<v SPEAKER_02>She quotes a general as complaining that prisoners of war during the Korean War are like soft and weak compared to World War II era prisoners.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so you're waiting for like maybe this has to do with the cruelty of their North Korean captors or the low living standards.

<v SPEAKER_02>No.

<v SPEAKER_02>She blames it on the fact that they were raised by housewives.

<v SPEAKER_02>That the earlier generation of GI was raised by these like tough-minded career women so they could stick it out in the Nazi POW camp.

<v SPEAKER_00>Hi, I'm Jerusalem Dempsis.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm Matthew Iglesias.

<v SPEAKER_00>And this is The Argument, a podcast where two friends argue about anything from politics, policy, culture.

<v SPEAKER_00>Today we're doing something a little bit different, and we are talking about big arguments in history.

<v SPEAKER_00>Neither Matt nor I had ever read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963.

<v SPEAKER_00>And we did that, and now we're gonna talk about it.

<v SPEAKER_00>Matt, what is the feminine mystique?

<v SPEAKER_02>That's a great question, Jerusalem.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm not 100% sure that I know.

<v SPEAKER_02>Having read the book.

<v SPEAKER_02>No, so I she's interested in the question of why after World War II you have this falling rate age of marriage, you have the baby boom, you have she feels women dropping out of college earlier, the whole education system pivoting towards sort of taking um women's career aspirations less seriously.

<v SPEAKER_02>And what she sees as a kind of a rollback of feminist progress that had occurred in the pre-war decades.

<v SPEAKER_02>The feminine mystique, I guess, is like the force that is causing those things to happen.

<v SPEAKER_00>I had trouble with this too because like it's not like a construction of like a phrase that is every, I mean it's a famous phrase because her book is famous, but like I've never heard of like the blank mystique in any other context.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so I'll try to piece it together because I don't I don't think it's the force that's making it all happen.

<v SPEAKER_00>What I understood the feminine mystique to be was like the aura around a certain kind of femininity that uh tells people uh that that like translates to people like this is what is the best way to be a woman.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like that there's this kind of femininity that is doing that.

<v SPEAKER_00>And it's like telling people to be housewives, to not kind of reject the life of the mind, to care less about what's going on inside, to center love and the family and the home.

<v SPEAKER_02>But it is kind of like a Well, and what she defines better, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>The other famous phrase from the book is the problem with no name.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, which is essentially suburban housewives, particularly the more educated ones, she feels are really depressed and miserable.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I I guess she's saying society's conventional response to this is to tell these housewives to essentially like housewife harder.

<v unknown>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Right?

<v SPEAKER_02>That like they have to get like more in touch with their feminine nature and their, you know, inherent desire to like nest and have a beautiful home.

<v SPEAKER_02>And the whole bulk of the book is like going through like different villains who are perpetrating this, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>So like Freudian psychoanalysis, um, Margaret Mead and Functionalist Soology, Education School, Women's magazine editors, women's magazines, um, marketers for like home appliances.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so these are like all these different forces which are telling people oh, you're unhappy, even though you have this like comfortable life in the suburbs, like you just need like more recipes or more brooms or to be more submissive, or maybe you were like taught to be too ambitious earlier in the world.

<v SPEAKER_00>I I think it's worth actually reading the opening paragraph.

<v SPEAKER_00>It just really sets up the whole book.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, the chapter is called The Problem That Has No Name.

<v SPEAKER_00>The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women.

<v SPEAKER_00>It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States.

<v SPEAKER_00>Each suburban wife struggled with it alone as she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night.

<v SPEAKER_00>She was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: is this all?

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think that like in that one paragraph, actually, you immediately, probably from a 21st century standpoint, know what the major critique of this book is going to be, even if you have like never heard of it before or heard of like any of the critiques of second-wave feminism that it spouts, um, which is that like it starts off by talking about like all American women in the 20th century and then immediately describes a life which is just about, you know, suburban upper class women or middle class women and their specific experiences.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like this is like the major critique that we hear.

<v SPEAKER_02>I gotta say, I felt from a readability standpoint, it was refreshing in a lot of ways how like non-intersectional the book is that like she has the topic that she wants to write about.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's often the case.

<v SPEAKER_02>You had a great article about this, actually, but like oftentimes people who are highly literate and like write takes for an audience of people who read takes really want to write about like their own problems and their own feelings.

<v SPEAKER_02>I feel like in a lot of the contemporary internet, instead of like actually getting people to be more broad-minded about that, we've just kind of like injected these like writing ticks.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Where, you know, it's like you could put this through Claude and it would like every seven pages just like insert parenthetically.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, of course, women of color have the receiver more, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>But it's like instead, it it just it's way more readable.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like she's she's running downhill.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like she has this complaint.

<v SPEAKER_00>Well, I think we can like split the difference here cleanly.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I agree with you that I'm glad that she just writes about her experience and her the problem that she's interested in.

<v SPEAKER_00>I do think that she gets a little confused sometimes because I'm not it's not clear if she's clear on the fact that she's only talking about these people.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like at various points in the book, she does seem to be abstracting away to all women that all women have these experiences.

<v SPEAKER_00>She's famously a labor reporter before this.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, she's like not unaware of civil rights.

<v SPEAKER_00>She like references at many points, like issues of civil rights, issues of racial politics in America at the time.

<v SPEAKER_00>And it's like, you know, I don't think it would have been difficult to be really clear.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I'm focusing on this for this reason, and probably preempt like 99% of the critiques by doing that without having to do like a mea culpa every seven pages.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, I mean, I I I'm just saying that.

<v SPEAKER_02>Just for clarity is fake.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yes.

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, it would be great if she just said somewhere like, this book is about people in my social class.

<v SPEAKER_00>But the the reason why that's too is that it's not just like, oh, you should just say that for people's sake, but also like, you know, uh the big question I have in the book, because where she ends up going essentially is that the way that women should resolve this problem, this like ennui that they have of being completely unfulfilled as housewives and um their central function being mothers and and wives to their uh you know, husbands, is that they need to go get a job outside the home, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like this is the fundamental thing that she says.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like after like 500 pages, like that's where she gets to.

<v SPEAKER_00>And it's like it becomes a little confusing then because is she saying that all of the women who are working are fulfilled and don't have like this kind of like ennui that is like brought upon by being treated as inferior under like patriarchal society?

<v SPEAKER_00>Is she saying that like they're actually underemployed?

<v SPEAKER_00>The thing I actually think she doesn't want to say very clearly, but I think she believes, is that the only people who are like truly fulfilled human beings are people who are in some way living the life of the mind, people who have been educated, people who are like not just working, but are working in a job that quote unquote like means something to like someone like Betty.

<v SPEAKER_02>I think like an important piece of social context of the book is like she's writing primarily about college-educated women, which, you know, is a subset of the population today.

<v SPEAKER_02>But at the time she's writing it's a much smaller subset of the population.

<v SPEAKER_02>And it's a much smaller subset of the male population as well, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, in the 1950s, um, the median American did not have a high school diploma, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>So, like the focus on college graduates is not just limited, like, but it's it's like willfully focused on a very elite group.

