Although The Feminine Mystique is often hailed as the harbinger text of third-wave feminism, Stephanie Coontz is quick in the opening lines of her A Strange Stirring to revoke the piece of its grandiose status, instead affectionately remembering it as a “brilliant artifact— and not a timeless classic.” Published in 2011, Coontz’s A Strange Stirring was written in the challenge of the previously held notion that the feminist movement of the 50s and 60s had come about due to a national “dissatisfaction in domestic life” resulting from the “personal inadequacy” woman had felt during the previous decades. Her challenge to ideas that founded the basis of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique feed her writing as she takes an equally controversial stance to Friedan’s book, raising the question of the validity of Feminine Mystique and its impact on the feminist movement when the piece itself neglected to narrate the struggle of women outside the wealthy and white bubble that could afford to read Friedan's book.…
Most men didn’t want women to be anything more than housewives, as they had been for years.While most women wanted the freedom to control their careers, bodies, and families.A majority of women felt that the peaceful days of the fifties transferred to the revolutionary days of the sixties the second “The Feminine Mystique” was published.When Friedan published her book, most of her ideas about the capability of a woman being more than a housewife were despised, while now, most people in her home country agree with her views.Friedan’s book had such a hand in changing people’s views on the roles of women, that it is still useful when issues of domestication are called into question. Finally, when a book that is powerful enough, written well enough, and passionate enough calls for social evolution, the public will…
As an icon in the women’s rights movement, Betty Friedan did more than write about confining gender stereotypes but she became a force for change. Susan Oliver’s bibliography captivates Betty Friedan’s leading role against the sexual inequality between men and woman during her lifetime. Born as a daughter of Jewish parents in Peoria, Illinois Betty saw in her own eyes the sacrifices women were making through her mother’s loss of fulfilling a career in journalism. Once she married, Betty’s mother had to give up her job at a newspaper and latter on urged Betty to peruse a career in journalism. Betty was able to graduate from Smith College with a bachelor’s degree and did one year’s worth of work in graduate school at the University of California,…
Imagine a world where women have a very little amount of rights, where women being hired was rare, and where only women cleaned. The only reason our world isn’t like that anymore is because of Betty Friedan, and others like her. Betty Friedan experienced having little rights her whole life, and one day wondered if other women felt the same way she did.…
Since the end of world war two, in 1945, Australian society has witnessed many dramatic changes in the rights and freedoms of women. Women, who had been encouraged to take on men’s jobs during the war were expected to vacate these positions and return to their traditional vocation in “home making”.…
Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was first published in the United States in 1963 by W. W. Norton & Company. Friedan began writing this piece after she attended her fifteen-year college reunion at Smith, a woman's college. She prepared a questionaire for 200 of her classmates at this reunion. The results were as she expected; many American women were unhappy and did not know why. Many magazines did not want to post Friedan's results because it contradicted the original role of women and conventional assumptions about femininity. After this, Friedan spent five years researching and writing The Feminine Mystique. In this book, Friedan defines women's unhappiness as "The problem that has no name". She goes into detailed exploration of what she believes is the problem for these women. Friedan uses statistics, theories, and first-person accounts to show that the problem is the idealized image of women society has created, which she calls The Feminine Mystique. Women have been confined to the roles of a housewife and a mother, denying them education and career opportunitites. Friedan successfully proves that the feminine mystique denies women the opportunity to develop their own ideas by discussing women's educational process, effective look at media, and first-hand accounts with other women.…
Throughout the Progressive Era many reform and laws were enforced. It was a great time for several groups especially women. During the Progressive Era we started to see women in public more often working and being accepted into society as equal to men. However, there were exceptions. Women still could not vote, were not given the same jobs men could get, were being paid less, and were still seen as homemakers.…
