I’m Wendell Bauer and this is Middle America.

Sarah Marie Dillard “The Lions” 0-1:44

12A

At the time of The Feminine Mystique’s release in 1963, author and former Peorian Betty Friedan was forty-two years old. [1] Her book debut was a best seller and gave voice to millions of women frustrated in their domestic roles. It also sparked massive public activism pushing for gender equality.[2] Friedan coined the phrase “problem with no name” to describe the depression, rage, and restlessness of 1950s and 60s women stifled by the popular view of women’s role in society.[3]

So, what brought Friedan to write the book that would be credited for inspiring the second wave of American feminism?

Growing up in Peoria, Illinois, Friedan was known as Bettye Naomi Goldstein (like Gold-Steen).[4] She was born in 1921 as the oldest daughter of Harry Goldstein and Miriam Horwitz Goldstein. Both sides of the family had fled the violent pogroms (like poe-gruhms) of Eastern Europe and settled in Peoria.

The Goldstein family home was based in Peoria’s West Bluff neighborhood at the top of Farmington Road, where it still stands today. Harry ran Goldstein Jewelry Company at 211 Southwest Adams, the current location of Illinois Central College’s downtown campus. Harry Goldstein had not attended college, but nevertheless was a fan of philosophy, especially the works of fellow Peorian Robert Ingersoll. He was also an American patriot who was extremely proud when his school-aged daughter, Betty, won a city-wide essay competition for a piece titled “Why I Am Proud to Be an American.”

Perhaps writing was in the genes, as Betty’s mother, Miriam Goldstein, had attended college and worked for the city newspaper as the women’s page editor before marriage. However, upon marriage she became a housewife, as was the custom. As the family had hired maids and a chauffeur up until the Great Depression, it seemed to Betty that her highly capable mother could not find enough challenges in daily life to sustain her. With the extra energy, Miriam nit-picked the children and their father, causing Betty great unhappiness in childhood.

The Goldsteins found Jewish life in Peoria to be a lonely existence. They were not part of a larger Jewish community. However, Betty did act as an English tutor for a Jewish mother whose family had fled Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s. Anti-Semitic beliefs among the local white Anglo-Saxon Protestant crowd kept them out of organizations like the local country club that their wealth might otherwise have afforded them. These prejudices also kept the kids out of the high school sororities and fraternities.

The one place where Betty did find a welcoming community was in the Peoria Players, the local theater company, where she played several roles throughout her childhood[5] and even wrote a play of her own.[6]

It likely did not help her social life that Betty was a brilliant student at a time when intelligence in women was undervalued or even discouraged. She skipped two grades before high school. In her memoir, Life So Far, Betty Friedan describes her high school self as embarrassingly under-developed due to her younger age.

During this lonely time of young adulthood, Betty Friedan vowed to make her Peoria peers someday look up to her.

At graduation, Betty Friedan stood as valedictorian of her class and as editor of an independent literary magazine called Tide.

And then she was off to never again make Peoria her home. Similar to Richard Pryor’s feelings on Peoria, Betty Friedan felt she could no longer live in this city. She felt that her pain of ostracism ran too deep. So, in the fall of 1938, Betty Friedan boarded the train on the Rock Island Railroad, changed over at Chicago and then road the sleeper train to Massachusetts and Smith College.[7]

Jared Grabb “This Land Is Your Land” 0-1:29

12B
How does one talk about depression? It can feel like Betty Friedan’s “problem with no name” at times, even if depression is only one symptom of what she was referring to.

Depression is the opposite of interesting. I personally experience it as a numbness or as a refusal to feel due to being overwhelmed by the emotions brought on by the outside world. It often shows itself in a lack of energy, lack of focus, want for sleep, and inability to properly respond to people and circumstances.

Maybe I’ve always had depression. My parents claim that I seemed fine as a kid. I, however, feel that my internal temperature has always been around what it is now.

I got my official depression diagnosis three years ago as an attempt to save my marriage and my band. To me, I was the same as I had always been, but those around me had hit their limit.

My bandmates related that my habit of emotionally dumping before each rehearsal was destructive to the group. I also made a self-deprecating on-stage comment at a festival that nearly sent a member away mid-set.

My wife, Angela, was similarly through with being a dumping spot for my negative emotions. Add to this the trials of parenthood and my absence as a parent for half of the nights of the week due to tip-based income as a bartender and waiter.

I think I was close to losing it all. I was hurting those that I loved most in the world. I didn’t see the use of counseling as particularly beneficial, but Angela greatly encouraged it. And, when your wife mentions her wondering what a life without you would be like, as an aside, you do what she encourages you to do.

The band took a break from rehearsals.

Angela called our insurance.

Our insurance led me to a free clinic downtown to get my diagnosis. I wasn’t a risk for self-harm. I didn’t have suicidal thoughts. I did have rage, despair, and self-loathing with nowhere to go.

