Aya Anzouk || As women began reclaiming their own voices and creating their own narratives, various feminisms became the medium(s) through which these women could rebel against the patriarchal chains that rendered them voiceless and spoken for. Although this change allowed for women to finally attain the status of visibility in the political sphere, it has simultaneously fostered division in women’s activism.
Betty Friedan’s 1963 oeuvre on the malaise of white suburban housewives, a classic of feminist theory, attests to the major inconsistencies in narratives within the movement and the strange hyperfixation of white feminists on solving non-issues. The year 1963 was a year of persistent segregation and the enforcement of such racist laws throughout the United States. It was also the year of the massive March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin Luther King’s now highly celebrated speech, and the uptick in nonviolent protests which gave rise to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Prior to the draft of President John F. Kennedy’s civil rights bill and the eventual ratification of the law, Black feminists acted as intermediaries between the two movements, emphasizing the importance of collaboration and intellectual exchange for the purpose of cultivating unison between two of the largest activism coalitions at the time. The aspiration of proactive allyship seemed to quickly pass from sight, as white women reacted to the mere suggestion of partnership with feigning insult and grave indignation. To join the movement of colored people was to trade privilege for prohibition, for after all the plight of white women was to be regarded as equal to white men before law, not to Black men.
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and her inquiry into a ‘problem that has no name’ at a time when non-white women and working class white women were facing urgent and tangible struggles reveals the limitations of her vision and underscores her position in the political sphere as a white feminist. Friedan was not exceptional in this respect, for even before her name rose to fame and after it did, many more feminist theorists and academics were willingly opting out of the discussion of intersectionality which called out their hushed support for the white supremacist ways of their own governments. Allied with only their personal interests, these women went on to produce several theories that still question the illusion of choice and the self-inflicted nuisance that upper-middle-class educated white women were barely tolerating. And perhaps I am wrong to think that the socialization of women and girls and their silent coercion into a lifestyle of servitude and futility cannot be compared to the persecution, lynching, and rape of Black and Brown bodies. It may be that there is a strong parallelism that is lost on me in this context. Yet I would not be the first woman to ever dismiss this comparison, for many women before claimed that the struggles of being a housebound trophy wife of a successful man were somehow more worthy of discourse than the physical and psychic imprints of racial and colonial violence. Some of these claims were explicitly stated, while some were passively communicated through direct action – or inaction – and the causes that were presented as priorities in mainstream feminist dialogue.
Feminism, in its neoliberal manifestation, has been persistently employed as a colonial instrument for manufacturing consent to unjust conflicts, and Betty Friedan’s brand of feminism was no exception. By framing the dissatisfaction and boredom of women as a national issue that is compromising the country’s potential, Friedan ties the fate of women’s rights to that of the American colonial project. Whether this was intentional or not has very little to no significance.
Today we witness the resurrection of a familiar variant of white feminism, one which does not pretend to subscribe to the progressive values of liberalism: conservative white feminism. While it makes no false claims of universalism or a sisterhood that transcends race and border, this branch of white feminism claims that – much like white identity in heterogeneous America – female white identity is at risk of total erasure. This artificial New Age invention is not feminist in the same sense that decolonial or Marxist feminisms are movements as well as ways of thought and belief that constantly aim to produce ideas to support their foundation. In fact it is a challenge to feminists who argue in favor of choice and personal freedom as feminist concepts. These women are of the opinion that their financial dependence, submission, and obedience to their husbands are all choices that stem from their personal world view and what they believe to be true. To criticize their choices is to deny them the autonomy that feminism proclaims every woman should have an inherent right to, and that is the talking point they parrot whenever they are confronted by the material realities that make their decisions irrational and self-destructive. Additionally, their absurd claim – reminiscent of the “Great Replacement Theory” – that there is a leftist maneuver aiming to replace cisgendered women by trans women is evidence of the fascist root of their ideas.
This metamorphosis of feminism serves as proof of its fragility, especially when it is handed on a silver platter to be co-opted by privilege, thus allowing it to be hijacked by white-centric, semi-political discourses that assume the patriarchal and racist authority to define what should or shouldn’t be at the heart of the feminist cause; That is the real problem which Betty Friedan and many of her peers fail to name. By defining the malaise of wealthy suburban white women as the focal conundrum of the era, The Feminine Mystique brushes to the side some of the most critical issues that obstruct the reinforcement of social justice. Therefore, women of color’s anger towards second-wave feminism was not somehow “misdirected”, but rather a natural response to exclusion and marginalization as perpetrated by influential figures in the political domain, whose positionality had allowed them to enjoy a certain degree of power that was alien to many women of a lower socioeconomic caliber.
