《孤島手札》《女性的奧秘》(‘The Feminine Mystique’ at 50) ‘Take to the streets!’

去年只寫《孤島手札》是本"還不錯的書"，實在有點應付。剛剛整理書堆，心岱 《孤島手札》再現。因為是新北市政府的書(序號：北臺灣文學115)，先有市長、文化局長、編輯委員代表的3篇序，令人有點不悅。不過第1篇交待孤島地理、歷史，該島還有一個與德國黑森林同名的"卡薩多"建案，有點魅力......(文字成熟......)

• 作者：心岱/ 盧紀君攝影
• 出版社：新北市政府文化局
• 出版日期：2012年

「孤島手札」便是在靜靜的河水上修書，是作家心岱從熱鬧繁華的台北城內，搬至城外山光水秀的八里，這三年的新生活絮語，在把它獻給新北市時，特邀請攝 影師盧紀君為此書增添畫面，八里的奇幻之美，從他的鏡頭裡，展現給予讀者無限想像的境界。心岱擅長透過深情的文學張力，表達她對世間萬事萬物的覺知，本書 為散文作品，以書信體呈現，速寫了生活空間的實相與虛象。

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重讀《女性的奧秘》，女性如何被排斥於主流之外

GAIL COLLINS 報道 2013年03月08日

Illustration by Tom Gauld

每個作家都渴望寫出一本能把握當下的書――在同輩人注意到一個時代所存在的問題之前就對 之做出完美闡釋。當然，這樣的願望幾乎永遠不能實現。大部分情況下，我們不過是因為用了一種有趣的方式解讀大家已知存在的問題而欣慰罷。但貝蒂·弗利丹 (Betty Friedan)卻實現了大家的夢想，摘取了這一桂冠。《女性的奧秘》(The Feminine Mystique)1963年出版以後，它帶來的強烈社會反響讓弗利丹根據女性讀者的反饋又寫了一本書（取名為《它改變了我的生活》“It Changed My Life”）。 如果有人要列一份二十世紀最重要書籍的書單，《女性的奧秘》毫無疑問將榜上有名。當然，這本書也登上了某保守主義雜誌所列舉的“十九世紀和二十世紀十大有 害書籍”榜單，哪怕這算不上對該書的褒揚，也至少證明了其給讀者和社會造成的強大衝擊力。

這本書在出版五十年後的今天仍具影響力。在她討論《女性的奧秘》及其影響力的新作《不同尋常的混亂》(A Strange Stirring)中，史戴芬尼·孔茨(Stephanie Coontz)提到她的學生在讀過諸如“性別販售”（The Sexual Sell) 一類章節之後產生“發自肺腑的共鳴”，認為這樣的章節讓他們聯想到當代社會文化逼迫他們購買消費品以及“需要將自己作為消費品呈現出來”的壓力。當然，如 果讀者想要知道美國女性生活和社會地位在過去半個世紀里的變化，以及她們從多莉絲·戴（Doris Day，上個世紀五六十年代有名的歌手和電影演員，出演了一系列描述上班族女性愛情生活為主題的電影——譯註）到“殺吸血鬼的布菲”(Buffy the Vampire Slayer)這之間的轉變及之後發生的一切，你必須從這本書看起。

評論家們和許多這本書的熱心讀者都覺得她們有必要指出《女性的奧秘》存在的疏漏，他們也理應為弗利丹在民權運動期間寫就這本書卻沒能提及黑人婦女而 感到困惑。此外，弗利丹只在談到想繼續工作的已婚婦女請管家或者保姆的時候，才提及工人階級女性。更值得注意的是，弗利丹寫了一本討論美國社會對女性態度 的書，卻未涉及任何法律上的討論。在1963年，大部分的女性如果沒有一個男性共同簽名者就不能獲取信用。在若干州，她們不能當陪審團成員；還有一些州， 丈夫們不僅佔有她們的財產權同時還控制着她們的收入。雖然弗利丹在書中着力討論了女性工作權利相關的問題，但並未提及當時報紙的招聘版面是按性別劃分的， 以及招聘單位公開提及某些職位只招聘男性在當時也是完全合法的做法。甚至當時的聯邦政府也這麼干。

