Desperate housewives are nothing new -- Friedan came across them decades ago. HILLARY RHODES looks at a feminist icon's lasting impact on American culture.
In the early 1960s, the notion of a desperate housewife in American suburbia helped start a revolution. Now it's a TV show.
Betty Friedan made waves with her book "The Feminine Mystique," which came tumbling through a happy-go-lucky baby boom and growing suburban sprawl, knocked down a few white picket fences and announced that the "perfect" suburban housewife life might not be so perfect after all. Gasp!
The once-groundbreaking opinions of Friedan, who died Saturday at 85, are so commonplace today that the concept has become the basis for a hit prime-time series.
So, should ABC's "Desperate Housewives" be taken as a reverential nod to one of feminism's legendary icons? Or is it an openmouthed, red-lipsticked cackle right in Friedan's face?
The women of Wisteria Lane certainly bring color to the image Friedan presented in her 1963 best seller, which looked at the shoddy deal women got by following the suburban dream and its promises of sterility and bliss. That sort of life left some women unempowered and unfulfilled, Friedan discovered after an in-depth study of fellow Smith College graduates.
Similarly, the "Desperate" ladies are each missing something major in their lives and are far away from true success. "Every female character on the show is ... incompetent in her own unique, stereotypical way," says Jennifer L. Pozner, the executive editor at Women in Media & News.
Sure, they're beautiful and wealthy and live in polished homes, but they're plagued by every problem that could possibly plague them, including the one that sets up the entire premise -- a burning secret buried under the pool.
The burial of problems -- denial -- was a theme among desperate housewives in Friedan's time, too.
"Just what was this problem that has no name?" Friedan wrote of her classmates from the class of 1942, who mostly became suburban housewives. "What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say, 'I feel empty somehow ... incomplete.'
"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."
The Wisteria women are the same, living a cartoonish, modern-day, "what if" version of the feminine mystique: What if this mystique that Friedan uncovered in the '60s took a dose of 21st-century steroids? Start with the "Leave It To Beaver" film set and fill it with a gaggle of histrionic hottie wives in low-cut outfits, marching robotically -- in high heels, of course -- from one problem to the next.
"What was this problem that has no name?" Four decades later, pop-culture's answer is to give "this problem" every name in the book:
It starts with infertility, drugs, crime, suicide. Then there's infidelity, alcohol, violence, deviance, unruly children and evil neighbors. Secrets. Cover-ups. Blackmail. Jealousy. Hatred. Reading other people's diaries. Stealing other people's measuring cups. Screwing the guy who mows the lawn.
Get it? These women are desperate, and stuck at home.
"They are looking for fulfillment in intrigue and gossip and sexual exploits, and they're all highly qualified women," said Deborah Siegel, director of special projects at The National Council for Research on Women and author of a forthcoming book on changing images of feminism in pop culture.
The women of Wisteria Lane could be better off "if they didn't have so much time on their hands to plan their plots and were instead contributing in different ways to their community or professions," Siegel said.
A show like that would probably not garner the same kind of ratings that "Desperate Housewives" does, of course. But Friedan might have preferred it.
In the end, the Hollywood housebots are fictional. "They exist to be humiliated in one amusing way after another," Pozner says.
But the issues that Friedan tackled were neither fictional nor amusing, and her legacy did more than lay the groundwork for a sexy Sunday soap.
According to Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage," most states still had head and master laws in the 1950s, meaning husbands had general authority within a marriage. Up until the 1980s, according to Coontz, it was possible for a man not to be charged with rape as long as the sex was with his wife.
After Friedan's success with "The Feminine Mystique," she became one of the dominant presences in the women's movement and, in 1966, the first president of the National Organization for Women. She had been a stay-at-home mother and wife herself, raising three children in the suburban village of Grandview-on-the-Hudson, N.Y., before her research -- for what was supposed to be an article in honor of her upcoming 15th college reunion -- turned into a best-selling book, and then into a movement.
She wrote what many women had been desperately waiting to hear:
"Housework, no matter how it is expanded to fill the time available, can hardly use the abilities of a woman of average or normal human intelligence, much less the 50 per cent of the female population whose intelligence, in childhood, was above average."
Somebody might want to tell that to Bree Van De Kamp.
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Hillary Rhodes is an asap reporter based in New York.
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