<v SPEAKER_03>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And there was a much broader, I think, um, social consensus at that time that higher education was an elite pursuit.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Right.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so she voices many different concerns over the course of the book, but like the core concern, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like the conceit of the book is that she was commissioned to do this like alumni survey um for the Smith class of 1942 for their 15th anniversary.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she found that like these hundreds of women like weren't using their college degrees, they like felt bad about that.

<v SPEAKER_02>And this speaks to like what is the purpose of Smith College, you know, very specifically.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she feels that the original purpose of women's colleges was to cultivate a female professional class.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think the thing that's interesting, it's like and again, this is why I think it's actually would have been good for her as a writer and for us as readers to be like very clear about what she's talking about, is that like she slides between this set of people and then broad concerns that she has about all suburban housewives, particularly when it comes to the psychoanalysis stuff, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>So, like, I didn't like know a lot about this.

<v SPEAKER_00>I was like, I like went to go learn about this.

<v SPEAKER_00>Basically, like psychotherapy, like it's like invented in the American space, like in the 1950s after World War II, and after there's like some success of this on the front lines or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so people, you know, therapists start like doing this, and then there's like a, there's like some sort of drug that gets invented in the 1950s, and like suddenly like tens of millions of American housewives, way more than like attended college, are like on these drugs and are like clearly unhappy.

<v SPEAKER_00>And then there's all this conversation because like Freudianism becomes like much more in the mainstream of what people are talking about in in like magazines or in like newspapers or whatever it is.

<v SPEAKER_00>And as a result, there's this like larger discourse going on as like Fredana's writing this book about how like why are women so unhappy that they're all on drugs?

<v SPEAKER_00>They're all have to be like medicated, they're all like if you've seen Mad Men, um, I think that like I now I only watched it the first couple of seasons.

<v SPEAKER_00>I know this is supposed to be like a great show or whatever, but like I didn't really get into it.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like I didn't understand Betty's character that well until I read this book.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I was like, oh, like I was like, because I was like, is she stupid?

<v SPEAKER_00>Is that what's going on?

<v SPEAKER_00>It's like, no, this is like a, this is like Betty Friedan's like version of a housewife who's been like stunted by her role and it's like medicated and like is being therapized and like pathologized.

<v SPEAKER_00>Anyway, so I think all of that to say is that there is this weird thing where if it's we're just talking about college-educated women, it's like a very small subset of the women who are being like psychotherapized, etc.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like, are we talking about all of them?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, because clearly they all have this enemy and they're not all like college-educated women.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, you know what I mean?

<v SPEAKER_00>So Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>So I mean, I I I think this is a question about the I I think not like flaws of the book as a construction, but like actual like flaw in her vision for society that, you know, is is maybe worth coming to eventually.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, but I I think, you know, part of what's was interesting to me about this book is, you know, I was kind of raised by like uh Marxist intellectual uh kind of people.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she um, as far as I can tell from Wikipedia, like also was kind of raised in those kind of like Jewish Marxist circles.

<v SPEAKER_02>She wrote for labor union publications before she got married, became a housewife, started writing for women's magazines, then had this like re-emergence as a much more prominent public intellectual.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she came out on the other side of that whole process and of doing this book as like a really like ideas first, like Hegelian rather than a material conditions Marxist, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like the thesis of the book is that like the articles that are in women's magazines and the Freudian uh and median um, you know, social scientists who the women's magazine writers rely on are like causing this mystique that they are like preventing women from wanting the things that she thinks they should want.

<v SPEAKER_02>Material conditions sneak in through the advertising sort of copy people a little bit, but like she's really she almost treats like World War II happening as like incidental to this whole process.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like she knows it happened, but you know, the re the reason the title is the feminine mystique, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Is like she thinks this mystique is having like significant causal impact on people's lives.

<v SPEAKER_00>I just think that like there's actually I mean, I I I I think I think she does give, you know, she does mention, you know, World War II's impact, especially on its um the impact on mostly on ideas rather than materialists.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like people come back from World War II, they're obviously horror struck by what's happened.

<v SPEAKER_00>They're terrified by like the fact that there's like an atomic weapon that's potentially going to be used in other contexts.

<v SPEAKER_00>Trevor Burrus, Jr.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she thinks it made men sentimental.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think there's like a level to which she's like, well, people obviously really wanted a simpler life.

<v SPEAKER_00>And this is like the world is like blown up, it was huge, and now like people were like, I want to get married.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, there's also been delayed marriage.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, either you were a young man that you went to war, so like you got married later than you would have otherwise, or you're maybe you went into war and war and you're just got married, so like you haven't been able to have a home life.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, there's all this stuff that I think is probably true.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I I think to say, like, the ideas are sent the idea, uh, ideas are central in this book, like you say.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I don't think it's because she's necessarily claiming a ton of causal impact between the feminine mystique's prominence and like, you know, age of first marriage or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>But Larissa because she is saying, like, as a suburban housewife, she feels bad.

<v SPEAKER_00>And she thinks that a lot of other women feel bad, and that regardless of what the like material consequences of that are, it's bad that people are unhappy.

<v SPEAKER_00>You know, and I think that like and that these are and that those that unhappiness is downstream of their self-conception, I think is like very compatible with materialist takes as well.

<v SPEAKER_02>But this, I I I guess like this book made me understand what contemporary conservative anti-feminists are talking about a lot better.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, I mean, I you guess like I see these takes that are floating around or like in meme version, you know, they have like the lady with her baby and she's like stirring a pot and her husband's giving her a kiss, and it's like, how much propaganda did it take to convince people this was oppressive, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>And you know, Friedan, the the book is this um like like self-rising yeast of a theory of change, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Where like she's saying, like the women who are writing articles for women's magazines are doing harm by perpetrating this feminine mystique that we could change the world for the better if they wrote different articles, which cast as aspirational people like the writers for women's magazines.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yes, right.

<v SPEAKER_02>So it's like on the one hand, she's like blaming them for a lot, but she's also giving them like a really easy solution, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Which is like they need to go back to like talking up, you know, career women and like work family balance.

<v SPEAKER_02>And and the thing is like it worked.

<v SPEAKER_02>But also she got what she wants out of this.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, if you go to a mainstream woman's publication today or 10 years ago or 20 years ago, I don't know f how when the change happened exactly, but like the articles are now saying what she wants them to say.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like she she won that argument, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Well, I think that like there's this question about like what the value of it's not because it's not just women's magazines are she's also talking about how these colleges, whether it's women, it's primarily she's talking about women's colleges, how they had like specifically changed curriculum and pushed women and high schools too, where she says she doesn't have as much data.

<v SPEAKER_00>Well, not a ton of data in this book, but like she doesn't have as much insight into what's going on in high schools, but from what she can see, that girls are being like literally pushed away from being able to pursue any kind of like higher level aims.

<v SPEAKER_00>She talks about like, you know, these top 10% of girls um in schools are just like overwhelmingly not even considering going to college, or if they are considered going to college, are not really thinking about studying something for for a long-term career, it's just to go to get a husband and stay at home.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think that like I think that like obviously there's like huge things missing in this book, like about like the laws that prevent women from being able to own property or open credit cards or not being able to study law.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like they're like the literal legal barriers, like discrimination and the and hiring, being able to be fired because you're pregnant, like all these things.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think it's notable that she like immediately almost like immediately after this book becomes a sensation, like founds an organization that then takes this like newly created consciousness and channels it towards these like legal shifts.