Another unnamed problem with feminism(s) is its tendency to oscillate towards extremes, either tokenizing or ignoring women of color or even participating in their subjugation. This tendency not only manifests in the violence of silence when it comes to race and class issues within the movement, but also extends to its collaboration with imperialism in spite of the repercussions it has on women of the Global South. Betty Friedan invokes a sense of patriotism and national duty that supposedly ought to be a strong argument against confining American women in the home; restricting women’s participation in the labor market and military services will inevitably lead to the United States falling behind its rivals. Therefore, The Feminine Mystique not only framed domestic malaise and rigid gender roles as a threat for national security but also positioned women’s liberation as essential to the vitality of the American project, establishing dangerous liaisons between feminist demands and the pragmatic rationale of the U.S. empire. Now of course there was no explicit call for women to enlist in the army, but the use of competition and conflict vocabulary at the height of the Cold War carried within it a clear message that cannot be disregarded.
One might say that perhaps Betty Friedan had no intention of making this hazardous link between her feminism and empire; yet, as Edward Said demonstrates in Culture and Imperialism, the uncertainty of authorial intention is secondary to the determinative role that cultural texts play in shaping imperial logic. Even if Friedan’s cultural critique wasn’t intended to promote empire, it has been a powerful actor within it. This is true for many Western intellectuals and authors, whose respective works interacted with the idea of imperialism passively, thus presenting it as a customary occurrence, almost like nature taking its course. Contrary to what many contemporary feminist theorists claim, there’s no evidence to suggest that Charlotte Brontë was offering some groundbreaking commentary on the implications of colonial intimacies or the dehumanization of the colonized woman under the rule of empire. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre depicts Bertha Mason as a Creole woman from the British colonies of the West Indies as a “madwoman in the attic” with her existence being considered a mere obstacle preventing Mr. Rochester from marrying Jane. After Jane Eyre is informed of her prospective suitor’s secret wife, she immediately takes a moral stand and refuses to become Rochester’s mistress. On this account, Bertha’s character becomes a stepping stone for Jane Eyre to assert her moral superiority and good character. The novel remains for the most part silent about the material manifestations of British colonialism, consequently naturalizing colonial anxieties and the psychic imprints of colonial violence.
While some tend to draw a line between fiction and non-fiction, proclaiming that the latter is not a form of cultural expression, I believe that Friedan’s position as a cultural critic and a feminist makes her work inherently cultural and therefore an invaluable part of her society’s cultural fabric. The ethnocentrism (and ethnonationalism) of her take on women’s liberation is reiterated by her position as a liberal Zionist who went on to identify as an “anti-anti Zionist,” even going as far as urging Egyptian feminist Nawal El-Saadawi to not bring up Palestine in her speech at the 1985 World Conference on Women, maintaining that “this is a women’s conference not a political conference (Taylor-Sheinma, 2020)”.
Most of Friedan’s work was inspired by her own experience. Having quit her job and moved to the suburbs with her family during the mid-to-late 1950s, she managed to take on a few freelance opportunities but soon realized that she wanted more. Her personal life inspired her focus on self-fulfillment as a feminist subject, contradicting the distinction she drew between feminism and the Palestinian cause, as she perceived the latter as a political issue while the former was solely personal. This selective framing reveals how what counted as a “feminist issue” to Friedan was determined by her personal circumstances and life experience, whereas the struggles of other women, especially those governed by colonialism, were considered to be beyond feminism’s reach.
If feminism is to survive its own fragility in an ever-evolving world, it has to be consistent in its opposition to oppressive systems be it patriarchy, classism, racism, or colonialism.
Author bio: Aya Anzouk is a Moroccan writer and undergraduate psychology student at Al Akhawayn University. Her work explores the intersections of psychology, coloniality, and cultural resistance. She has written for Al Mayadeen, Awan, Al Tanweeri, and the New Arab.
Works Cited:
Brontë, C. (1864). Jane Eyre.
Friedan, B. (1923). The feminine Mystique. Laurel.
Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and imperialism. Vintage.
Taylor-Sheinma, D. (2020, September 10). Zionism split the women’s movement in the ’70s. Will it do the same to BLM? +972 Magazine. Retrieved September 22, 2025, from https://www.972mag.com/zionism-feminism-blm/
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