The Feminine Mystique: Book Review
The Feminine Mystique (1963) examines the dehumanizing conditions of middle class American women who were excluded from social and political life to be anchored in their wifely and motherly roles. The book marks the Second Wave of American feminism. Friedan writes, “Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers” (61). This meant that the whole of an American woman’s life was meant to attract and keep her husband and serve his and children’s needs. She deals with this painful ordeal of women and clearly brings out the ennui, unhappiness, and the lack of companionship experienced by women in their marriages.
The feminine mystique was so powerful that women failed to realize their true desires and actual capacities. According to Friedan,
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. . when it wishes to exalt sexuality it celebrates fertility through the phallus; when it wishes to denigrate sexuality, it cites Pandora” (51). Patriarchy is more a habit of mind and a way of life than a political system. It is so deeply embedded in our culture that a change in the former is more difficult to attain than a change in the latter. According to her, a sexual revolution would bring to an end the institution of patriarchy and the ideology of male supremacy.
Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) makes a vehement attack on the stereotyping and fixed gender roles to which women are conditioned. According to her, “the female is considered a sexual object for the use and appreciation of other sexual beings, men. Her sexuality is both denied and misrepresented by being identified as passivity . . . The characteristics that are praised and rewarded are those of the castrate – timidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy and preciosity” (The Female Eunuch 17).
The title ‘The Female Eunuch’ suggests denial of sexuality to women, thus a non-entity. When this vital part of one’s life is removed or suppressed one becomes like a eunuch. She argues, “If marriage and family depend upon the castration of women let them change or disappear”
Susan Oliver On Betty Friedan
294 Words | 2 PagesSusan Oliver writes an exceptional biography that describes in detail the life, success, struggles and failures of Betty Friedan. From her childhood as a divergent American-Jew living in Peoria, Illinois to being an outstanding student and writer in school, finding her path as a strong feminist at Smith College, her struggles as a mother and wife to mothering the second feminist movement. Susan Oliver explored all the factors that contributed to Betty Friedan’s strong private and public persona. Betty Friedan, a driving force of the second feminist movement, is barely recognized for the emancipation of women. Mostly known as the author of the Feminine Mystique, Susan Oliver made sure to demonstrate that Betty Friedan was more than a mere
Betty Friedan's The Importance Of Work By Betty Friedan
1088 Words | 5 PagesIn her essay, “The Importance of Work,” from The Feminine Mystique published in 1963, Betty Friedan confronts American women’s search for identity. Throughout the novel, Betty Friedan breaks new ground, concocting the idea that women can discover personal fulfillment by straying away from their original roles. Friedan ponders on the idea that The Feminine Mystique is the cause for a vast majority of women during that time period to feel confined by their occupations around the house; therefore, restricting them from discovering who they are as women. Friedan’s novel is well known for creating a different kind of feminism and rousing various women across the nation.
The Awakening In The 1850's
706 Words | 3 PagesThe role of a woman in society has always fit into a perfect box. Women were expected to be the dutiful wife, loving mother and housekeeper for her family. Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, in 1963 hoping to unveil the truth behind women’s thoughts about their role in society. Friedan exposed that things were not always, as they seemed for the average mother and homemaker in the 1950s and 1960s. Kate Chopin wrote The Awakening in the 1850’s which told the story of Edna Pontillier and her struggles as a housewife and finding her true identity.
The Importance Of Work Betty Friedan Analysis
1269 Words | 6 PagesIn the essay “The Importance of Work,” Betty Friedan used her platform as an activist and author to motivate women to escape their domestic roles as a housewife. Friedan wrote the Feminine Mystique, which inspired the second wave of feminism. In this book, Friedan’s goal was to assess the “problem that has no name,” or the idea that women should be limited to only providing for their spouses and children, which restricted their individuality (Kirszner and Mendell 790). In her essay, she wanted to first explain that finding one’s identity, male or female, required performing work that provided something bigger for society. Her central argument; however, was to enable the women in the 1960s to seek their own approval.
Bad Feminist Analysis
818 Words | 4 PagesWhenever the slightest portrayal of sexism is seen, feminists are quick to react and correct what is wrong. The solution to sexism is not to blatantly ignore it and say it does not exist anywhere; the solution is to stand up for what is right and implement the actions that need to take place. In “Bad Feminists” by Roxane Gay, it was stated that “[her] favorite definition of a feminist is one offered by Su, an Australian woman who...described them simply as ‘women who don't want to be treated like shit’” (Gay 169). That is basically essential for all bad feminists.