<v SPEAKER_00>Because like I don't think it's a situation where she was like, I don't think that the material world matters.

<v SPEAKER_00>But her theory of it was largely that you actually need to awaken these people who have a lot of power towards the problem so that you can address then the material.

<v SPEAKER_00>Right.

<v SPEAKER_02>But I mean, I just mean in terms of like my own understanding of you know, like like Evie Magazine is as if somebody read Friedan's critique of women's magazines in the 50s and was like, we should do that, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>You know what I mean?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like it's it's it's very much like running the counterplay.

<v SPEAKER_02>And again, like she's very interested in like women's colleges, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Especially elite women's colleges and the tenure of you know, the tenor of what they're talking about.

<v SPEAKER_02>And you know, so I was I was looking up um uh details about the history of of Radcliffe, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>And from 1943 to 1960, the president of Radcliffe College is a man.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, and he is orienting Radcliffe toward this kind of feminine mystique uh sort of concepts, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>As he's navigating World War II issues, various other things.

<v SPEAKER_02>In July of 1960, uh Mary Bunting, so right before this comes out, becomes the president of Radcliffe, and she almost right away, she's mentioned briefly in the book, like launches all these initiatives to like increase the re-increase the seriousness of the education, to push for like full integration of the Harvard and Radcliffe classes, to make it so that the male Harvard professors can no longer refuse to teach uh the Radcliffe students, which they have been doing previously.

<v SPEAKER_02>And today, or when I was in college 25 years ago, Smith and Wellesley and all those places are super strongholds of like feminist thought, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>So it's like she I don't want to say like she got everything she wanted out of the world, but like out of the specific institutions that she focuses on as like the key ideas levers, like she she won those arguments.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so people who don't do you not agree with her, I guess is my question.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, do you not agree that that was a way of changing, like I think like it is clearly the case that, like, I mean, this is a I forget who said this quote.

<v SPEAKER_00>I read it in a New Yorker piece about um about the book, but that like, you know, there's no such thing as a book, a popular book that's ahead of its time.

<v SPEAKER_00>Because of course, if it got really popular, it's like resonating with something that is likely existing in the population already.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think that's like true of this book.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, but I also think that things can be organizing principles.

<v SPEAKER_00>That like these kinds of things, whether it's the the ability for it to like, you know, she has now the money and the prestige to start the national organization of women, and like uh she's able to then start like getting attention by from like, you know, the the president and and uh the first lady, and then is able to like actually start pushing for legislation.

<v SPEAKER_00>For instance, I mean the the uh she does this later on, but um stewardesses were getting um fired for for being pregnant.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like I just think that like it actually wasn't just oh, she got it out, she got Smith to change their curriculum a bit.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think like actually she did raise the consciousness of a bunch of like highly educated women and they began focusing on this as an issue.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, I mean, I think probably.

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, I just you know, it's I mean, this is not a criticism.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's just it's not if you asked me to write about the big changes in gender relations at the end of the 20th century, I would not have front-loaded this particular set of institutions and ideas in the same way.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm mostly used to hearing that view, like from conservatives, you know, who are saying like this, like this is bad, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>And these like media brainwashers have like made people deny their femininity, blah, blah, blah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I've, you know, for years looked at that and been like, I don't, you know, I to me, like something she does not talk about, right, is just the practical problems of being in a state of fairly extreme material dependency on your husband, who, you know, maybe he's not like the worst husband in America, you know, like he's not abusive or horrible, but maybe he's just like he's not treating you very well, you know, like he's not kind and attentive and he's having affairs like like Dondre, you know, madman is all we know about things.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, and so it's like there's a very common sense, basic way in which that dynamic is oppressive.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, even if the idealized, like mystique version of being a 1950s housewife would be great, that like the reality of being at the short end of an asymmetrical bargain, like would be really bad, and that people given the ability to obtain some more optionality would turn against that, particularly seeing the example of a cohort of women who got married at a very young age because there was a you know particular set of social circumstances happening in the late 1940s, but that people who grew up in those households later in the 60s and 70s would be saying, you know, I need to like, I I like want to find love and companionship in life and all kind of normal human universals, but like I want to be a little bit.

<v SPEAKER_02>More cautious about my own material circumstances and independence, just like a much less psychological version of the same story to me seems more central to what's going on.

<v SPEAKER_02>But because these social changes, as you're suggesting, are like they're actually quite a bit larger.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, you know, it's it's it's not it's not just that like her focus is.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think those like like you're correct.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I'm just like, if someone were to say, like, hey, like list like the top three things that shifted women's rights in the late 20th century, I'm like, you know, I I don't think I put a lot of stock into what the women's magazines were saying, um, like their their tenor or what stories they were publishing or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I just think that like you're approaching this from like kind of like what she does here that like then ends up being very resonant with a lot of women, and then you have, you know, she ends up writing another book about like all these women's uh, you know, reactions to the book and how they felt really seen.

<v SPEAKER_00>So like she does like she has block quotes that like no publisher would ever let you do.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like the number of block quotes in this book are like insane.

<v SPEAKER_00>That's more than a page and a half sometimes.

<v SPEAKER_00>And she's often just like quoting interviews she has, the women where she's just like, they're just expressing their like ennui and upsetness and I'm like, I'm like, the purpose of that is not always like I think the most important thing is like the ladies' magazine.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's like, hey, like from us and our standpoint in 20 in the 21st century, this seems like, yeah, of course, a lot of women felt unfulfilled after going to college and then like going to be a housewife.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like at the time, it like genuinely is like a very radical thing to become like a very popular notion.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like a lot of women, I think, were kind of confused by their own inability to be satisfied with the life that they were told was supposed to make them happy.

<v SPEAKER_00>And also just like not just unhappy at uh uh, you know, surprised or or confused about what how to think about that problem, but also just that the idea that it wasn't just a guilty secret, that there were like actually a lot of other women who felt the same way, and also that, you know, there was maybe a way out of it.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like at the very end, she like talks about how she has like, you know, you think it's real I mean, I don't know how real this is, but she's like, you think it's really hard to get back in the workforce.

<v SPEAKER_00>But actually, my friend like took two trips to New York City and now she's a journalist again.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I'm like, you know, okay, whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I just think that there's a level here.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, not today.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, but I I just think that there's like a level here where like what she's doing is actually in like raising the salience of unhappiness in a way that's not just the like common Freudian version.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like there was a version of this, which is like women, these women are like unhappy because they have been too educated, they've been given too much control out of the house uh before they get married.

<v SPEAKER_00>We've raised their expectations too much about what life is supposed to look like, their power in politics, et cetera.

<v SPEAKER_00>And Fredan's like saying, like, no, like you're right that these women are like really unhappy, but like the thing they're unhappy about is that all women are people.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like if you're a person, just like man, that like you are missing out on being able to live to your full capacity if you are then stunted at the age of like 21 and you get married and you have no ability to exercise life on that.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so like I think, I think this book is doing more than what you think it's doing.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think it's like the interiority of it, I think, is actually like important.

<v SPEAKER_02>So the book has a uh interesting relationship to empirical social science.

<v SPEAKER_02>As do we all.

<v SPEAKER_02>Which is a topic that you and I sometimes joke about.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um Matt hates social science.

<v SPEAKER_02>If you were doing this today, you would expect some charts about how happy people.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think there's one table in the whole book.

