Feminine Mystique: A Literary Analysis

My Summer Project is on the novel Jane Eyre written by Charlotte Bronte. My project initially highlights the problems faced by a women in 19th Century. The issues come in the way of people when the two belongs to different class and status. It also highlights various themes, the writer has used in the novel and also how every theme is being shown with examples. The novel is about love and determination, which can be understood from the view of an orphaned girl, who apart from being a part of all the difficulties and problems of class and status, she always believed in love and was determined by it.

It is told from her point of view. The speaker is a housewife who is fed up. During this time, her point of view can easily be associated with the idea of feminism. The poet choses to write in her own point of view because it makes relating to ideas of feminism much easier. If the poem was written during the same time, by her husband it would have a much different feel.

In her novel, The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan focuses on the fact that the bond between a mother and daughter can overcome any ethnic barrier. Despite there being many disagreements and arguments about the ways to live their lives, Tan defies this issue by creating a bond that is unbreakable even though the experienced different upbringings. Certain disagreements keep the novel interesting and create a conflict depicting the problems stemming from this barrier. Through her use of similes, metaphors, and flashbacks, Tan shows how the bond between a mother and daughter can withstand even the strongest cultural differences. Tan expresses the changing connection between the main characters’ mother-daughter relationship through the use of metaphors.

After the war ended, women were no longer needed in the workforce and were expected to return to pre-war beliefs and focus on marriage, housekeeping and child rearing. The image of the happy housewife became the image that many women strived to achieve and was on the more frequent depictions of women in television, magazines and advertisements. Television played a vital role in the postwar era in reflecting the changes in society as well as influencing the future. Women began to look at the lives of their mothers and saw the unhappiness and decided that was not the life that they wanted to live. Though with the stereotype of the spinster and old maid, many were still afraid to remain single.

Mona Lisa Smile “I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I always knew the woman I wanted to be” quoted Diane Von Furstenberg, which describes the prestigious all-female Wellesley College in the movie “Mona Lisa Smile.” The movie illustrates certain expectation within the gender roles and the changes over time while some things remain the same. The students were focused more on become a great housewife after graduating college, than what they really wanted to do. Katherine Watson a graduate from UCLA was a art teacher hired by Wellesley College to teach art history, unaware of the way the school curriculum is taught and the students frame of mine on how life for a woman should be. On the first day of class Katherine met the lady whose life she will impact; Betty Warren, Joan Brandwyn,Giselle Levy, and Connie Baker were intelligent, very sarcastic, and tried to intimidate her. She learned the only way to challenge the girls’

The book reveals the private angst which many middle class women were experiencing in the 1950’s as unwaged housewives and consumers. ‘Mystique’ was Friedan’s term for the ‘problem with no name’ – the psychic distress experienced by women who had no public careers and were immured in domestic concerns. The book is based in part on a survey of Smith College graduates. The book led to the birth of America’s largest Organization- NOW (National Women’s Organization) in 1966. Betty Friedan – a Liberal Feminist believed in the theory of liberal freedom for women.

Corrine Babin Essay on “Two Kinds” The Misfortune of Change “My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America” (Tan 220). Amy Tan, author of the short story “Two Kinds,” began her story with this line, presenting the expectations the mother had for her child to be great. As the story progresses, protagonist Jing-mei, and her mother start off on a great note, but their relationship continues to deteriorate and transfigure at the same time as it faces many challenges and fights; each breaking and battering it more than the last. Throughout the story, Jing-mei experiences numerous changes, including changes dealing with the way she feels towards her mother, causing her to act in a harsh way. At her lowest, most despondent point in her adolescent life, the protagonist was very brash, yelling hurtful words at her mother to spite her.

“Everyday Use” The story “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker is a story between a mother and her two daughters. The story is mainly about a mother and one of her daughters Dee. The conflict is how they both see the world differently. There is a lot of symbolism in this story because of Dee. In Walker’s writing, redemption will take one away and bring one back, in a perhaps humbling but empowering way, to something close to home.

The initial setting of the play immediately identifies Martha as a housewife who, as pertaining to the time period of the plot, satisfies the stereotype of women in the early part of the twentieth century. Primitively, readers rightfully assume Martha Hale is another conventional female of her time: property and inferior. Martha rushes unpreparedly out of “her kitchen, [which] was in no shape for leaving,” to meet her impatient husband. While complying with the submission of the era as she rushes to her husband and her worry as to the state of her kitchen, Martha Hale is defies the expectancy of a simple-minded and

Her dream is “to stay at home safe with Father and Mother, and help take care of the family”(140). Beth is a very responsible and caring as a little woman should be, yet while helping and taking care as she fills her mother’s place at the Hummels family, she got inflected by the scarlet fever. Beth pays the price for repressing entirely the manifestation of one’s demands; for simply being a little woman. One can see the attrition of energy in the labor to live like a little woman. One can also see the passive self-image that is actual encumbrance of the little woman as Beth describes herself “ stupid little Beth trotting about home, of no use anywhere but there” (360).

Women were also encouraged to take Miltown with or without a mental disorder, because it cures that all day unpleasantness . This paper will discuss why women thought they had a need for a ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ and where those needs come from. In the years, post-wartimes, women were removed from their wartime jobs and placed back into their homes to raise their new born

Anthony was introduced to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and started to work together during the Women’s Suffrage Movement. Susan B. Anthony learned everything that Stanton could teach her about being an activist and abolitionist. Anthony attended her first convention in 1852 at Syracuse. “Anthony and Stanton believed the Republicans would reward women for their work in building support for the Thirteenth Amendment by giving them the vote. They were bitterly disappointed when this did not happen” The women created the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 and also published The Revolution in Rochester, which was a newspaper.

The Character of Eugena (Skeeter) Cox Eugena is a bundle of contradictions, Skeeter wants to be a writer, but her mother wants her to be a wife. She is a twenty-three year old white lady with the book featuring the real stories of the black women maids who worked for white families in her hometown in Jackson Mississippi. Eugena was a caring young. She attempted to make sure that the maids didn’t hear the lady league talking about them. She also let the maids she also let the maids help her with the book that she was writing.

Brady appeals to the reader’s emotions in her article why I want a wife by using pathos. She creates a connection between herself and the reader to make the reader feel what she is feeling and relate to her, which by definition is pathos. In Brady’s article “Why I Want a Wife” she develops a valid argument of why she wants a “wife” by using examples of pathos to connect with her female readers of the Ms. Magazine and draw their attention. This is a rather effective method when one considers that this article was written in the 1970’s when women’s rights acts was just starting to take place. Before stating her argument Brady identifies herself as a “wife” to establish her credibility.

Though some were content to return, a large number of women were unhappy with this sharp, stifling contrast. However, expected to be content with the seeming prosperity of the time, their voices were silenced until the publication of the Feminine Mystique. What made the book a true turning point was that it would spark the Women’s Rights Movement of the 60s and 70s. Seeing the success of the Civil Rights Movement, Friedan’s bold denouncement of the Cult and --- inspired women to fight for extended rights and full equality, more than simply the voting rights they gained in the 1920s. This second wave of feminism sought equal pay, equal rights, education, and more.