I got my diagnosis and then was on my way to a discount counselor to try to save my relationships.

It’s really not that easy, though.

Most of what I feel came out of these initial counseling sessions was me making it evident to my wife that I was willing to do whatever it took to make our relationship work.

The other breakthrough would be acknowledging the guilt that I have always felt from my attempts to make a life in art and music. I realized that this started in college, where I decided to get an art degree, and then again when I went into credit card debt in order to tour and record music. In recent years it manifests as guilt for wanting to tour and invest in recording that draws time and money from my family.

…The counseling wasn’t enough.

I switched jobs to an hourly day position in order to spend more time with the family. I started on anti-depressant medication. I started hiking in the woods around town and on various biking trails. My wife’s and my bandmates’ moods improved. However, my mood remained depressed if minutely improved to the outside world.

And, then the pandemic hit. I lost my job in food service, and soon after, my wife lost her post-farm job at the office.

We decided to homeschool our daughter Elizabeth for the year, and with that my trials began anew.

Jared Grabb “Middle Years”

12C

At Smith College in Massachusetts, Betty Friedan continued to excel. She found that where her intellect had isolated her in high school, it now brought her acceptance in college.

Social justice issues that had been seeded with the anti-Semitism of her youth further gained her interest. Between her sophomore and junior years, she took a summer apprenticeship at Highlander Folk School to attend writing workshops alongside labor organizers. While a writer for the Smith College newspaper, she also attended an anti-war protest in Washington, DC. Later, as editor of the college newspaper, Friedan wrote pacifistic editorials. However, the attack on Pearl Harbor would change everything, and where many expected Friedan to continue to speak out against the war, she felt that her country’s needs had shifted.

By this time, Betty Friedan was seeing the effects of Hitler’s Germany in her school. Both professors and students at Smith College had fled the Nazis’ cruelty.

Her understanding of the effects of authoritarian leadership grew in the summer after her Junior year when she went to work in Iowa City on early experiments in group dynamics.

Betty Friedan graduated with highest honors from Smith College. However, a possibly more important takeaway from Smith was her need to live in a way that would make life better for those to come.

In her own words, “Growing up Jewish in Peoria gave me a passion against injustice…. At Smith, …It was your responsibility to take a stand on political issues… and make a difference.”

After Smith, Betty received a prestigious science fellowship for psychology at University of California at Berkeley. It was the first time a psychology student or a woman had received the fellowship. At this, a physicist she was dating at the time exclaimed, “It’s over between us. I’m never going to win a fellowship like that.” The heartbroken Betty took this statement from the physicist as a warning that men of the time were not ready to love her at her full potential. She dropped out of her graduate studies and headed east.

Now wandering the streets of New York City with many of her more bohemian friends, Betty took a job for the Federated Press. There she covered topics such as the Roosevelts and striking workers.

One story piqued her interest as it concerned a manufacturing plant in New Jersey largely staffed by women rather than men. Betty was naively surprised to find out that the striking women were being paid merely a fraction of the wage that their male counterparts would receive. Such stories began to sour her on the Marxist theories that she had found so romantic in her college years.

When World War II ended, so did Betty’s job with the Federated Press. Many women were let go from their work once male soldiers and workers returned. Luckily, she bounced back with a job at UE News, the newspaper associated with the United Electrical Workers.

One plus side to soldiers returning from the war was that Betty now had far more dating prospects of her own age. Soon after the war, she went on a blind date with a young theater director named Carl Friedan. Betty was charmed by his sweetness and humor.

In 1947, they were married and became Carl and Betty Friedan, and in 1948 Betty took a year off to be home with their first child, Daniel.

Four years later, when Betty was pregnant with their second child, Jonathan, UE News decided to fire her rather than give her time off.

And so, for the next decade Betty would play at being a housewife while still finding time to write freelance for magazines such as McCall’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, Reader’s Digest, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s, Coronet, and Good Housekeeping. During this time, she and Carl had a third child, Emily, in 1956.

In 1957, Betty Friedan came across a book called Modern Women: The Lost Sex, by Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg, two Freudian psychoanalysts who claimed American women had too much education and that it was keeping them from “adjusting to their role as women.” As a rebuttal, Friedan used her appointment of making a survey for her fifteen-year Smith College reunion to ask related questions of her female peers.

The discontent that she found and where she found it, more-so with those filling the conservative female roles than with those who pushed back against them, became the spark that would cause her many women’s magazine article rejections and eventually become her book, The Feminine Mystique. The article that she once felt she had wasted a year trying to sell, led her to more and more interviews with women that only served to support her thesis that the role of women in the 1950s and 1960s had become far too constraining to the detriment of not only women, but society as a whole.