<v SPEAKER_02>Were it's so good.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, like what do you make of that?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, clearly just from the book's sales, like clearly it resonated with a lot of people, as you were saying.

<v SPEAKER_02>But like, is it true that housewives circa 1960 were unhappy compared to women in 1930 and 1990?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, do we We may never know.

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, she definitely doesn't.

<v SPEAKER_00>No, I mean, I um, you know, in some ways, it's actually kind of like fun to read a book where like there was like such a like a dearth of data that you could just like say whatever you wanted and like provide some like suggestive evidence, but then like you're not like actually required to do that much research because it was actually there's not like widespread surveys of American housewives in like the 1930s and a panel every single year for like, you know, 20 years.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like it's like at some level she's like freed of like the work that many people have to do now.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think you're right that it does lend her a level of um I think she should have a little bit more uncertainty about whether the relative unhappiness has changed since the 1930s.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think probably women who were like living through the Great Depression, they had like other things that were making them unhappy.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like the material abundance of the post-war era probably made a lot of people very happy about, you know, their lives and their ability to, you know, not be starving or eat whatever I don't know what depression food was.

<v SPEAKER_00>But um so I think that's probably true.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think that, you know, whether or not I think women in the 1930s were happier or less happy than the 1950s, I think what is true is that whether it's because, you know, we began pathologizing like millions of women at once, and like also we began prescribing like tons and tons of like psych uh you know, uh psychiatric medicine at this time.

<v SPEAKER_00>There was tons of reports outside of Freedan, particularly, of like lots and lots of women who were like anxious and depressed and whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>Now, whether that's like a, we are now measuring this for the first time, it's a we are now, because there is a now commercial incentive to prescribe this medication, we are just prescribing it even to women who otherwise would not have been pathologized, or it's a genuinely women are unhappy in a way that they haven't been before now.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like we may never know, but I don't I'm not sure how relevant that actually, how much of that actually matters.

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, I mean, it's just it's it's something to know.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's interesting so you know my uh grandmother on my father's side.

<v SPEAKER_02>I remember a conversation I had with her near the end of her life.

<v SPEAKER_02>Not like on her deathbed, but you know, she was she was old, but I was and I was a grown-up.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, and she was telling me um about how much better things were uh when she was a kid, yeah, when she was like a teenager.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I was like, you know, that was the Great Depression grandma and like World War II.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like it seems like really bad bad.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, but you know, I going back over the biographical details of her life, um you know, she was born in 1915.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, so you know, she would have been in her 20s in the depression, and she was working at a leftist newspaper uh at that time.

<v SPEAKER_02>And then after World War II, she got married, and then she was a housewife for over a decade.

<v SPEAKER_00>And and you should note that her husband was reportedly very abusive to her, like physically.

<v SPEAKER_00>So that seems like relevant to Freedance.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Not my grandmother.

<v SPEAKER_00>Oh, I'm so sorry.

<v SPEAKER_02>To be clear.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um no, no, I'm just saying like it's like parallel lives.

<v SPEAKER_02>And then in 1964, my grandmother uh gets goes on the staff of the nation, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>So it's she has this Wow, use the exact same life, but that's why I got so confused.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>So I got from this book why my grandma had this like sort of objectively wrong like 30s, because it's she is living that same tempo of life where like she was, I guess, like a like a new woman in the 30s, and then But it's also like I think everyone feels this way right about their youth.

<v SPEAKER_00>To an extent, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>But I mean, she experiences very specific, like post-war retrogression to housewife role, and then like post-feminine mystique, like re-emergence into the world of letters.

<v SPEAKER_02>She's a magazine editor, she starts publishing novels in the 70s, etc.

<v SPEAKER_02>I think without thinking about it a lot, a lot of us kind of have this um unidirectional view of history.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so, like, if feminism was more advanced in the 80s than in the 50s, it must have been even worse in the 20s.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And just the the point about the cadence here that you have, she just calls them the feminists.

<v SPEAKER_02>I guess we today would call them uh suffragettes or or first wave feminists, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>But like there's a generation of activism leading up to around 1920.

<v SPEAKER_02>And then there's like a 20-year period when the fruits of that activism are being born, and then there's this backslide, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>And now the backslide looks small in the historical sweep of things, and it's like more or less like one wave after another, you know, and and this, and you can even see like the fertility charts, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like if you zoom in, there's this huge crash.

<v SPEAKER_02>If you zoom out, it's just like steady decline and a and a 10-year blip upwards.

<v SPEAKER_02>That's a thing where like the the book is of its of its time, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>And it's about what we now know to be this kind of temporary dislocation.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, but the book itself is like a like a causal lever in reversing the tide, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>It certainly sees itself that way.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I mean, I think so.

<v SPEAKER_00>Louis Menand, he wrote this great piece in uh The New Yorker called Books as Bombs, where it talks about this book, but also like a bunch of other books around this time period that had like are credited with having like massive effects.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like whether it's um Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which is credited with like really kicking off a lot of the environmentalist movement and uh leading to the um you know regulation of DDT, or it's uh Ralph Nader's Um Unsafe at Any Speed, which ends up creating a bunch of consumer protection legislation regulations, um, or it's uh Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, all of these are like around like the 60s and 70s.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, there are there are many more of these books too.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, but like I don't think that like books can have this kind of impact now, or at least, you know, obviously it's debatable, like you said earlier, about whether or not you could really credit this book with like having done all of second wave feminism.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like it's unclear if like that's like something you could really say.

<v SPEAKER_00>But even plausibly, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like books now that are like topping the New York Times bestseller list, like is like not achieving the level of widespread interaction.

<v SPEAKER_00>And one thing that, you know, I think it's in one of the forewords or closes of this book is that like many people will say they have read the feminine mystique, and then like you'll ask them about like they're just like aware of the discourse in a way.

<v SPEAKER_00>And this is true of like all books.

<v SPEAKER_02>But that's like Pickety, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Yes.

<v SPEAKER_00>That's true.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I I mean, even Piketty, I mean, like, I don't know, like, do you view that as like our our generations?

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, but I I think one of the differences here, right, is that the the formal argumentative strategy of the feminine mystique is you should read this book, you should tell other people to read this book, you should tell the magazines that you read to like think about the themes of this book, you should, as a magazine writer, you should, as a college professor, as a high school teacher, you should just like say the stuff that this book says.

<v SPEAKER_02>And that it's not just that that causes the change, that is the change.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Right.

<v SPEAKER_02>Piketty absolutely changed how people talk about the phenomena that are discussed in Piketty's book, but that didn't change the phenomena that Piketty talks about in his book, because like some other other things would have to happen.

<v SPEAKER_02>And Capitol in the 21st century doesn't have as good of an argumentative strategy at all.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like he says the thing that in the past caused the kind of income compression that I want is the massive destruction of World War II.

<v SPEAKER_02>And then he's like, So am I saying we should do that again?

<v SPEAKER_02>He's like, No, I'm not, because like I'm not a crazy person.

<v SPEAKER_02>So, what I want to happen is this whole set of policy changes that's never been seen before in the world.

<v SPEAKER_02>And we're like, he proposes a wealth tax that's like violates the terms of the US Constitution, you know, et cetera.

<v SPEAKER_02>So it's like the book is very successful, qua book, but it doesn't achieve its goals.

