Friedan called it, the problem that has no name,
and without considering,
we threw ourselves
into a world of producing.
Not life, not home
just little letters that followed our names,
and more zeros in our accounts.

The sacred art of home
the dignity of cultivating life
the great mystery of being a wife
We thought inferior to men’s work.

A dollar sign was supposed to give us
significance.
More than the living, breathing
fruit of our love.
We threw our birthright away
(at least Esau got a bowl of soup)
What did we get in exchange?

Empty wombs,
and the erasure of our kind.

Betty Frieden with her book, The Feminine Mystique, helped launch the movement we know as Second Wave Feminism, in America. Riding on the coattails of French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger, Friedan argued that women would never find satisfaction within homemaking, motherhood, or wifedom. To Friedan, the domestic sphere was as dangerous as death for women. In her own words:

“women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps…they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.” The Feminine Mystique

For Friedan, the home, marriage, and children were the source of women’s stagnation. A woman could never reach her full potential if she kept to the domestic sphere of homemaking and motherhood. This is why she later helped found NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League). Motherhood was the ultimate hinderance to women’s success, and so she fought for the legalization of abortion.

It takes a great darkness of mind to see the home as a metaphorical death camp, while campaigning to make our wombs literal ones.

Friedan’s legacy lives on as women continue to disparage marriage as an inhibiting institution. Whenever we fear motherhood as a hinderance to our self-fulfillment, we are echoing her thoughts after her. For every scoff upon a women announcing her choice to prioritize her home, her husband, or her children, we hear the ghost of Freidan and her costly ideas. For it was not merely the home that she denigrated, but the holy institution of marriage, and the very life of children.

Friedan and her contemporaries popularized ideas that have had costly ripple effects as they were embraced wholeheartedly by women across the west. They have led to the loss of any meaningful way to categorize Woman. They have led to generations of women who live with an existential angst about what it means to be of our sex. They have led to a false dichotomy between motherhood and other pursuits, and have created a false guilt in women who have the good desire to marry and have children. Most costly of all, they have led to millions of lost lives through abortion.

And as women gave up so much of what it means to be a woman for what Friedan promised would offer fulfillment and satisfaction, that problem that has no name has yet to be solved. It still rests in the heart of women inside or outside of the home, because the problem was never with marriage, or children, or the domestic sphere, but within the heart. And there is only one solution to problems of the heart, and that is Christ.