Michel Foucault's The History Of Sexuality
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Summary Of She Is Old School Like That By Lorena Garcia
492 Words | 2 PagesLorena Garcia wrote “She is Old School Like That,” this piece is about sex talks between mothers and daughters in the Latin American community. She examines the way which these talks are given and at what point in the life of the daughters they are given. Garcia points to the different methodology the Latina mothers used when talking to their daughters, and their reactions when they found out their daughters were engaging in sexual activity. Garcia claims that there is a certain pattern in which the Latina mothers behave. These women are the operation with a new definition of sexuality influenced and shaped by the heteronormative and patriarchal society.
Analysis Of Alan H. Goldman's 'Plain Sex'
1425 Words | 6 PagesInside and beyond the myth and the social impact of the subject as One or Substance. Alan H. Goldman’s essay ‘Plain Sex’ is a central contribution to the academic debate about sex within the analytic area, which has been developing since the second half of the ‘90s in Western countries. Goldman’s purpose is encouraging debate on the concept of sex without moral, social and cultural implications or superstitious superstructures. He attempts to define “sexual desire” and “sexual activity” in its simplest terms, by discovering the common factor of all sexual events, i.e. “the desire for physical contact with another person’s body and for the pleasure which such contact produces; sexual activity is activity which tends to fulfill such desire of the agent” (Goldman, A., 1977, p 40).
The Cult Of True Womanhood Analysis
2199 Words | 9 PagesThe Cult of True Womanhood in “The Yellow Wallpaper” In her essay “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860”, Barbara Welter discusses the expected roles and characteristics that women were supposed to exhibit in accordance with the extreme patriarchy of the nineteenth-century America. The unnamed narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is seen to conform and ultimately suffer from this patriarchal construct that Welter labels the Cult of True Womanhood. The narrator falls victim to this life of captivity by exhibiting several of the fundamental characteristics that Welter claims define what a woman was told she ought to be.
Individuality In George Orwell's 1984
1446 Words | 6 PagesWithin Oceania, the Party strives for sexual puritanism in order to eradicate true humanity and demonize sex. Actual sexual acts are portrayed as filthy deeds to the citizens of Oceania since young childhood. Organizations such as the Anti-Sex League work to exalt individuals who choose to remain chaste rather than to partake in sex. According to Gorman Beauchamp in his essay “Of Man’s Last Disobedience: Zamiatin’s We and Orwell’s 1984,” these societies are comparable to “medieval monks and nuns” who demonstrate “their superior love for and loyalty to their God” and are in turn treated with a greater degree of respect and are given a higher position in their society (11). The Anti-Sex League functions similarly, but instead of growing in faith or
Challenging Patriarchal Norms In Homegoing By Yaa Gyasi
1308 Words | 6 PagesThroughout history women have challenged patriarchal norms, changing the standards. In the book, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, women are constantly told what they should do, and what they should want. Ness should want to work inside the house, Abena should want to marry for power, and Marjorie should want to be asked to prom. However, unlike other women characters in the book, these three characters challenged their assumed positions as women and in doing so gave their families and men in their lives a new perspective. Every generation made strides in women’s rights, but even as rights and laws adapted to new times, there were still limitations on women that they needed to overcome.
Redefining Realness By Janet Mock Analysis
1729 Words | 7 Pages"Gender is such a familiar part of daily life that it usually takes a deliberate disruption of our expectations of how women and men are supposed to act to pay attention to how it is produced"(The Social Construction of Gender 65). This tells us that once someone does something out of the "norm" then we start to conceive ideas of what gender is and how it is produced. Once something is done out of what we were taught and perceived to believe is right we then frown upon these actions. Our genitalia is often used as an indicator of which sex we belong to. The reading also talks about gender stratification and how it ranks men above women.
Summary Of Sedgwick's Epistemology Of The Closet
1105 Words | 5 PagesEve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her Epistemology of the Closet claims that “many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture are structures—indeed, fractured—by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” (Sedgwick 2008, 1). Sedgwick argues that it is a crisis “indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century” (1). This is an interesting point since the male perspective is the pillar, of the Western Patriarchal model of gender role’s construction—and for our purpose sexual identity constraint. The author, in her book, says that “virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis
Women And Their Rights In Kate Chopin's The Story Of An Hour
791 Words | 4 PagesDuring the 1890’s until today, the roles of women and their rights have severely changed. They have been inferior, submissive, and trapped by their marriage. Women have slowly evolved into individuals that have rights and can represent “feminine individuality”. The fact that they be intended to be house-caring women has changed.
Beauvoir The Lesbian Analysis
926 Words | 4 PagesWith this she means that women’s sexuality is something that frightened men in the Middle Ages, according to them lesbianism was often related to a hatred of men or a bad experience with a man. Simone de Beauvoir also notes this in The Second Sex: Homosexuality for woman is one attempt among others to reconcile her autonomy with the passivity of her flesh. And if nature is invoked, it could be said that every woman is naturally homosexual. The lesbian is characterized simply by her refusal of the male and her preference for feminine flesh; but every adolescent female fears penetration and masculine domination, and she feels a certain
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