Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” encapsulates second-wave feminism from the 1960s. Despite being released over 60 years ago, it presents messages that are still extremely relevant. When I finished the book, I realized not much has changed for women.
Following WWII, the societal expectation for women in the United States was to get married young and become housewives. Friedan argues that this assumption left many women unfulfilled and missing a personal identity. This is being mirrored in the new era of social media today. While there has been some progress made in the last 60 years for women’s autonomy, there still seems to be strong expectations of what women should be interested in and pursue. This expectation--elevated by the online culture of today--makes any path outside the norm difficult. The freedom to venture off an established path may be too much pressure; and instead, some women are finding themselves drawn into social media; a new career has emerged... the coveted influencer.
The influencer, as opposed to the content creator who explores their passions in art, history, technology, etc., has the sole purpose of partnering with brands to sway consumer behavior and spending. This has become a huge industry in the US, with creator revenue from sponsored content going from a $5 billion industry in 2021 to over $10 billion in 2025. This explosive growth has permeated culture, goals, and expectations, especially for women.
This is where Friedan’s argument and the modern dilemma of an influencer epidemic intersect. Friedan wrote, “American housewives can be given the sense of identity, purpose, creativity, the self-realization, even the sexual joy they lack-by buying things.” Many women of her era avoided forging an identity of their own, instead relying on products that promised a fulfillment of their role. Through dishwashers and washing machines, the role of women in the home was cemented. Today, by following and pursuing careers as influencers, some women of today are also avoiding creating their identities. The ubiquitous influencer prevents the drive of ambitious, original senses of self by encouraging conformity.
A study by the Department of Communication Sciences at Ghent University examining gender effects in influencer marketing found that “results suggest that women perceive themselves to be more similar to the female compared to the male influencer, leading to stronger feelings of parasocial interaction, which in turn positively affect brand attitude and post engagement.” Not only do women engage with and relate to influencers more than men, but they are more likely to pursue becoming one, with 72% of influencers in 2024 being women, a report by Collabstr found.
If a woman's identity is being formed solely by the things she is told to buy or promote, can that truly be considered her identity? Furthermore, without investigating opinions outside of what is encouraged online, one becomes easier to manipulate. Losing the drive to form one’s own identity, women are confined to the role of good shoppers and trend addicts.
Like the role of housewife and mother in the 1950s and 60s, this confinement inevitably will lead to frustration, as Friedan explained, “By choosing femininity over the painful growth to full identity, by never achieving the hard core of self that comes not from fantasy but from mastering reality, these girls are doomed to suffer ultimately that bored, diffuse feeling of purposelessness, non-existence, non-involvement with the world that can be called anomie, or lack of identity, or merely felt as the problem that has no name."
It is not an inherently bad thing, being an influencer or being a housewife. If an individual woman is happy in that role, she has that right. However, the relentless marketing and influencing to women is a serious problem. By encouraging a monoculture, the rise of influencers creates a breeding ground for a New Feminine Mystique, one that says, "It doesn't matter who you are; this is who you should be."