從某個特殊的角度來分析，該書的所有疏漏之處實際上也是其凸顯力度的地方。也就是說，《女性的奧秘》實際上是一本憤怒地揭示當時美國社會裡，那些受過優秀教育的聰明婦女是如何被排斥在美國主流職業社會之外，僅被當作穿着高跟鞋的生育機器的現狀的著作。總體來說，這本書相當私人化，從而使這本書極具衝 擊力和影響力。在書中，弗利丹說她之所以放棄了自己的研究生教育，是因為她學術上的成就對當時的男友來說是一種威脅。她對當時社會流行的那種認為新一代的 女大學生不過是通過大學教育而獲得所謂的“太太”學位，並把婚姻當成是她們追求高等教育的全部和終極目標的看法感到極端憤怒。她也因當時的精神病學家將家庭主婦們的不愉快狀態定義為一種力比多紊亂而感到憤慨。同時，她也因當時市場經濟將整個女性群體簡單看成是一群讓國家經濟繁榮的購物機器而感到憤怒，因為 這種看法認為女性存在價值就在於她們總是在購買新廚房用品並瘋狂地尋找完美的洗衣液。

此外，弗利丹對女性雜誌的攻擊也相當猛烈。弗利丹給這些雜誌寫過專欄，因此她可以舉出一個又一個它們如何兜售女性奧秘的手段和例子。書中有個例子講 的是一個有抱負的年輕女子的悲劇，她曾經對自己是有事業上的期待的，但是她後來結婚了，看爛了六本斯波克博士(Dr. Spock)所著的兒童教育書之後高聲宣布：“我真是幸運！幸運！我真高興我是個女人！”在讀完這個片段之後，你應該很容易想像精神病院的醫護人員們把她 捆綁上床的場景。

事實上，對於住在美國郊區的人來說，“二戰”以後他們在那兒的生活既非十分安逸也並不特別折磨人——每個工作日的白天，那一排排沒有盡頭的、佔地四 分之一英畝的房子都是女人和孩子的世界。我在辛辛那提一個這樣的郊區長大，父親們每天早晨開着家裡唯一的汽車去上班，他們離開後，街區里唯一的成年男性是 送牛奶的湯米大叔或者開一輛老式巴士的阿特，在他車上的架子上放着賣給被困家中的家庭主婦們的日雜百貨。因為要照料家裡的幾個小孩，母親的一天是忙碌的， 但她們也不會過於操勞。一天最讓人放鬆開心的時刻大概在四五點鐘到來，家務活都幹完了，晚飯在烤箱里溫着，女人們可以坐在某個主婦家的廚房或者家裡後院的 露台上喝酒聊天。至少在我家，接下來就是父親回到家，開始第二個小時的雞尾酒時間，這時候爸媽會討論他們一天怎麼過的，然後家裡大一點的孩子會推上小孩子 出門散步很久。大概弗利丹的家庭生活和我所熟知的家庭生活的相同之處就只有每天喝酒的部分。

在《女性的奧秘》里，弗利丹試圖將自己描繪成六十年代初一個典型的中產階級家庭主婦。但事實上，這個在婚前和成為母親前在曼哈頓為若干左翼和工會報 紙工作過的史密斯學院的畢業生，並非這樣的典型主婦。她屬於那一小撮上過大學對自己有雙重期待的女性：一邊是未來呆在家裡的家庭主婦，一邊是學校里嚴肅對待成績書單和討論，並和男生選修同樣課程的好學生——或者就像弗利丹一樣，去史密斯學院上學並認為自己的課程要比別人的更難一些。大學畢業她去念研究生， 直到和她約會的男生帶着她去貝弗利山散步的時候說，“我們不會有結果的。因為我永遠都不可能得到你那樣的獎學金。”於是弗利丹放棄了她的學術生涯，搬到了 東岸開始“活在現實里，為報紙工作，沒有什麼特別的規劃。我結了婚，有了孩子，像女性的奧秘指引那樣成為了一個住在郊區的家庭主婦。”

這些真的是事實么？弗利丹真的是因為一個滿懷嫉妒的追求者的一句話而跑去紐約嫁給一個完全不同的男人的么？這其實並不重要。重要的是作為一個家庭主 婦——就算是一個平時還給雜誌寫專欄的家庭主婦——弗利丹覺得她的生活無聊透了。她深知自己所處的時代和過去的不同，她明白美國人從農場搬到城市又從城市 搬到郊區之後，美國人的家庭生活發生了本質的改變。在農場，家庭主婦在維持家庭為單位的農業生產經濟活動中扮演着重要的角色，她要自己做衣服、肥皂、蠟燭 和奶酪，要自己種植蔬菜、養雞，還要參與非正式的家庭主婦之間的經濟活動，交換其他必須品。

