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Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique: Part 2 — Violating the “God-given nature” of Women

Writer's picture: Elizabeth MillarElizabeth Millar

Updated: 18 hours ago

By Jazmine Lawrence


Jazmine Lawrence is a Master of Arts (Theology) student at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, Canada. Prior to theology studies, she served for 14 years in the Royal Canadian Air Force as aircrew on Sea King helicopters. 



            In my earlier reflection on Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, I noted that her book aims to show “that women are not naturally fulfilled by devoting their [entire] lives to homemaking and child-rearing.”[1] Of Jewish descent and stirred to passion against injustice from the holocaust’s horrors and other injustices against Jews,[2] Friedan’s background in psychology and as a writer for women’s magazines added fuel to her critique of romanticized domesticity and the injustices it effected.[3]

            As a student of theology, I notice Friedan using The Feminine Mystique to throw resistance against Christian theology, especially in Chapter 3: “The Crisis in Woman’s Identity.” The “role crisis”—in which girls were told “they could be and do whatever they wanted to, with the same freedom as boys” before hitting the reality of a woman’s “role”—involved clergymen who “interrupted women’s-rights conventions, waving Bibles and quoting from the Scriptures: ‘Saint Paul said… Saint Peter said…’” At every step, Friedan says, “feminists had to fight the conception that they were violating the God-given nature of woman” by thinking it was possible to transcend the God-ordained “roles” of mother and wife.[4]

This “fight” has been a pervasive reality for throngs of Christians who have seen patriarchal injustices and the woundedness (read ‘trauma’) it causes. The fight is also an opportunity for healing by leaning into what feminism suggests about rooting out systemic problems (read ‘theology and praxis’ that are the often-invisible backbone structure of the Church). Clergymen in Friedan’s time framed feminism as questioning the authority of “Saint Paul” and “Saint Peter.” And God. It was blasphemy. However, Christian feminism since then has helped show that the problem is not what Peter, Paul or God said, but our interpretation and application of these authority figures; it’s fruitful to more deeply study what, why, where, and how they spoke without dishonouring them.

Because Friedan brings up the church’s role in women’s discontent and disordered identity, theology and the church are implicitly invited to absorb the critique and publicly seek to reverse injustices and bring healing. The ultra-conservative/fundamentalist church of Friedan’s time (she seems unaware of any other kind, though there have always been alternatitives) shut down the conversation, laughing off or warning of the dangers of such emancipatory thinking, as I mentioned John Adams had done to his wife in my initial reflection. But it wasn’t just the men: Phyllis Schlafly, representing ultra-conservative American women, spearheaded a countermovement against the Equal Rights Amendment of Betty Friedan’s 1960’s, and against the women’s rights movement in general. Disney’s 2020 Mrs America series spins the tale to show the irony of Schlafly’s incredible energy, time and funding spent on her Stop ERA efforts outside the very home in which Schlafly insisted women belonged. Now, we may be tempted to roll our eyes and say, “Of course, how ironic,” but if we were church-goers in the 60’s we may well have been caught in the painful tension of wanting to right the injustices against women while hearing we were blaspheming and violating a God-given mandate for women. 

But wait, some of us are still caught in that tension. 

Thirty years after Friedan published, an early chapter of Religion and Mental Health published by Oxford University Press pointed out that “religiously sponsored and culturally approved female roles are evidently active in the development of mental disorder among women.”[5] This warning resonates with a 2021 study which reported that “among religious participants, women who attend sexist religious institutions report significantly worse self-rated health than do those who attend more inclusive congregations. Furthermore, only women who attend inclusive religious institutions exhibit a health advantage [to participating in the religious institution] relative to non-participants.”[6]

A Christians for Biblical Equality Mutuality Blog article reviewed the study and concluded that, “Good research is descriptive, it helps us understand the problem, but it is also prescriptive, it helps us see potential solutions to the problem.”[7] Such is the case with The Feminine Mystique as well: if theology and church practice are implicated in the problem, then Friedan’s book needs not just review but re-review by theologians and ministers for as long as it takes to—in that painfully slow, organic process called human progress—right wrongs and heal hearts. Since no church congregation can claim to have perfected egalitarianism or mutuality, and since the secular and spiritual heritage of hierarchicalism affects us all, we can let Friedan’s observations suggest prescriptions––healing solutions––from the unique position of relationship with the Great Healer.

In further reflections, I’ll look more at how the content of The Feminine Mystique speaks to the contemporary church and theology.


[1] “100 Most Influential Books of the Century” on The Greatest Books. Accessed 10 Jan 2025. (https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/42f)

[2] “Betty Friedan” on Wikimedia Foundation, last updated 8 Jan 2025. Accessed 10 Jan 2025 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Friedan).

[3] Marion Kaplan, “Betty Friedan” on Jewish Women’s Archive, last updated 23 June 2021. Accessed 10 Jan 2025. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/friedan-betty

[4] Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Apple Books, 1963 (2024 ed.)).

[5] Robert A. Bridges and Bernard Spilka, “Religion and the Mental Health of Women” in Religion and Mental Health, John F. Schumaker ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 49.

[6] Patricia Homan and Amy Burdette, “When Religion Hurts: Structural Sexism and Health in Religious Congregations” in American Sociological Review 86/2, 18 Mar 2021. Accessed 6 Jan 2025 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122421996686).

[7] Camden Morgante, “When Religion Hurts: How Complementarian Churches Harm Women” on theMutuality Blog, 19 May 2021. Accessed 6 Jan 2025 (www.cbeinternational.org/resource/when-religion-hurts-how-complementarian-churches-hurt).

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