<v SPEAKER_02>Whereas like Friedan actually sets her goals.

<v SPEAKER_02>Second wave feminism is such a big change in how American society operates, but so much of the change is itself like about what ideals are held up.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, what do we say people should be aspiring to, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she says, you know, in one of her afterwards, right, it's like women are making, you know, she's doing a crude gender pay gap analysis, and she's at like 73 cents of the dollar by the time she's writing it.

<v SPEAKER_02>And like, eh, not that many women's CEOs and stuff like that.

<v SPEAKER_02>But I think she can say legitimately that by the 20th anniversary of this book, to say nothing of the 30th or the 60th, like people are not being guilt tripped by the mainstream media into the idea that they need to be housewives.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like it has become just really accepted in America that like a married mother can have a job, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like she and because the the goal is to have it be that people say that that's okay.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so, like, she just achieved that, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Well, I mean, like, even outside of that, but like, I mean, I mean, I mean, the other books though aren't like that.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like Silent Spring is a very specific regulatory goal.

<v SPEAKER_00>So, I'll tell you everybody's speed, a very regular goal.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like Death and Life of Great Americans, like, let's destroy Robert Moses works.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, I mean, like, you know, I think Yes, and no, I I I think all those are wind up being more ambiguous, though, because they have this slightly different.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think that we should talk about the most insane stuff that that Betty Ferdin says.

<v SPEAKER_02>Oh, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>So, okay, if you read the first, I would say the introduction of like the first two chapters of this book.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>I think like a normal 21st century lib is gonna be like, she's really cooking here, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, even if you have some doubts about the empirical identification, it like it just like it rings true.

<v SPEAKER_02>Sure.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know what I mean?

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like this like seems correct.

<v SPEAKER_00>Later in the book, There's so many psychotic parts of this.

<v SPEAKER_02>I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think we should trade the mic.

<v SPEAKER_00>Which what's your favorite?

<v SPEAKER_00>Which one do you want to call out?

<v SPEAKER_02>Okay.

<v SPEAKER_02>She quotes a general as complaining that prisoners of war during the Korean War are like soft and weak compared to World War II era prisoners.

<v SPEAKER_02>And then she further adds that they are dying at a higher rate while held in captivity.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so you're waiting for like, maybe this has to do with the cruelty of their North Korean captors or the low living standards.

<v SPEAKER_02>No, she blames it on the fact that they were raised by housewives, that the earlier generation of not an exaggeration was raised by these like tough-minded career women, so they could stick it out in the Nazi POW camp.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um in the same chapter, right, she says these housewives are making their sons gay, um, their daughters are sluts.

<v SPEAKER_02>She doesn't use that word, but like that's what she's saying.

<v SPEAKER_00>I just want to be very clear about the mechanism for the gay thing.

<v SPEAKER_00>Because I think this is like actually quite interesting.

<v SPEAKER_00>What she is saying, what she is saying is that women, um, because they are forced to cut off all of their aspirations and their ability to meet their own capacities to just the home life, are forced to redirect that towards their sons, who they will eventually be able to have like an outside life, be able to live the life of the mind, you know, have careers or whatever it is.

<v SPEAKER_00>And because they create such an intense like bonding, and I think that like there's like a tons of like memes now about like mother-son, like, you know, relationships like boy moms or whatever, but like she's doing boy mom analysis.

<v SPEAKER_00>She's like, these boy moms are like so enmeshed with each other that these sons cannot have normal relationships with women, and they turn against women and they're stunted.

<v SPEAKER_00>So it's not just as if like you're making your kid gay, but that like homosexual men are like emotionally stunted beings that like do not have the capacity to have fulfilling relationships even with other men.

<v SPEAKER_00>Anyway, the it's one of those tricks in the book which makes me think like this is Betty Friedien going, huh?

<v SPEAKER_00>Okay, so I figured out how to get the feminists on board, I figured out how to get some of these house ones on boards.

<v SPEAKER_00>Now, how do I get some of these like homophobes on board with my argument?

<v SPEAKER_00>Let me explain to them exactly how homosexuality is the result of this feminine mystique.

<v SPEAKER_00>The other one that I think is like really um crazy, especially because this book is published in 1961, so she's writing the 1950s, which is the time when we're like learning about all the atrocities of the Holocaust.

<v SPEAKER_00>She has an entire chapter, which is literally just about how housewives are like concentration camp prisoners.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yes.

<v SPEAKER_02>She does do that.

<v SPEAKER_00>At one point she says, like, obviously it's not the exact same thing I'm paraphrasing or whatever, but I do think that I mean, you know, raises some questions uh for me about the uh, you know, uh her her metaphorical choices.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think that like you could not like no one would have like the mind space to even like write something like that now.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, in many ways, that's a good thing, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, you would think about the critiques that would obviously come from someone raising that problem, and then you would go, like, I'm just not gonna say that.

<v SPEAKER_00>I'm gonna say something else that's like more rational and that less insane.

<v SPEAKER_00>But also, like there's like a freedom to this book, like what you were saying at the very beginning, Matt, about like how she can like just write about what she knows without having to like worry about like the intersectionality.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think this is like this is like the like flip side of that.

<v SPEAKER_00>This is like the negative side of that.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, she has like no sense of like the critiques that will come from her work, and she's like not, those people are not in her head, she's not defensively writing.

<v SPEAKER_00>So then as a result, she's like, okay, yeah, being a housewife is like being a concentration camp pretty.

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, the concentration camp thing is insane.

<v SPEAKER_02>I think the earlier thing, the the homosexuality one, to be clear, I do not endorse We do not endorse any of these views.

<v SPEAKER_02>But I think the like meta question of like the argumentative strategy of this book is really, really interesting.

<v SPEAKER_02>And like clearly something that you know has occurred to her, right, is that like men and people who value the traditional virtues of masculinity are going to not like this book and are going to say that it is bad.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she is trying really, really hard to win over like her swing voters on this, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>She is at pains to say that if mothers work outside the home, that's going to raise their sons to be manlier men.

<v SPEAKER_02>She has a lot of stuff in here, which I think if you like double-blinded it, could be out of like Jonathan Haidt book from last year, you know, about these like helicopter parents and you know, like the kids.

<v SPEAKER_00>It makes me think, is there like any generation that's like, yeah, the kids were raised well this time?

<v SPEAKER_00>Probably not.

<v SPEAKER_02>But I mean, but I just mean, you know, it's like she is really wants men or or people who value traditional masculinity to think that her agenda is going to be good for them.

<v SPEAKER_03>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And is like trying to say that, like, clearly her concern with the feminine mystique is about its impact on her and on people who are very, very like her.

<v SPEAKER_02>But she wants you to think that the like larger social consequence is it's like turning all of America sort of like frilly and absurd.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she gets into this thing about the consumer.

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, but you know literally though.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, but like in keeping with the concerns of the time.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, you know?

<v SPEAKER_02>And she's like, the the the closest to like a like a materialist part of the book is about the advertising of these consumer wares.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she's like really trying to say it's like, look, like you can get the instant bake mix if you want, but just like use it so that you can cook faster, so that you can do something other than cooking.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like if you have a better appliance, you can just clean your house faster and not worry as much about it.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she's also like, you could just clean your house less, you know?

<v SPEAKER_02>She has this whole thing about how like when you become a full-time housewife, you have nothing else to do.