郊區的家庭主婦並不扮演什麼經濟角色，現代的家庭生活用具已經使她不再為過去那些費時勞神的家務活所累。一個女人的自我認同，弗利丹寫道，“曾經是 由她對於家庭的必須勞動貢獻和成績來決定的。” 但這種基於家庭勞動的自我認同在她的時代已經消失了，尤其在這個家務勞動“不再真的必須而且並不需要多少能力——在一個女性終於獲得自由追求更多東西的時 代和國家。”

接着弗利丹將這些困擾她的問題寫成了《女性的奧秘》。這本書最終上架的時候，那些感到自己被完美的家庭和婚姻禁錮、困住而覺得厭煩的主婦們翻開了這 本書，並開始重新審視自己在這個世界上的位置和角色。“一些女人因為《女性的奧秘》對她們的人生選擇提出質疑而感到憤怒，而別的女性，就像我自己，覺得她 們終於得到了理解，”馬德琳·庫寧(Madeleine Kunin)曾在她位於馬薩諸塞州劍橋的讀書會上如此評價這本書，當時她是一個醫學院學生的太太。庫寧後來重新開始工作。像弗利丹一樣，她取得了超乎尋常 的成績，最後成為了弗蒙特州的州長。

據我所知，在我長大的街區沒有一個家庭主婦讀過《女性的奧秘》。如果她們真的懷疑過自己的選擇的話，那也是很久之後當那些令弗利丹憤怒的家政雜誌還 一再宣揚的家庭主婦生活中固有的諸多問題凸現之後。《女性的奧秘》是着力描寫母親們對女性角色的困惑的，但是對於第一代定居郊區且在很年輕的時候就有孩子 的家庭來說，當他們的孩子長大成人離開家的時候，那些因家庭生活失去自我的母親實際上還正值盛年。我們從新家——大學宿舍回望過去時，意識到我們必須為了 保護自己而戰勝這種空虛感。後來，我們開始閱讀姍姍來遲的《女性的奧秘》，讀到的時候給人就是“啊哈！”的感覺。在這種情況下，弗利丹關於人必須有事業和 職業——這個適用於所有問題的答案——就十分受用。

《女性的奧秘》後來成為了那種決定一個作家一生的暢銷書。1966年的時候，弗利丹在華盛頓為另一本書做研究，她參加了一個由各州女性地位委員會舉 辦的會議，與會人員因聯邦政府明確表示不會為了執行1964年通過的《民權法案》(Civil Rights Act)中禁止職場性別歧視條款而專門立法，感到十分憤怒（這個例子也正好說明女性平權運動並非發軔於《女性的奧秘》，那些委員會是在這本書出版之前的肯尼迪時期成立的，而當議員們在國會為《民權法案》展開辯論的時候，美國的家庭主婦們才開始傳閱這本書）。

那些憤怒的與會者後來聚集到弗利丹的酒店房間，討論在約翰遜政府對採取強制性措施毫無興趣的情況下，她們應該如何行動（弗利丹出了名得難相處，在討 論期間她把自己鎖在洗手間，讓其他人全部離開，但沒有人走）。第二天，就是這群弗利丹的同僚在午餐時候忿忿地傳遞會議紀要，並且就在午餐時間創立了“全國婦女組織”（National Organization of Women, 簡稱NOW），弗利丹任該組織主席。正是弗利丹領導的“全國婦女組織”，代表着那些普普通通、單調乏味的職業女性——《女性的奧秘》總遭到批評忽略了這個 群體——為爭取她們的權力提出訴訟。在1970年，是弗利丹呼籲全國婦女走上街頭，遊行慶祝年婦女選舉權運動成功和婦女獲得選舉權五十周年，她的呼籲在全 國各地的城市都得到了極大的響應，讓世人知道女性希望改變她們生活和社會的決心。在紐約，參與遊行的人未能獲准穿過第五大道，她們被告知只能從人行道穿過。弗利丹走在這支隊伍的最前面，再次成為她們的帶頭人。“我們肯定不可能稀稀拉拉地走在第五大道上，”她後來寫道，“我把手揮到頭頂吼道, ‘佔領所有街道！’那真是一個令人難忘的時刻。”

