“«But this was not Nazi Germany. This was America».

Revisiting the Concentration Camp Analogy in Betty

Friedan’s Feminine Mystique,” in: The American Uses of History. Essays

on Public Memory, edited by Tomasz Basiuk, Sylwia Kuźma-

Markowska, Krystyna Mazur, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang,

2011, pp. 267–280.

Agnieszka Graff

“But this was not Nazi Germany. This was America.”

Revisiting the Concentration Camp Analogy in Betty

Friedan’s Feminine Mystique

In the twelfth chapter of The Feminine Mystique (1963)

Betty Friedan describes the American suburban home as “a

comfortable concentration camp” (305-309). Given the

semi-sacred status of the Holocaust in contemporary

public discourse, it is hardly surprising that Friedan

was harshly critiqued, even castigated, for the passage.

One might argue, perhaps, that the status of this

shocking analogy in the text is marginal – a mere four

pages out of almost four hundred – but the figure lingers

uncomfortably in the memory of anyone who has actually

read the classic text of second wave feminism as a whole.

It seems to be part of the book’s design, rather than a

mere excess. Marginal or not, however, the comparison

remains a rhetorical scandal, tactfully avoided by some,

carefully examined by others. According to one historian,

the analogy “exaggerated what the suburban women faced

and belittled the fate of the victims of Nazis,” and

ought to be read as Friedan’s effort to build “a race-

neutral picture, in the process both trivializing and

universalizing the experience of Jews” (Horowitz 205).

Friedan herself was eager to dismiss it as a mistake, a

regrettable error of judgment. In her autobiography Life So

Far (2000), Friedan claims she is now “ashamed of it,” and

explains she got “carried away” due to reading Bruno

Bettelheim’s work on the psychodynamics of concentration

camps (Life 132).

My aim in this paper is neither to join the chorus

of detractors, nor to provide excuses. Instead, I revisit

the analogy as an important feminist use (or rather

abuse) of recent history – one that tells us something

important about political and intellectual history. I

examine the analogy’s content and consider its

positioning and function in the rhetorical composition of

The Mystique as a text. Next, I take a brief look at

Friedan’s most obvious alternative: the race-gender

analogy, which was enormously popular among her

contemporaries. I suggest some reasons for her choosing

World War II over racial segregation as the political

evil to which gender inequality ought to be compared. The

third and final part of this paper explores ideological

dimensions of the concentration camp analogy as it

functioned in the late 50s and early 60s – namely, its

claims to universalism and humanism. I draw on Kirsten

Fermaglich’s study of the changing status of the

Holocaust in American Jewish thought, and particularly

its universalizing potential in the Cold War era, but my

focus is on the significant absences of Friedan’s

argument, the evasions achieved by means of the analogy.

My claim is that the extended reference to concentration

camps allowed Friedan not only to say certain things, but

also to leave out, mask, or obfuscate certain questions.

One significant evasion is Friedan’s past commitment to

the radical old left; her Jewish background is another.

My reading of The Mystique is indebted to Eric Foner’s

and Sacvan Bercovitch’s insight that the rebels who have

tended to matter most in U.S. history were those who

managed to locate their message in traditional American

rhetoric, harnessing such categories as “freedom” and

“democracy,” and employing such rhetorical forms as the

conversion narrative and the jeremiad. In Friedan’s case,

the rhetoric thus harnessed centers around the concepts

of “selfhood,” “maturity” and “identity.” My argument

hinges on the claim that the book closely follows the

structure of a jeremiad as defined by Bercovitch, and

that concentration camps are a secular version of

damnation. What is at stake in these rhetorical

maneuverings is Friedan’s status as an exemplary

American, and consequently the framing of feminism as an

inherent part of American culture.