<v SPEAKER_02>So you start fussing and saying, well, we've got to vacuum the floors three times a week instead of twice, we've got to mop more.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she's like against all of that.

<v SPEAKER_02>So she's she's positioning herself.

<v SPEAKER_02>I don't want to say like favorably to men, but favorably to a kind of like a like a masculine vision.

<v SPEAKER_02>More lived out man, though.

<v SPEAKER_02>Right.

<v SPEAKER_02>But I mean, she she wants men to agree with her about this.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I mean, she's explicitly like, I mean, one thing I thought that was really interesting in the book is that like it is very uh clear that it views women in many ways as culpable in their own subjugation, that like the choice to like be enthralled, the feminine mystique, the choice to decide to like you're gonna go home and make your entire life about a man uh and your children, is not just the product of people, you know, limiting your options and capacity, whether through telling you not to go study science or telling you that it's unfeminine and that you're not gonna be able to get married and force you to choose between being a happy home wife and uh having having a happy home life and having a fulfilling career.

<v SPEAKER_00>But it's also that like freedom is scary.

<v SPEAKER_00>She's like she says something like almost exactly like that.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, freedom is terrifying, and women were afraid of having the consequences of that freedom, and that it was actually easier and safer for them to like shun it and just accept the feminine mystique as being true.

<v SPEAKER_00>And this also, I think, similar to what you said, is like is a result of wanting to appeal to men.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think it's also like, I think she genuinely does give women a lot of agency in their own subjugation, which I'm like not totally sure how I feel about this.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, like, I don't really think that explains it.

<v SPEAKER_00>I would imagine it's more like there are rationalizations that a lot of women go through in order to make the like circumstances of having to be like a second-class citizen not horrible.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, okay, perhaps I had no opportunity like my brother did to become a doctor, but I am going to rationalize that by saying, like, well, the home I can throw myself into the home life.

<v SPEAKER_00>I'm gonna make it really important, I'm gonna treat my kids really well, I'm going to like get involved in my local community, my PTA.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, there's a really great book.

<v SPEAKER_00>Uh, you won't get into the whole thing here, but about like how uh, you know, a lot of actually like NIMBY activism in the Boston suburbs is like created a lot by these like highly educated women who don't actually have um full time careers outside the home.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like they're like really involved in their communities and doing politics and all this kind of thing.

<v SPEAKER_00>And it's like, I don't think that that's like uh I think that like Free Dan is a little bit too harsh on them.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's interesting, you know.

<v SPEAKER_02>Because I mean again, it it speaks to the question of like what I think is.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, what's really going on here?

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, because she throughout the whole book has this aw shucks pose, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, she's a housewife who like dabbled in writing for women's magazines.

<v SPEAKER_02>She was doing this Smith College survey.

<v SPEAKER_02>She talked to women, she found that they had this problem in common, like a problem with no name.

<v SPEAKER_02>And you're like, all right, all right.

<v SPEAKER_02>But then she's like has very specific takes about like Margaret Mead, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>And like the influence of Margaret Meade's anthropology and incredibly specific critiques of like Columbia Teachers College and like what it's saying about people.

<v SPEAKER_02>And if you read about her, you know, biographically, like she's Jewish, which she doesn't mention while doing this absurd concentration camp analogy.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, or like saying that like Freud was sexist because he was Jewish, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>I didn't know about this.

<v SPEAKER_00>She likes cites like the the the the what is it, the one of the prayers that is no longer in vogue, but that every single morning uh Jewish men will say like three prayers, one of which is, thank you, God, for not making me a woman.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>Which I know, I looked into it, but apparently that's like a I mean it was very controversial even when the Torah was being, you know, the Almond was being debated.

<v SPEAKER_02>They didn't have that in my synagogue.

<v SPEAKER_00>Uh, yeah, apparently reformed Jews were like, no.

<v SPEAKER_02>Even the conservative Jews don't really say it anymore.

<v SPEAKER_02>We cut that one out.

<v SPEAKER_02>So I just I just want to be clear again.

<v SPEAKER_00>I am not justifying the anti-Semitic choice.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm just I just I just think like, you know, there's a there's a a presentation of self in any kind of book.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she's doing something here where she's she's obscuring her origins in like popular front.

<v SPEAKER_00>She does understand uh intersectionality.

<v SPEAKER_02>Writing.

<v SPEAKER_02>On one level, this book is like remarkably blind to questions of race in American life.

<v SPEAKER_02>On the other hand, it can't actually be blind because she talks about her meeting with Thurgood Marshall at one point.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, she criticizes women's magazines for not covering the civil rights.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's brief, you know what I mean?

<v SPEAKER_02>But she keeps like dolloping in that she's actually incredibly aware of this like wrenching social conflict that is playing out.

<v SPEAKER_02>She's just not talking about it, you know, like deliberately, but obscurely.

<v SPEAKER_02>And like, I think to an extent, and as you say, right, the book seems to be talking about the life of the mind.

<v SPEAKER_02>But then, like, one of the big things that she does when she she creates now is like this campaign about mandatory retirement ages for stewardesses.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Which is like, I'd wanna say it has nothing to do with the themes in the book, but if all the information you had was the text of the book, you'd be like, why would she possibly care about this, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>So like she But this is my point broadly about it, is that like she is aware that like awakening people who have a lot of political power and like reorienting their thinking towards this problem versus the other things people were talking about is like genuinely a way of getting the material stuff done.

<v SPEAKER_00>So I think like there's a lot of critiques of her of being like, she's not materialist.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I'm like, I think she's just like aware of like, yes, you're a materialist.

<v SPEAKER_00>Now, how do you get the material circumstances to change?

<v SPEAKER_00>You have to like pass laws.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, you know what I mean?

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, I have a revolution.

<v SPEAKER_02>I just I just wonder about everything, like how seriously you want to take sort of what the Freedan character is saying in this book versus what does Betty Freedan, the person who we like to know more about.

<v SPEAKER_02>Because the book was very successful, she did a lot of things after the book, and we also know a lot about her, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>In a way you wouldn't necessarily um, you know, and so you never a hundred percent know with like an activist book.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, like, you know, how how on the level is any of it.

<v SPEAKER_02>I I wanted to mention Stevenson and Wolfers on the declining female happiness paradox, because Friedane does not promise us that like if we do what she wants, women will be happier on average.

<v SPEAKER_02>But I think that's clear the implication of what she's writing.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, uh, two uh, you know, well-known progressive economists.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, you probably see uh Justin on television.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh Australian.

<v SPEAKER_01>Australian.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um uh Betsy was in the Obama administration.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um they wrote a paper looking at actual survey evidence, which only goes back to 1972, so not quite to the Friedan era.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um but they show that women have become less happy uh across the last quarter of the 20th century and into the 21st century.

<v SPEAKER_02>Not like dramatically less happy, but distinctly less happy, um, while men have become somewhat happier.

<v SPEAKER_02>And, you know, they don't like say why this is or what they're thinking is, but they characterize it as a paradox because obviously women's incomes have risen during this time, with the scope of professional opportunities available has risen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

<v SPEAKER_02>And that was like the the thing that we know in retrospect that like I most wanted to like put in dialogue with the author of this book.

<v SPEAKER_02>I do think it's kind of hard.