節選自《女性的奧秘》50周年紀念版的介紹部分，貝蒂·弗利丹所著，由W.W. Norton & Company出版。
本文最初發表於2013年1月27日。
翻譯：龍荻

Riff

‘The Feminine Mystique’ at 50

By GAIL COLLINS March 08, 2013

 

Every writer yearns to create a book that will seize the moment — to perfectly encapsulate the problem of an era before other people even notice the problem exists. Of course, that almost never happens. Mostly we’re happy if we can manage to explain, in an interesting way, something people already know is going on. But Betty Friedan won the gold ring. When “The Feminine Mystique” emerged in 1963, it created a reaction so intense that Friedan could later write another book about the things women said to her about the first one (“It Changed My Life”). If there’s a list of the most important books of the 20th century, “The Feminine Mystique” is on it. It also made one conservative magazine’s exclusive roundup of the “10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries,” which if not flattering is at least a testimony to the wallop it packed.

We’re still reading it today. In “A Strange Stirring,” her book about “The Feminine Mystique” and its impact, Stephanie Coontz writes that her students “responded viscerally” to chapters like “The Sexual Sell” that spoke to their own feelings of being under pressure to buy consumer goods and “to present themselves as objects to be consumed.” And of course, if you want to understand what has happened to American women over the last half-century, their extraordinary journey from Doris Day to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and beyond, you have to start with this book.

 

Critics — and many fans — feel obliged to point out the things that “The Feminine Mystique” ignores, and they are right to be a bit flummoxed that although Friedan was writing during the civil rights movement, she barely mentions African-American women. Working-class women make their appearance mainly in a few suggestions that married women who want to work might want to hire a housekeeper or a nanny. Remarkably, Friedan managed to write a whole book indicting American society for its attitudes toward women without discussing its laws. In 1963, most women weren’t able to get credit without a male co-signer. In some states they couldn’t sit on juries; in others, their husbands had control not only of their property but also of their earnings. Although Friedan obsesses about women getting jobs, she does not mention that newspapers were allowed to divide their help-wanted ads into categories for men and women, or that it was perfectly legal for an employer to announce that certain jobs were for men only. Even the federal government did it.

In a strange way, all those deficits are the book’s strength. “The Feminine Mystique” is a very specific cry of rage about the way intelligent, well-educated women were kept out of the mainstream of American professional life and regarded as little more than a set of reproductive organs in heels. It is supremely, specifically personal, and that’s what gives it such gut-punching power. Friedan dropped out of her postgraduate studies because, she said, her academic success was threatening to her boyfriend. She was furious about the way the female college students of the next generation had been programmed to regard getting an MRS. degree as the be-all and end-all of their experience in higher education. She was enraged by the way the psychiatric profession regarded housewives’ unhappiness as a symptom of an out-of-whack libido. She was angry at the way the economy appeared to see her entire sex as simple consumption machines who built national prosperity by buying new appliances for the kitchen and searching madly for the perfect laundry detergent.

And don’t get her started on women’s magazines. Friedan wrote for them, and she piles up one astonishingly awful example of the selling of the feminine mystique after another. There’s one short story about a young woman who planned to “be something,” then married, wore out six copies of Dr. Spock’s child-care book and wound up declaiming: “I’m lucky! Lucky! I’M SO GLAD TO BE A WOMAN!” You really can envision the team from the mental hospital strapping her to a gurney.

The postwar suburbs were either heaven or hell for their inhabitants — endless stretches of brand-new houses on quarter-acre lots, occupied, during weekday hours, entirely by women and children. I grew up in one in Cincinnati, where the dads drove off to work every morning in what was then the only family car, leaving behind a land in which the only adult males were Tommy the milkman and Art, who drove an old bus outfitted with shelves of groceries that he sold to the stranded housewives. The moms were busy, mainly with the several small kids, but they were not overworked. The high point of the day came at 4 or 5, when the chores were done, dinner was in the oven and the women could congregate in someone’s kitchen or on the back porch to drink and talk. In our house at least, that was followed by my father’s arrival and a second cocktail hour, during which my parents discussed their day while the older children took the younger ones for endless walks in the stroller. Perhaps the only way Friedan’s household resembled mine was in the drinking.