One of the most tired questions of Friedan

scholarship concerns her purported radicalism (usually

pointed out by conservative detractors) or lack thereof

(bemoaned by fellow feminists, who view her as hopelessly

middle-class and willfully naïve about economic and

racial realities). My own position on this issue is close

to that of feminist essayist Katha Pollitt, who argues

that it is precisely its seeming lack of radicalism, the

sweet voice of the suburban “every woman” awakened to the

emptiness of her own life that makes Friedan’s work

radical in its cultural impact:

The far-right magazine Human Events knew what it was

doing when it put The Feminine Mystique on its list of

the Ten Most Harmful Books of the Nineteenth and

Twentieth Centuries. It might not have been as

profound as The Second Sex or as radical as the stream

of articles and pamphlets that a few years later

would pour from the mimeograph machines of the

women's liberation movement. But for millions of

American women it was as profound and as radical as

it needed to be. (Pollitt)

Friedan’s message was both simple and shocking. Her book

announced that the model of middle class femininity taken

for granted in the 50s and early 60s was actually a

mistake of astounding proportions, a source of misery for

millions of women and a dire threat to America’s future

as a nation. For a 1963 mainstream American audience this

was, indeed, “as radical as it needed to be.” Yet, as

Pollitt notes, Friedan’s is not the language of women’s

liberation. Writing her book five years before “women’s

lib” hit the cultural stage, Friedan was not out to

“liberate” anyone. I would argue that the more

appropriate term might be “to convert,” because her

political and rhetorical choices are best considered in

the context of the secular religion of the period:

existentialism and humanism, with echoes of the older

tradition of American expressive idealism. The

concentration camp analogy – bizarre and morally

objectionable as it may seem to us today – is part and

parcel of these rhetorical and intellectual currents.

Although her aim of comparing suburbia to Hitler’s

crimes against humanity is announced in the title of the

chapter – “Progressive Dehumanization: the Comfortable

Concentration Camp” – Friedan eases her reader into the

comparison gradually. In fact, the entire chapter is

designed to prepare us for this ending: it is carefully

structured to create a mounting sense of danger, and to

link this danger with the figure of the desperate

housewife. The nightmarish, gothic quality of the chapter

is gradually intensified, as Friedan enumerates victims

of the “mystique,” people she has met personally, or

heard about from various experts in education or mental

health. The litany of horrors begins with distraught

teenagers who have no real interests, refuse to study,

and are engaged in “killing time” (Friedan, Mystique 283-

4); next, Friedan moves on to describe kids who take

drugs and demolish cemeteries “for kicks” (285). After

the degenerate teens come American GI’s who were

prisoners of war in Korea in the 1950s and were said to

have “almost universally lacked the old Yankee

resourcefulness” (286). The passive and overly “feminine”

collective personality of the young generation of

Americans is accounted for by symbiosis with middle class

mothers – the suburban housewives who have fallen victim

to the mystique. In drawing the disturbing image of women

who, deprived of selfhood, devour their children

psychologically, Friedan is – interestingly enough – more

worried about the boys than about the girls (290).

This last observation ought to give us pause; The

Mystique is a feminist text concerned not so much about

women as about the effects of femininity, defined as a form

of cultural manipulation, even brainwashing. As Rachel

Bowlby notes, the book develops “a full scale narrative

of imminent cultural decline precipitated by the menace

of the marauding ‘mystique’. . . a generalized

domestication of all American people, men and women”

(82). Domesticity is presented as an all-consuming

cultural and spiritual malady that can be traced back to

women (primarily, to overprotective mothers) but is

damaging to all. It is worth noting here the idea of

“feminization of culture” has a long and complex history

in American intellectual life. The threat is famously

decried by Basil Ransom, a conservative Southerner in

Henry James’s satirical novel about suffragettes, The

Bostonians (1886). The speech is so strikingly similar to

certain passages of the Mystique that it seems worth

quoting at some length:

The whole generation is womanized; the masculine

tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a

nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age

of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated

solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we

don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of the

feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that

has ever been. The masculine character, the ability

to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear

reality, to look the world in the face and take it

for what it is – a very queer and partly very base

mixture – that is what I want to preserve, or

rather, as I may say, to recover… (260)

Basil Ransom views “feminization” as a threat to men from

women (particularly, emancipated women, who remain

“nervous, hysterical, chattering” despite their

emancipated status), while Friedan views it as, above

all, a threat to women, which then spreads to everyone

else by contagion. These are of course significant

differences, but the idea that “masculine character”

ought to be preserved, and that domesticity is destroying

American culture is common to both texts. The concept

will be developed into a full-fledged feminist analysis

by Ann Douglas in her controversial book about The

Feminization of American Culture (1977).

Let us return to chapter twelve with its relentless

escalation of horrors. Having dealt with effeminate

youths of both sexes, it launches into a nightmarish

enumeration of mysterious ailments afflicting

domesticated women: “bleeding blisters, malaise,

nervousness, . . . heart attacks, bleeding ulcers,

hypertension, bronchopneumonia. . . psychotic breakdown”

(293). The anxious, diseased, passive and infantile women

locked up in the padded cages of their homes are unable

to raise their kids. To prove this point, Friedan

provides us again with images of distraught children,

among them a sleepwalking girl of thirteen (300). These

horrors are followed by middle-aged housewives who break

down completely and have to be hospitalized (301).

Finally, we are asked to contemplate two rather bizarre

bits of perversion: the “Battered Child Syndrome”

(desperate women, it turns out, regularly beat their

children) (302-303), and news about the alarming

popularity of books about “‘love’ affairs between human

beings and animals” (excessive fondness for other

species, says Friedan, is a clear sign of dehumanization)

(303). “Where will it end?” – asks the author

dramatically (304). As we know already, within the

structure of her own thinking it all ends with the

comfortable concentration camp analogy – the book’s final

descent into hell.

In the passage immediately preceding our entry into

the camps, Friedan’s usually positive voice multiplies

images of negativity, seemingly gropes for an adequate

reference point, and finally stumbles upon it as if by

accident. Here is how the figure of the concentration

camps appears in The Feminine Mystique:

It is urgent to understand how the very condition of

being a housewife can create a sense of emptiness,

non-existence, nothingness. There are aspects of the

housewife role that make it almost impossible for a

woman of adult intelligence to retain a sense of

human identity, the firm core of self or “I” without

which a human being, man or woman, is not fully

alive. For women of ability, in America today, I am

convinced that there is something about the

housewife state itself that is dangerous. In a sense

that is not as far fetched as it sounds, the women

who “adjust” as housewives, who grow up wanting to

be “just a housewife,” are in as much danger as the

millions of who walked to their death in the

concentration camp – and the millions more who

refused to believe that the concentration camps

existed. (305)

Following Bruno Bettelheim’s essay “The Informed Heart” –

a text notorious for its oversimplified view of camp life

and, significantly, her only source on the subject –

Friedan goes on to describe how the camps devastated

their victims psychologically, so that they “adopted

childlike behavior, [gave up] their individuality, and

merge[d] themselves to an amorphous mass” (306) so that

“finally “not the SS but the prisoners themselves became

their own worst enemy” (307). Deprived of a sense of self

and a sense of a future, she writes, prisoners accepted

the camp as their only reality and turned their rage

against themselves, thus finally accepting their own

extermination. Friedan stops short of the hair-raising

claim that the passive victims committed mass suicide

(notably, Bettelheim did cross this now unthinkable

line). Nonetheless, by psychologizing their predicament,

she comes disturbingly close to such a conclusion. In

fact, it is precisely the focus on psychology (rather

than politics) that allows Friedan to draw the improbable

parallel between the camp and the suburban home. Equally

problematic is her comparison between those who survived

the camps and women who rebel against the “mystique”:

American women are not, of course, being readied for

mass extermination, but they are suffering a slow

death of mind and spirit. Just as the prisoners in

the concentration camps, there are American women

who have resisted that death, who have managed to

retain a core of self, who have not lost touch with

the outside world, who use their abilities to some

creative purpose… (307-308)

Paradoxically, the idea that the nature of living in

the camp manipulated victims into passivity and

complicity with the Nazis, making them see “the SS and

the fences as even more impregnable than they were,” is

what breathes hope into the text. If the imprisonment and

destruction were of a psychological nature, then

liberation could also come from the inside, an act of

individual will. Friedan concludes by citing Bettelheim’s

anecdote about a group of naked prisoners, utterly

dehumanized, on their way to a gas chamber. In this

story, a Nazi officer orders a member of this group – a

woman – to dance. As she begins to do so, she snaps out

of the camp-induced daze, seizes his gun and shoots her

tormentor. She is, of course, immediately killed herself,

but Bettelheim (and Friedan with him) views this as an

act of regaining selfhood: “this dancer threw off her

real prison” (309).

The morality tale about a “way out of the camp” is

chilling in more than one way: because of the ease with

which it idealizes exit into death, thus trivializing

Shoah; because it singles out a rebel, building an aura

of repulsion around the passive others (those who do not

dance and do not awaken); and finally, because of the

story’s focus on nudity and the unexamined gender

dimension of the events recounted. What is truly

shocking, however, is the tale’s positioning at the end

of the chapter, the ease with which Friedan first uses

the dancer as example of heroism, dignity and human

agency, and then abandons her naked, dead body to

conclude her chapter in the matter-of-fact cheerful tone

of a self-help manual: “The suburban house is not a

German concentration camp, nor are American housewives on

their way to the gas chamber. But they are in a

trap. . .They must refuse to be nameless, depersonalized

manipulated. . .They must begin to grow” (309). The

moment is one of released tension: having explored the

ultimate evil, are we allowed to breathe more easily. The

exhortation “[t]hey must begin to grow” is followed in

the two final chapters by advice on how “growth” might be

achieved.

It seems almost a truism that The Feminine Mystique is a

jeremiad – so often is it casually referred to as one. It

is useful, however, to move beyond the colloquial sense

of the term, and apply the precise meaning proposed by

Sacvan Bercovitch in his classic study The American Jeremiad.

As he defines it, the jeremiad is a characteristically

American type of critical political rhetoric. It draws

heavily on the tradition of Puritan sermons focused on

the concept of errand into the wilderness, but it is

comfortable within a secular framework. In fact, claims

Bercovitch “’The process of Americanization’ began not

with the decline of Puritanism, but with the Great

Migration, and . . . the jeremiad, accordingly, played a

significant role in what was to become modern American

middle class culture” (American Jeremiad 18). The jeremiad is

not so much about God, as it is about faith and movement.

What counts is the structure of lament about lapse from

faith followed by calls for repentance, and the sustained

climate of anxiety. This structure involves three key

elements: it sets up a standard for individual and public

life; it shows the extent to which people have departed

from the standard; and it projects a path of return to

the ideal. According to Bercovitch, two features of the

American jeremiad distinguish it from its European

equivalent. The first is its heightened sense that change

is, in fact, possible. The second is what we may call

high drama: the American jeremiad characteristically

maintains a high level of tension between promise and

fear, between the reality and the ideal. This tension is

an end in itself, as it produces energy for change,

allows for the dynamism of the errand: “[The rhetoric]

posits a movement from promise to experience – from the

ideal of community to the shortcomings of community life

– and thence forward, with prophetic assurance, toward

the resolution that incorporates (as it transforms) both

the promise and the condemnation” (16).

