She explains that she wants "to go out into the world to act for myself to exercise my unused faculties to try my own unknown powers to earn my own maintenance"-all motives of which Friedan would approve.īut in the event, employment for Agnes is not an exercise in self-actualization. Agnes Grey, a poor clergyman's daughter, decides to become a governess.
In fact, Agnes Grey can almost be read as a deliberate, impassioned point by point refutation of the Feminine Mystique. Brontë's portrait of the unfair, demeaning, constrictive plight of those women matches, in its quiet, righteous fury, Friedan's portrait of the unfair, demeaning, constrictive plight of housewives.īut the fury and the feminism are, perhaps, where the similarities end. The 1847 novel reads today as a feminist denunciation of the hardships and inequities faced by female governesses. That was my experience, anyway, when I recently read Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey. 4 Big Problems With 'The Feminine Mystique'įor post-Friedan folks, then, looking at a pre-Friedan feminism can be jolting.
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