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In one of the most shocking passages of her 1:963 feminist classic, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan claimed that "the 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. . . .'" Friedan went on to explore this analogy for several pages, and then continued to use the phrase "comfortable concentration camps" to refer to suburban homes throughout the rest of The Feminine Mystique.
Scholars have since castigated Friedan for her inaccuracy and insensitivity in developing the concept of the "comfortable concentration camp." Feminist scholar bell hooks, for example, has charged Friedan with "narcissism, insensitivity, sentimentality, and self-indulgence."2 Historian Daniel Horowitz called Friedan's comparison "problematic," "trivializing," "careless and exaggerated."3 And Friedan herself has backed away from her imagery, saying in her recent memoir, "I am ashamed of that analogy. . . . The American suburb was no concentration camp."4 Indeed, in a 2001 interview, Friedan refused to discuss her camp analogy in any detail, repeating several times that she had made an error in judgment.5
There is no question that Betty Friedan's analogy was an exaggerated and flawed one, as she herself now recognizes. The Nazi regime publicly confined, starved and tortured its victims in camps, and selected Jewish victims for mass extermination. This psychological and physical destruction was obviously wholly different from, and much more extreme than, the psychological devastation that was wreaked by suburban homes, which privately confined and socially marginalized middle class women.
Nonetheless, it is intellectually unsatisfying to dismiss this powerful analogy merely as inaccurate or sensational, or to accept Friedan's disavowal of the analogy without probing further. Friedan's analogy offers historians an important window into the impact of the Holocaust on American Jewish thinkers, as well as the impact of the Holocaust in larger American culture. By comparing Nazi concentration camps to American suburban homes in 1963, Friedan demonstrated that American Jewish intellectuals were not only conscious of the devastation of the Holocaust earlier than most historians have recognized, but that these intellectuals were also vocal about the Holocaust, using it to shape American public opinion in ways that most historians have thus far overlooked.
In describing...