Fifty years ago, this best-selling book showed the American housewife coming unglued

Bored, lonely housewives have been skulking around American novels for half a century — undersexed, under-stimulated, and underappreciated. Of course, they aren’t without foremothers. Bourgeois domesticity and its discontents were the subject of some of the best 19th century novels, books like Madame Bovary, which, in the words of writer AS Byatt, “opened a vision of meaninglessness and emptiness.” No matter the era, in the absence of significant work — which the family economy does not demand of many middle- and upper-class women — the twin strictures of marriage and motherhood drive women to the brink, it seems.

Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and others revealed one view of privilege as a spiritual prison. But their modern analogue, the truly nutty hausfrau of 20th century fiction, the kind driven to madness by a philandering or aloof husband, needy children, and domestic drudgery, the one who feels perpetually guilty because for all intents and purposes she has everything and should be happy, was arguably born exactly 50 years ago, with the publication of Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife.

While taking her daughters for a frozen custard, Bettina Balser, the Upper West Side “mad housewife” fictionally penning the 1967 book, sees a stack of notepads in the five-and-dime and decides in that moment to start keeping a diary. “I knew the idea was right, was sound,” she realizes, “because as I stood and stared at the pads, the tic in my eye suddenly stopped, the lump in my throat disappeared. A sign.” Bettina, who goes by Tina, is a smart, funny, mother of two who seems genuinely surprised to have found herself where she is, captive to gnawing anxiety and depression and horrified by her husband. The book became a bestseller, and was made into a movie in 1970. (Actress Carrie Snodgress won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar for her performance.)

In the introduction to the 2005 edition of Diary, Maggie Estep writes that the book was such a success because “it came at a time of Total Crisis for women.” What were these women were so upset about, anyway? According to Betty Friedan, the primary diagnostician of the malaise of the American housewife, they were “victims” of a “deadly ‘dailyness,’” a feeling of repetition that knew no relief because the women generally had no larger goals, or none that were achievable. “Housewives who live according to the feminine mystique,” she wrote, “do not have a personal purpose stretching into the future. But without such a purpose to evoke their full abilities, they cannot grow to self-actualization.” It’s a condition that appeared to be made worse, not better, by the advent of 1950s household technologies that promised women liberation from some forms of domestic labor.

It also wasn’t helped by men who had little empathy for women’s work. In Diary, Bettina’s husband Jonathan is as clueless as he is arrogant. (It bears remarking that he’d probably be classified as emotionally abusive by today’s standards.) “Poor Jonathan,” Bettina writes of her husband. “Touchy and disorganized he thinks I am….What I am at times is so depressed I can’t talk, so low I have to lock myself in the bathroom and run all the faucets to cover the sound of my crying. What I am at other times is so jazzed up with nerves I can’t stand still and everything shakes, and I end up either having to take a pill or a quick sneaky shot of vodka.”

Bettina is afraid of everything from bees to dentists to rapists. Though she dislikes her “pale haggard face,” she’s occasionally pleased by her reflection, “being the reverse image of the one I’d had to look at for months, Ella Cinders instead of Cinderella, you might say.” The diary conceit allows Kaufman to narrate Balser’s life in almost stream-of-consciousness style, which lends immediacy to the character’s many neuroses. Tina remembers her youth, laments her lost freedom, chronicles her run ins with oddball characters like her building’s drunken elevator operator, and details her alienation, explaining that it took her close to two years to leave aside her ambition to become a painter and “acquiesce” to the life she has now. This was done with the help of a male therapist, who urges her to stop resisting her fate. “I finally learned to accept that I was a bright but quite ordinary young woman,” she writes, “somewhat passive and shy, who was equipped with powerful Feminine Drives — which simply means I badly wanted a husband and children and a Happy Home.”

Through various dramas, including a somewhat disastrous extramarital affair, Tina attempts to claw her way out of the depression and despair wrought by this acquiescence, realizing that she shouldn’t have repressed her own aspirations, and trying to make it right. By the end of the novel, Tina hasn’t quite found salvation, but her husband has become a more human and slightly more sympathetic character, and some hope lingers that the couple might build a more honest, if not quite a happy, home.

The publication of Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, was, in the words of critic Louis Menand, “one of those events which seem, in retrospect, to have divided the sixties from the fifties as the day from the night.” It not only named and elaborated the condition of the housewife, it also seemed to carry with it, as some polemics do, an expiration date for the phenomenon it defined. The book opened up the possibility for a new kind of honesty among women and, like a Pandora’s Box, its contents could never be kept in again.

For its part, Diary of a Mad Housewife put a funny, zany, struggling human face on Friedan’s mystique. It paved the way for the boldly feminist novels of the subsequent decade, like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. Diary also testifies to the power of confessional writing, a labor of self-acceptance and self-realization that has sustained, even saved, many women, arguably spawning the personal essay-industrial complex in the process.