Clearly, the intensity of the hope generated by a

jeremiad depends on the amount of fear it projects – the

more terrifying the image of hell, the greater the desire

to repent, and the greater the shock of conversion. To

return to The Feminine Mystique, I suggest that we read the

concentration camp analogy as the book’s descent into

hell, and the chapter’s final sentence (“They must begin

to grow”) as a moment of release, the light in the

tunnel, typically provided in a jeremiad right after the

depths of damnation have been made evident. At this

point, the book slips into another familiar American

genre – a self-help book, advising women on how to

embrace a “new life plan,” “commit themselves to the

future,” “fulfill their own unique possibilities as human

beings” (337), and “become complete” (378). Change is not

just possible, it is well within reach.

The above interpretation positions Friedan’s book as

a secular sermon to and about women, with Friedan

preaching the gospel of American values. The Feminine

Mystique claims that women have been manipulated into

abandoning the American creed of individualism, offers a

chilling vision of descent into the most un-American hell

imaginable, and follows this with a plan for last minute

conversion: women must embrace individualism and join the

mainstream of American life.

Although the concentration camp analogy makes sense

within this framework – a jeremiad requires a potent

image of hell – it is, admittedly, something of an

anomaly if considered within a broader context of second

wave feminist rhetoric. The central position is firmly

occupied by another conceptual mapping, that between the

position of women and Jim Crow segregation. When reading

anthologies of feminist essays such as Sisterhood is Powerful

(1970), Women’s Liberation. Blueprint for the Future (1970) or Voices

from Women’s Liberation (1971) one is struck by the ubiquity

of the race-gender analogy: exploited by radicals and

liberals alike, it figures in arguments concerning

politics, law, economics, psychology and history; roles

and images; oppression and adjustment to oppression.

Through the race-gender analogy, 60s feminists

capitalized on the gains of the Civil Rights movement:

like blacks, went the argument, women were a “minority

group” with a history of resistance – discriminated

against in the workplace, under-represented in decision-

making, prone to internalize negative views of

themselves. Sexism was compared to racism and defined as

segregation: systemic inequality legitimized through the

idea of separation of differences. The analogy had a

profound impact on feminist interventions into language:

“sexism” was self-consciously modeled on “racism,” while

“male chauvinism” and “male-supremacy” were borrowings

from anti-racist rhetoric and meant to be recognized as

such.

Although it was eventually critiqued by black

feminists as an appropriation, a trivialization of race,

and a tell-tale sign of the second-waves privileging of

whiteness (see e.g. hooks 141-143), throughout the late

sixties and early seventies the comparison with race was

what endowed feminist talk about gender inequality with

and aura of political relevance and legitimacy. The

analogy was ubiquitous in the discourse of Women’s

Liberation. Naomi Weisstein’s essay “Woman as Nigger” in

Voices from Women’s Liberation is exceptional only in calling

attention to the forbidden word in its title. Kate

Millett’s Sexual Politics not only uses the analogy but also

lists seven references to “racism – analogy to women’s

status” in its index (389).

Admittedly, The Mystique was written before the texts

mentioned above, but second wave feminists were hardly

the inventors of the race-gender analogy; it had been

used with flair a century earlier by feminist

abolitionists such as the Grimke Sisters, Elizabeth Cady

Stanton or Margaret Fuller, who all compared “woman” to

“slave” in a variety of contexts. Friedan was not only

familiar but also fascinated with these sources; chapter

four of her book is, after all, devoted to early

feminism. Moreover, had the race-gender analogy seemed

appealing, there were some respectable European sources

to turn to: Gunnar Myrdal and Simone de Beauvoir, both

familiar to Friedan. The former had developed the analogy

between the paternalism implicit in both racism and

sexist prejudice in An American Dilemma; the latter used it

extensively in the Introduction to The Second Sex. De

Beauvoir notes that “equality in difference” as applied

to women “is precisely like the ‘equal but separate’

formula of the Jim Crow laws aimed at the North American

Negroes”. She then goes on to argue that “The eternal

feminine” corresponds to “the black soul” and to “the

Jewish character” (xxix). Interestingly enough, this

second analogy – between woman and the Jew – is briefly

considered, and then rejected as imprecise, because the

Jew, reasons de Beauvoir, differs from woman in that he

is a pariah, “not so much an inferior as he is an enemy

for whom there is to be granted no place on earth…”

(xxix). Given the tendency to infantilize women, de

Beauvoir concludes, the nature of sexist prejudice is

akin to racist paternalism, not to anti-Semitism – an

ideology of pure hatred, which demonizes its Other. Thus,

with extermination looming in the background, de Beauvoir

stops short of comparing women’s plight to that of Jews.