In “The Feminine Mystique,” Friedan tried to portray herself as the typical middle-class housewife of the early ’60s. But really, the Smith graduate who worked for a series of left-wing and union newspapers in Manhattan before matrimony and motherhood was no such thing. She was from a smaller cadre of women who went to college holding two self-images simultaneously: the future stay-at-home housewife and the serious student who cared about grades and reading lists and serious discussions, who took the same courses as the men — or who, like Friedan, went to Smith and presumed her courses were actually harder. Then she was off to graduate school until the boy she was dating took her for a walk in the Berkeley hills and said, “Nothing can come of this, between us. Because I’ll never win a fellowship like yours.” Friedan gave up her academic career, came East and “lived in the present, working on newspapers with no particular plan. I married, had children, lived according to the feminine mystique as a suburban housewife.”

Did that really happen? Did that one remark from a jealous suitor really send Friedan off to New York and marriage to an entirely different man? It doesn’t actually matter. What matters is that as a housewife — even one who kept writing freelance magazine articles on the side — Friedan was bored out of her mind. The difference between her era and the past, she understood, was that the nature of housework had changed when Americans moved from the farm to the cities, and then the suburbs. The farm wife had a crucial economic role in the family, which depended on her to manufacture the clothes, the soap, the candles and the cheese; to grow the vegetables and raise the chickens; and to participate in the informal housewife economy where she could trade the things she made for other vital family supplies.

The suburban housewife had no economic point at all, and modern appliances had stripped her of most of the time-consuming chores of the past as well. A woman’s sense of self, Friedan wrote, “once rested on necessary work and achievement in the home.” But that vanished in an era when housework “is no longer really necessary or really uses much ability — in a country and at a time when women can be free, finally, to move on to something more.”

Friedan’s analysis of what was bothering her turned into “The Feminine Mystique.” And when it hit the stands, women who were feeling bored and trapped by their perfect homes and marriages picked up the book and mentally repositioned themselves in the world. “Some of the women were outraged that ‘The Feminine Mystique’ placed their choices into question, and others, like myself, felt at last they had been understood,” said Madeleine Kunin, who argued about it at her book club in Cambridge, Mass., where she was the wife of a medical student. Kunin later rejoined the working world herself. Like Friedan, she overachieved, and eventually she became governor of Vermont.

As far as I know, none of the moms in my neighborhood read “The Feminine Mystique.” If they ever questioned their choices, it was later, when an inherent flaw became apparent in the ideal suburban lifestyle that was celebrated in all those women’s magazines that drove Friedan nuts. The feminine mystique was built around the central feminine role as mother, but the first generation of suburbanites had their babies young, and the children were grown and gone while their role-deprived moms were still in the primes of their lives. We looked back from our new homes at college dorms and understood that this was an emptiness we had to protect ourselves against. Later, when we got our late-arriving hands on “The Feminine Mystique,” it was an aha! moment. Friedan’s obsession about having a career — the one answer she seemed to grab at for every single problem — made perfect sense.

“The Feminine Mystique” became the kind of best seller that defines an author’s life. In 1966, Friedan was researching another book in Washington when she wound up at a conference of state commissions on the status of women, where attendees were angry over the fact that the federal government had made it clear it had no intention of enforcing a law against job discrimination on the basis of sex that was included in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (This is a good time to point out that “The Feminine Mystique” did not create the women’s rights movement. Those commissions on the status of women were started by the Kennedy administration before the book was published, and the Civil Rights Act was being debated in Congress while American housewives were still just starting to pass Friedan’s book around.)

It was in Friedan’s hotel room that the angry conference-goers met to discuss what they should do when the Johnson administration showed no interest in pursuing the issue. (Friedan was universally known as a difficult personality, and at one point she locked herself in the bathroom and told everyone to go home, but no one did.) The next day, it was Friedan’s coterie that angrily passed around notes at lunch, creating, on the spot, the National Organization for Women, which Friedan would head. It would be NOW, under Friedan, that would file suits on behalf of exactly the kind of average, unglamorous, working women that “The Feminine Mystique” is always criticized for ignoring. And in 1970, it was Friedan who called for the great march to celebrate the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage, creating a mass turnout in cities around the country that would drive home to the nation exactly how determined women were to transform their lives and their society. In New York, the marchers were denied a parade permit for Fifth Avenue and were told to keep to the sidewalks. Friedan, at the head of the pack, took the lead again. “There was no way we were about to walk down Fifth Avenue in a little thin line,” she wrote later. “I waved my arms over my head and yelled, ‘Take to the streets!’ What a moment that was.”

Excerpted from the introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition of “The Feminine Mystique,” by Betty Friedan, to be published next month by W.W. Norton & Company.