The Feminine Mystique: Sexual Excess and the Pre-political Housewife

Miller, Meredith (2005) The Feminine Mystique: Sexual Excess and the Pre-political Housewife. Women: A Cultural Review, 16 (1). pp. 1-17. ISSN 0957-4042

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Abstract / Summary

This article is part of a larger research project on postwar feminism and lesbian pulp fiction. Its basic argument, argued through cultural materialism, is that the lesbian position is historically contingent and continually produced within a shifting array of cultural and market forces.

Arising out of anxieties around work, family power and consumption post war, the lesbian position allowed authors to articulate a radical discontent with housewifery in the years before 1963. Thus, a study of lesbian pulp fiction belies the myth of The Feminine Mystique as a second wave point of origin. At the same time a queer studies approach helps to apprehend the heterosexual politics Friedan’s work, highlighting the structural homophobia which informed the second wave, in particular a pervasive discomfort with excessive female desire.

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