Betty Friedan, as we know, will pursue this path with no

hesitation.

Why then, despite having read de Beauvoir, as well

as the endless comparisons between women and blacks made

by earlier generations of American feminists does Friedan

turn to Nazi Germany and the camps instead? The answer is

that to someone of her generation and background the

concentration camp analogy was more readily available

than the race-gender comparison, as well as more

promising in terms of rhetorical effectiveness. This

conclusion can be drawn from a study by historian Kirsten

Fermaglich, who examined the place of our analogy in

Jewish intellectual history. Fermaglich locates both its

uses and its initially accepting reception in the context

of U.S. discourse on the Holocaust in the 50s and 60s. In

her view, Friedan did nothing surprising when she used

the camp analogy, she merely joined a cohort of liberal

Jewish intellectuals (all men) who had been using it to

criticize American society. Friedan belongs to a distinct

period of Holocaust consciousness when Jewish

intellectuals who had come of age during World War II

referred to concentration camp “as metaphors for

individual destruction in a mass society” (Fermaglich

219), while blurring the difference between concentration

camp and death camps, and evading both the Jewish

identity of the victims of Shoah and their own Jewish

background. Others in this group include historian

Stanley Elkins, who in 1959 famously compared American

slavery to Nazi concentration camp, Robert Jay Lifton,

who drew a parallel between the plight of survivors of

Hiroshima with those of concentration camp in 1967, and

Stanley Milgram, whose 1961 obedience experiment involved

comparisons between ordinary Americans and concentration

camp guards (Fermaglich 219). Significantly, the

rhetorical pattern of universalizing usage of the

extermination of Jews emerged before the term

‘Holocaust,’ spelled with the upper case, was introduced

to American audiences along with the view that Shoah was

an unprecedented event as well as one that could not be

compared to any other form of suffering without a breach

of decorum. The shift which brought the sense of

sacredness around Shoah into American consciousness

occurred as late as 1967, and is linked by historians to

American reactions to the Six Day War (see: Fermaglich

206 and elsewhere).

Friedan’s evasion of Jewishness in her references to

the concentration camps and Nazi Germany is both

significant and characteristically American. When used by

de Beauvoir, references to Nazism are quite clearly

linked to anti-Semitism; her choice of the Other to whom

women may be compared is one between Blacks and Jews. For

Friedan, on the other hand, the camp comparison is not

ethnic or racial, but universal, and her focus is not on

the humanity of these groups but on their status as

scapegoats. In The Feminine Mystique, Jews are not part of

the picture, and Friedan never mentions them. This

omission is no accident. An early draft of the book

includes a direct comparison between mothers in America

and Jews in Germany as society’s scapegoats, and this

passage was carefully edited out of the final version

(Fermaglich 217). In striking contrast to Sylvia Plath –

a non-Jew who ostentatiously encourages the reader of

“Daddy” (1963) to imagine her as Jewish – Friedan,

discourages all such associations, leaving Jewishness out

of the text, as well as out of the biographical note and

the Preface (Fermaglich 220).

The analogy partakes in the discourse of liberal

humanism of its era, a discourse whose rise to legitimacy

coincides with the assimilation of Jewish intellectuals.

