer (1989) endeavours to account for the prevalence of conspiracy images in
the writing of that period. She does this by confirming—in a tone which
combines historical authority and confessional intimacy—the accuracy of those
figurations of ‘what many women feel living in a phallocratic culture’. ‘There
can be few women,’ she asserts, ‘who, at some time or other in their lives, have
not experienced the frightening sense of being trapped in a conspiracy of male
domination’ (Palmer, 1989:69). But, in a similar fashion to Friedan’s retractions,
having asserted that most women in early 1960s suburbia had the experience of
living in a conspiracy, Palmer goes on to acknowledge that ‘in material terms
this notion of a “conspiracy” may be a simplification and exaggeration’.
Potentially simple-minded and exaggerated, the notion of conspiracy in the early
1960s was perhaps, in Palmer’s words, no more than ‘a projection of imaginative
reality’, a metaphor which merely gestured towards women’s experience. Yet,
having set out such a characterization of the trope of conspiracy, she immediately