While several magazine editors had rejected Betty, she acquired a book deal at her very first publisher meeting with Norton. Five years later, The Feminine Mystique would shock the world. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan used her experience as writer for popular women’s magazines to present a systematic takedown of the popular image of femininity in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. While the book’s focus on white, middle-class women now bothers many, Friedan started the conversation and asked the questions that would grow to reshape American society and widen the role of women within it.[8]

Jared Grabb “Wipe Your Eyes”

12D

“Sometimes she blotted out the feeling with a tranquilizer. Sometimes she thought the problem was with her husband, or her children, or that what she really needed was to redecorate her house, or move to a better neighborhood, or have an affair, or another baby. Sometimes, she went to a doctor with symptoms she could hardly describe: ‘A tired feeling… I get so angry with my children it scares me… I feel like crying without any reason.’”

This is in part how Betty Friedan describes the 1960s housewife in her revolutionary book The Feminine Mystique. Friedan later writes:

“She has no identity except as a wife and mother. She does not know who she is herself. She waits all day for her husband to come home at night to make her feel alive.”

…and…

“She can never spend more than 15 minutes on any one thing; she has no time to read books, only magazines; even if she had time, she has lost the power to concentrate.”

When I read these accounts of depressed American domestic life, they hit home. I understand that as a married, white, straight, cis male in America, I do not have the obstacles of the 1960s American housewife, but I do know these feelings. I read the The Feminine Mystique often as if reading my own thoughts.

After my daughter Elizabeth was born, my wife Angela initially stayed home to care for her. Like the families of the 1960s middle class that Friedan describes, I tried hard to fulfill the male role as provider. I experienced this as depressing and stressful. I never liked managing other people, and that seemed to be the only way that I could come close to helping us get by.

After a year at home, Angela went to work on a farm. Then there was a year around pre-school where I stayed home as the primary caregiver in our household. I continued serving drinks in a bar on the weekends, but I was the go-to parent six days per week. And initially, acting as the primary caregiver felt fantastic. The bonding time could be magical. The sense of pride at eventually having my daughter come to me first for her support was an exhilarating feeling.

But, living your life in the headspace of a young child can be exhaustingly dull and slow moving. The need for patience can be overwhelming. Once Elizabeth was able to attend full days at school, I went back into the workforce.

Since I lost my job at the beginning of the pandemic in the Spring of 2020, I once again spent time as the primary caregiver for my daughter. Again, things started out pretty well. I enjoyed reconnecting with my daughter after two years back in the workforce, but after a couple months the lifestyle was wearing on me.

Around this time, Angela lost her job as well. With Angela’s full-time presence back in the household, and Elizabeth in need of homeschooling heading into the Fall, I could no longer keep it together. I wanted to hold my own as primary caregiver, but the lack of escape in family-isolation quickly found my thoughts full of noise and my rage manifesting.

Angela picked up the slack and took the lead on Elizabeth’s care and education.

I took up laying on the couch with guided meditation recordings pumping through my ear buds.

And, here we are. Medication doesn’t seem to be providing results for me. While I have a want to carry my weight in childcare, I know that Angela carries it more. And, my depression remains.

I’m luckier than the 1960s housewife because Angela covers for me in order that I can record music quietly in the basement during the midnight hours. But, I miss my bandmates. I miss the audiences. I miss adult conversations. I miss time spent alone and free.

But now Angela is stuck feeling like a 1960s housewife while doing the most domestic work. What about her creative pursuits?

Perhaps my identifying so strongly with Friedan’s book is a sign of the progress that our country has made in the last nearly sixty years. In a 1964 television interview for the CBC, Friedan referred to the man who is quote “strong enough to be gentle” and who can say, “’no’ to the masculine mystique.”[9]

This is the man that I want to be. A man strong enough to be gentle is what Elizabeth and Angela need. But, what if wanting is not enough. What if like the 1960s housewives unknowingly germinating for the women’s movement, the role just doesn’t quite fit?

Jared Grabb “Prison Bars” (Middle America Version)

12OUT

Thank you for listening to Middle America.

The featured music for this episode was “The Lions” by Sarah & the Underground. Everything else was created by Jared Grabb. You can see a full listing of the music used in today’s episode on the episode’s webpage at midamericapod.buzzsprout.com.

Editing assistance was provided by Becca Taylor.

If you enjoy the show and would like to support it, 5-star reviews on Apple Podcasts and subscriptions over at patreon.com/midamericapod are the best ways to do that. We also have transcripts at the Patreon.

Keep your chins up, friends.

Until next time…



[1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Betty-Friedan
[2] https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/betty-friedan
[3] Friedan B. (1963). The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Friedan
[5] Friedan B. (2000). Life So Far. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.
[6] https://www.peoriamagazines.com/ibi/2016/feb/peoria-mystique
[7] Friedan B. (2000). Life So Far. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.
[8] Friedan B. (2000). Life So Far. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.
[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfgxHKli9CU