Both developments can, as is well known, be attributed to

the cultural impact of World War II. Elkins, Milgram and

others of their generation (e.g. Norman Mailer) were

among the first American Jews whose Jewishness could be

safely evaded: they were Americans addressing their

fellow American. Jews have become human victims and human

survivors of an inhuman regime. As such, they can wage

some of the harshest, most scathing criticisms of

American culture.

Though its victims were humanized out of ethnicity,

Nazism is clearly marked in the Mystique as German. First

introduced as America’s other in the opening chapter of

the book, Germany reappears in the text regularly. Let us

take a brief look at the initial appearance, which at

first glance may seem casual, even accidental. Friedan

is reminded of Germany when she recalls the endless

complaints of suburban housewives striving to put their

dissatisfaction into words, and the grumbling of editors

of women’s magazines, who complained that they could not

run stories on topics such as desegregation, because “you

just can’t link it to woman’s world”.

As I listened to them – writes Friedan – a German

phrase echoed in my mind – “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche,”

the slogan by which Nazis decreed that women must

once again be confined to their biological role. But

this was not Nazi Germany. This was America. The

whole world lies open to American women. Why then

does the image deny the world? (37)

This passage is a vivid foreshadowing of chapter

twelve. Without mentioning concentration camps, it links

Nazi Germany to confinement and dehumanization, bringing

women into the picture. Its powerful opposition between

Germany and America suggests that the concentration camp

analogy must be placed within the context of Friedan’s

rhetoric of commitment to American values and her

critique of American reality. Friedan’s version of

history pits American freedom against German

restrictiveness, censorship, mass murder, as well as the

desire to confine women to their biological role.

Let us briefly re-examine the pattern of references

to ethnicity in the book: the Jews are humanized (and

Americanized) out of ethnic identity; Germans are present

as the embodiment of the un-American; blacks and the race

problem are mentioned only in passing and never directly

(57, 87, 239). I would suggest that another group is

conspicuously absent, namely Russians – America’s other

at the time the book was being written. Clearly, however,

their presence in the text would have complicated the

picture and hurt Friedan’s rhetorical design because of

communist Russia’s rhetoric of gender equality and its

role in the cultural scenario of the Cold War. As a

feminist aspiring to make gender equality seem like an

essential part of American values, Friedan needed enemies

of America who were also enemies of gender equality.

Germans were perfect for the role.

This brings us to the central evasion of Friedan’s

book – her own radical past. As documented in Daniel

Horowitz’s study Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine

Mystique, the founder of NOW was hardly a passive housewife

suddenly shaken into feminist awareness in the 50s.

Though never a member of the Communist Party, Friedan was

politically engaged in the old left as far back as 1943.

For three years she worked at the Federated Press in New

York, and then, for six years, she wrote regularly for

the left wing union paper UE News (official publication of

the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of

America). None of this figures prominently in her memoir.

Life So Far does not deny her early radical commitments, but

the author dismisses them as youthful fascinations,

unrelated to her later feminist awakening, which she

views in purely personal, experiential terms. Horowitz is

never mentioned by name, but he does appear on the pages

of the memoir as ”a deconstructing male historian [who]

would try to dismiss my credibility in writing The Feminine

Mystique by claiming it was all a communist plot starting

with my Smith Student days and my labor immersion, and

insisting that I never was really a suburban housewife.

But that isn’t true” (Friedan, Life 111). If Friedan of

2000 felt her early communist sympathies needed to be

dismissed in such a way, we can only guess how defensive

she was about the topic while composing the Mystique.

Clearly, Betty Friedan the Jewish radical could not have

authored the 1963 bestseller produced by Betty Friedan

the American housewife.