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, it's 10 years.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>A lot of the things she wanted happened.

<v SPEAKER_02>Between 1961 and 1970.

<v SPEAKER_02>So I mean, maybe 1972 was the peak and things got worse after that.

<v SPEAKER_00>1971, beginning of the antique growth era, that's why everyone's getting unhappier.

<v SPEAKER_02>Maybe.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think she's stagnant.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, stagnating productivity, I don't know, you know?

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, I think the closest thing to what I think I've heard Stevenson say is like taking seriously the like scariness of freedom, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>That it's like when you say to people, the most you can aspire to is to be like a good homemaker and a good mother.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um a lot of people can do that.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh when you say to people, like you should aspire to, you know, be like Margaret Mead or, you know, to like be a senator or like be the CEO of Pepsi or whatever, like very few women can achieve at the level of the highest achieving women, not because of like their lack of like that's how that's the nature of success, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>And so it's like, you know, there's not a lot of consideration given in the text to like, so what if you like try really hard and set your sights high and then you don't make it?

<v SPEAKER_00>I think that like she does, I mean, she obviously doesn't explicitly engage with that like at length directly, but I think that this is something that men grapple with all the time.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like there's like a value that she has, which I share too, which is just that like men are grappling.

<v SPEAKER_00>That is But I just mean like there's a there's we're always wrestling with our feelings.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, very true.

<v SPEAKER_00>But there's like the the fulfilling your capacity as a human being or attempting to fulfill it is like itself a like satisfying feeling.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like when you apply yourself to a difficult problem, like even if you like can't figure it out totally, like that is like maybe it's not like fun or enjoyable in the moment, but it makes you feel happy that you did it or satisfied about yourself.

<v SPEAKER_00>Which is why like a lot of the happiness polling and satisfying research satisfaction, like uh satisf- is that a word?

<v SPEAKER_02>Satisfaction.

<v SPEAKER_02>Satisfaction, thank you.

<v SPEAKER_02>I can't get no satisfaction.

<v SPEAKER_00>A lot of the happiness polling and a lot of the satisfaction research.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like it's very difficult to know what people mean, particularly when you look at the World Value Survey, you look at different countries, and people are like defining this differently.

<v SPEAKER_00>Anyway, okay, before we get to our peer review section where we'll talk about a social science research paper of the day, Matt has an interesting one for us.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, we're gonna, whenever we do a book club like this, we're going to um rate the book, not based on how much we liked it or, you know, ineffable how good it was, whatever, but just like how successful do we think this book was at its aims?

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, out of 10, uh, 10 being the highest, one being the lowest.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think this is like an eight.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's an eight.

<v SPEAKER_02>I think this is like a 10.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, I don't I just like I I think it's like hard to imagine an equivalently ambitious book seeing its ambitions achieved on the level that this I mean.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, I don't think she literally says like women are earning 73 cents on the doll.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, she clearly does not feel like we've accomplished feminism.

<v SPEAKER_02>No, but she adds in her afterwards like more ambitious goals for herself and for now, because the goals within the four walls of the book are like so completely achieved.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, I think, I think like everything you could say, not everything like conservatives could say, but like all the critiques from the left of this book, like whether you agree with them or not, are just like all downstream of the fact that like everything she's advocating for in this book has been achieved.

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, this book comes out in Kennedy administration.

<v SPEAKER_02>There's no women in the JFK or LBJ cabinets.

<v SPEAKER_02>There had been a woman in uh Roosevelt Truman and a different one under Eisenhower.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, but like it was just okay to have a cabinet with no women in it at the time that this came out.

<v SPEAKER_02>And today it's like Donald Trump has a woman as White House chief of staff, you know.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I will say both of you and I have recently written and we'll like link this somewhere, but about like the girl boss um and about girl boss feminism as something that we are reclaiming for me.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think you're just admiring it from from from outside the the girl bossing universe.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I I think in some ways, like, I mean, Betty Friedana is doing like almost like the original girl boss take.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um I think so.

<v SPEAKER_00>What you don't think so?

<v SPEAKER_00>It's interesting.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's something that at the time is considered, I mean, the critiques of her are not like that's bad.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's that like you are underinclusive of like of what girl bosses can be.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like now it's like, you know, we're in this moment where even the idea that progress could happen through women gaining more power commercially or in the academy, whatever, like that is considered like almost like not just naive, but like counterproductive to feminism, progressivism, et cetera, because you're like validating the existing systems, hierarchies.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think that like whatever you think about like the appropriate like structure of the economy, if you look at like literally how people's material reality shifts as a result of steps you can take right now, like increasing representation of like minority groups or like women is like a clear way of actually accessing that.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I just think that it's something we're like, I think she's ahead of her time.

<v SPEAKER_00>She's the original girl boss.

<v SPEAKER_02>Something that I thought was interesting relative to my expectations and like I was expecting this to be like a truly like proto-girl boss book.

<v SPEAKER_02>She has remarkably little to say, actually, about careers in like for-profit industry.

<v SPEAKER_02>She's very focused on media, academia, and sort of um, you know, what in the 19th century?

<v SPEAKER_00>Media was for-profit.

<v SPEAKER_02>They call it Yeah, yeah, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>But in but it's specific sectors, you know, like like the learned professions, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like she clearly wants to see more women doctors, more women research scientists, more women professors, more women writing books, more women involved in politics.

<v SPEAKER_02>She doesn't say anything about like more women advertising executives.

<v SPEAKER_02>As middle managers at General Motors, or whatever were like the majority of the Trevor Burrus, Well, I think this is a point where like, I mean, like it's good to bring back the like Betty for Dan thinking clearly about the politics of what she's saying.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I think in some ways what's going on here is like it is less threatening to a lot of the potential commercial interests, or like the places where men are largely getting their jobs to be like, oh, like they want to be professors or they want to be like, you know what I mean?

<v SPEAKER_00>They want to be lawyers, maybe or something like that.

<v SPEAKER_00>But they're not like trying to like come to like your power plant to like take your job.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, but I I also think it's it's a little bit the like internal conflicted leftist within her.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Doesn't really want to be like a true, you know, capitalism cheerleader for Cheryl Sandberg.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, there's a cohort of like pioneering women on Wall Street.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, who like I think of as very much like second wave figures, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>But that's like actually not what the book is.

<v SPEAKER_02>The book's not not about them, but it also isn't about them.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, it's it's just it's one of those things where it's not quite what I what I thought.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's it's more focused on like thinky people than on uh business people.

<v SPEAKER_00>The end state that she's looking for for women, where they have access to these highest echelons of elite society and life of the mind, like right now.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, one critique that a lot of feminists have is that like, yeah, there still is a huge gap of like what women get to be CEOs and like law professors and whatever and like disparities there.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, to me, like that indicates that there's still she would not view this to be the the the apotheosis of even this specific book's goals.

<v SPEAKER_02>All right.

<v SPEAKER_02>Peer review?

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, let's move on.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, we'll talk about it.

<v SPEAKER_02>So, Matt, what do you have for us?

<v SPEAKER_02>Okay, peer review.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, this is a paper by Tadeha Grockner, Claire Boone, Patrick Turley, and Paul Gertler.