Presenting herself as a political innocent who

speaks exclusively from ”experience” was strategic and,

as we know, the strategy worked rather well. In my view,

however, more is at stake here than an effort to protect

herself against red-baiting, and defend her work from the

label of radicalism and inevitable marginalization. The

evasions of The Feminine Mystique were part of Friedan’s

strategy of mainstreaming feminism by undermining Cold

War rhetoric of patriotic domesticity, but without taking

on the Cold War itself. As the famous “Kitchen Debates”

of 1959 make evident, the book was written in an era when

mainstream U.S. culture equated patriotism with

consumerism, women’s domestic role, and traditional

family values. According to Fermaglich, Friedan’s

position fits the mold of post-war liberalism, a quiet

dissent from the Cold War consensus (222).

Paradoxically, then, the thrust of the book’s most

shocking analogy is not radical but strategically

conservative – an affirmation of “American values” at a

time when the term “un-American” had very clear

associations – with communism. By claiming that the

housewife is very much like a prisoner of a Nazi camp,

Friedan puts recent traumatic history to work for women’s

autonomy, while evading both her own leftist past and the

more obvious and directly relevant historical context

that of 1950s and early sixties. The blatantly un-

American sound of “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche” is just what is

needed to achieve the effect. If the Cold War consensus

says that domesticity is a way of battling the Soviet

Union, Friedan trumps this idea by introducing Nazi

Germany into the equation, as a promoter of women’s

domesticity and destroyer of humanity.

Although Friedan’s concentration camp analogy is

clearly a rhetorical scandal from today’s perspective, in

1963 it was a device rooted in the period’s rhetorical

conventions. The passage has great structural

significance to the entire text and its purpose, as

analyzed above, is threefold. First, as part of the

book’s jeremiad design, the analogy is meant to shock

readers into a sense of urgency – the struggle against

the mystique takes on heroic, life-or-death proportions.

The danger is apocalyptic, a national disaster: through

its commitment to the stifling ideology of domesticity,

America has departed from its promise so far as to

resemble Nazi Germany. America – not just its women, but

also its men and its children – is on its way to hell.

Second, viewed through the Cold War context, the analogy

helps reframe the relation between gender and national

pride, reclaiming “American values” from the

conservatives. In a cultural context that elevated the

American housewife to the position of a national icon,

Friedan manages to argue that the feminine role is not

only UN-American, but ANTI-American. The domestic

ideology is shown as foreign to American values,

literally so – a German import. At the same time, the

liberal anti-fascism at the core of the analogy protects

Friedan herself against accusations of left-wing

radicalism. The third function has to do with ethnicity

and is somewhat paradoxical: through ritual evasion of

the Jewish identity of Holocaust victims, the figure

allows Friedan to make her own Jewish background

irrelevant to her political position.

Woven into the text at a pivotal point, positioned

as image of damnation in the tradition of the American

jeremiad, the concentration camp analogy helped locate

Friedan’s feminism in the mainstream of American politics

during the Cold War era. By choosing German fascism

rather than American racism as her book’s evil other,

Friedan navigates Cold War politics. Though shocking and

foreign to our contemporary notions of discursive

propriety, the analogy was actually conceived as an

assimilationist gesture, a way to universalize the

particular, and Americanize what might seem foreign.

Fermaglich’s archival research suggests that it fulfilled

this role rather well – at the time, no one objected, not

even camp survivors accused of desecrating the memory of

the victims of Nazism (226). The analogy was a radical

statement only in the sense of being forceful, but not if

the measure of radicalism is the willingness to challenge

the very assumptions of one’s culture. Friedan’s method

was to not to position herself at cross purposes with the

dominant ideology, but to argue that the object of her

critique – conservative gender norms – was foreign to

America. The goal, after all, is to “bring women into

full participation in the mainstream of American society

now,” as she would put it in the Statement of Purpose of

National Organization for Women, founded in 1966 (87).

Unsettling as it may seem today, the bizarre image of

Holocaust without Jews, with victims as willing

collaborators of their murderers, who are then compared

to unhappy housewives, is no accidental excess in The

Feminine Mystique. The analogy is a key passage in the text,

part of feminist and American rhetorical history, and an

error of judgment only in retrospect.

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