<v SPEAKER_02>It is called Early Life Sugar Restrictions Reduce Genetic Disparities in Adult Adiposity.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, adiposity is uh being fat, uh, as I understand it.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, so they're looking at um UK sugar rationing, which lasted until after World War II and has been the source of uh a good amount of interesting research on what happens when kids can't have sugar.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, but they link this with um UK biobank data, so like genetic information about people.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so one of the things they show is like it's well known, people have different genetic predispositions to obesity.

<v SPEAKER_02>But they show that kids who were born during the rationing era, and this like didn't eat sugar when they were really little, are much less obese as adults, and that that's concentrated in the people who have high genetic predisposition to obesity.

<v SPEAKER_02>That's that that what's happening is some kind of interaction between the genetic predisposition and early life uh sugar consumption.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, I mean, no, I mean, it like there's like a broad take that like sugar is just like bad for everyone, and like I think it's probably true to some extent.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like what this paper does is that there's like almost no benefit to like the low-risk group at all from this.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like it's almost entirely the high-risk group for obesity that like gets the benefits from this.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like, I mean, we're like living in the GLP1 era right now, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Where there's like a much better like rethinking about obesity as not just being about like kind of personal choices, but being about like genuine like health, like underlying health uh uh shifts or uh or genetic uh differences between people.

<v SPEAKER_00>And um, that seems like even more so validated by this paper.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I mean, I just I think it also like doesn't fully validate the genetic version of obesity either, because this is like just an environmental story.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like this is about like you can just take sugar out of the environment and then you'll have this like massive benefits.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's like both camps.

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, it helps you explain, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Because there you mean you you see a lot of discourse about this, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>But it's like if you look cross-sectionally at obesity, it seems to be almost entirely genetic.

<v SPEAKER_02>But if you look in a time series term, obesity rises like way too quickly for like human evolution to explain it.

<v SPEAKER_02>These are different kinds of explanations, but this I think helps us understand how like both of those things can be true, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>That like the availability of early life sugar is like the proximate cause.

<v SPEAKER_02>And yet the incidence is very heavily determined.

<v SPEAKER_00>This is also a very like, you know, Matt Iglesias paper at this moment because like you're because you're so uh uh opposed to a lot of these social science which papers are kind of vague.

<v SPEAKER_00>This is like this is just like, hey, clear answer.

<v SPEAKER_00>Don't give your young children sugar.

<v SPEAKER_00>Don't do it.

<v SPEAKER_02>There's an interesting policy question.

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, I think to me, like we're supposed to talk about liberalism, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, here at the argument.

<v SPEAKER_00>Everything's about liberalism.

<v SPEAKER_02>I think these questions about uh like like paternalism and like you know, like self-harm, et cetera, are some of the um most challenging like questions in liberal theory, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like there's like a good amount of evidence that like UK sugar rationing, which was imposed as a kind of like loopy economic measure, but that like this had like significant public health benefits.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so like maybe from a technocratic standpoint, right, it's like the government should be like much more aggressively uh restricting access to Michael Bloomberg to sugar.

<v SPEAKER_02>Right.

<v SPEAKER_02>But then on the other hand, I mean, there's like basic freedom concerns, but also the fact that like actually for most people, like giving the kids sugar is fine, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>And that's the same thing.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like the median cocaine user will have a good time and will just stop doing it because it can be.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, I think this is relevant to the smartphone debate that everyone's having right now.

<v SPEAKER_00>And gambling and everything.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think that like people would be kind of almost more uncomfortable with one that's like, we're gonna test your genetic predisposition to all of these things and then restrict them if you are actually genetically predisposed to like gambling or smartphone addiction or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like, I don't know, in some ways, that feels worse to me than like a broad scale, like no one gets sugar.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like no one gets sugar.

<v SPEAKER_02>If every child who like had sweets developed serious health problems as a consequence, then I think we would say, whatever our feelings about liberal freedom, like we're gonna just like make that not be the case.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>If it was but since it's a minority, like it's weird because it seems odd to like restrict everybody's behavior for the sake of a subset of the population.

<v SPEAKER_02>But to do it with the genetic testing would be like triple insane.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, so it's like, yeah, uh and it's like you almost wish this problem was more severe, because then it would have a clearer.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, it's funny because we're about to have this problem with cars, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like with self-driving cars, um, as Waymo kind of expands to a bunch of different cities, um, you know, not soon, but like once you have like real penetration across the United States, there's more like real questions about like removing people's ability to drive without self-driving cars because of how many people die as a result.

<v SPEAKER_00>And this is another case where like similarly, like you could imagine, I mean, unlike with sugar, you don't have to like do genetics, but like if you like, let's say, for instance, it's really easy to take away your license if you get into like a ridiculous accident.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like you now you're not like worried about like, well, can you get to work or whatever?

<v SPEAKER_00>Because you could just take away Mo.

<v SPEAKER_00>And that's one way to deal with it, but I think it's actually gonna like raise like much more of like the broader question about like, okay, everyone in society benefits because like 30,000 people fewer a year are gonna die.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like, I'm a good driver or my friend's a good driver.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, why are we not getting to like hit the open road with our cars?

<v SPEAKER_00>And I I think it's like almost even even harder problem for like the libertarian-minded people, because like the ineffable I like to drive my car thing is like I think more difficult to quantify in like a so in like a policy context than like food, which is like I think a very like normal thing that people are eating all the time.

<v SPEAKER_02>But this is like a reflection I had on feminine mystique, which was, you know, when I first popped open the chapter about Freud, I'm like, why is she talking so much about Freud and psycho?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, nobody takes this seriously.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's just wrong.

<v SPEAKER_02>And her whole critique of it itself, like, is weird.

<v SPEAKER_02>Because she's taking it so seriously.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>But then I, you know, I I read, I learned, and, you know, I not just her book, but but read about the topic.

<v SPEAKER_02>And it's like that was considered state-of-the-art science in the 1930s.

<v SPEAKER_00>Mind boggling, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>And so kicked people out of psych, like psych fields for like contradicting Freud.

<v SPEAKER_02>Right.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so the people of 1957 who would be saying sort of educated progressive takes about like, we need to listen to the science, we need to trust the experts, we can't have this like, this like, frankly, like nut job conspiracy theorist who's like the magazine editors and the bakery marketers are in league with these foreign Jews to tell, you know, but it's like she was right fundamentally.

<v SPEAKER_02>And the Freudians, like, the Jews part, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>No, but you know what I mean?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, it's in retrospect, that part of the book, you're like, this is pointless.

<v SPEAKER_02>This is not even interesting.

<v SPEAKER_02>But like at the time, that's probably actually the most significant argument.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so now we're here and we're like, well, this is a better time than that.

<v SPEAKER_02>These are, you know, people at Rand and, you know, leading schools.

<v SPEAKER_02>But I'm just like, I become more reluctant than I was 15 years ago or 10 years ago, even five years ago, to be like, we got this social science, and it like says there will be like large benefits if we do this thing.

<v SPEAKER_00>And it's like I'm really gonna restrict freedoms on the basis of a white paper.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, like I'm just like, I'm very, I think our current empirical methods are like a lot better than Freud's, but I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_00>Uh and on that note, I think it's a good place to wrap up peer review, uh, which is supposed to be a more positive take on social science, but got a little doomy at the end there.

<v SPEAKER_00>If you enjoy this conversation, um, please subscribe, comment.

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<v SPEAKER_00>Hi.