The American movement for women’s liberation and rights was undoubtedly the most progressive in the decades that followed the Second World War. The second wave of feminism that ensued in the 1960s and 70s redirected the goals and ambitions in the fight for gender equality in many aspects. This new wave of liberal reform allowed women to break free from the domestic sphere from the conservative restraints of the 1950s, which have traditionally limited a women’s access to the same political, economic, and educational rights as men. While the fight for women’s equality started to make real headway post World War II, the fight for women’s rights has existed long before then. This can be seen in the Antebellum reforms or the first wave of feminism from the early 19th century to the early 20th century.…
The Progressive Era lasted from the 1890s to the 1920s focusing on many different issues. During the Progressive Era women played a key part in trying to make changes in their political rights and making advancements in progressivism. “Equal Rights” was not what it seemed to be, women of course had their freedom but they necessarily didn't have the freedom to vote like that of men.…
There are numerous examples of women fighting for their right to vote, a key igniting factor to the Women’s Suffrage Movement gaining momentum began with the end of the Civil War. In the reconstruction era, the 14th and 15th Amendments in the governmental and male gender political spheres, created a frenzy in the women’s suffrage movement, instilling women to no longer be quiet and fight for the rights they deserved. The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, stipulates in Art.1, Sec.2 “males”, becoming a contradiction to Article 1 of the Amendment, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States… are citizens of the United States”, nowhere mentioned excluding the female gender. The Fifteenth Amendment states all citizens had the right to vote, unfortunately the female gender was not encompassed as citizens, whereas newly free slaves surpassed the female gender in discrimination.…
Women fought a lot to gain full equality during the Progressive era. The perfection of the American Revolution increased women’s suppositions, encourage some of the first straight forward requirements for impartiality and observed the formation of female institutions to enhance women’s education. According to http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraid=11(by the early 19th century, American women had the highest female literacy rate in the world). The American government's expanded suffrage to involve essentially all white males, nevertheless, they started contradicting the vote to free African American men and in New Jersey to women, who had temporarily won these advantages succeeding the Revolution. During the 1820s and many years after…
Feminism: a topic of discussion in many homes and classrooms, which asserts the utmost attention amongst its listeners. A crazy ideal that believes women hold fundamental rights among men, and deserve the same treatment, the same opportunities. Feminism has grown since its conception in the early 20th century, and has catapulted upward in a grand and illustrious fashion, clinging to the souls of women who will no longer be oppressed by an abusive patriarchy. However, in this decade, feminism has become the topic of crude humor, has been made the punchline of jokes directed toward women. Feminism has become merely a way to generalize women as “crazy, hormonal monsters” who should never have a say in democracy because their “time of…
Thus, in an attempt to further promote equal opportunity between men and women, a second wave of feminism emerged between 1968 and the 1980’s, which can be best characterized by women’s refusal to acclimate to society’s rigid belief of what an ideal woman should be or act like (Mancia, Class, 12/2). This problem is perfectly illustrated in the Feminine Mystique, written by Betty Friedan, in which Friedan discussed the unhappiness of many young women in the 1950’s and early 1960’s despite many of them being married and having children, living the life a woman is “supposed” to have. Furthermore, Friedan complained of young women who were being taught that “truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights” (Friedan, p. 271). Instead, they were being taught that it was a woman’s “job” to essentially be a housewife (i.e. stay home, clean the house, make food for her family, take care of the kids, etc...) (Friedan, p. 273). However, Friedan largely opposed this view and believed that it embodied the false prototypical stereotype about women. Rather, Friedan believed that a truly feminine woman would do just the exact opposite and does aim for a career, higher education, and political rights in the same way that a man would (Mancia, Class,…
In Cold War Ideology and the Rise of Feminism by Elaine Tyler May, May examines the impact of political changes on American families, specifically the relationship of a Cold War ideology and the ideal of domesticity in the 1960s. May believed that with security as the common thread, the Cold War ideology and the domestic revival reinforced each other. Personal adaption, rather than political resistance, characterized the era. However, postwar domesticity never fully delivered on its promises because the baby-boom children who grew up in suburban homes abandoned the containment ethos when they grew up. They challenged both the imperatives of the cold war and the domestic ideology that came with it. The first to criticize the status quo were postwar parents themselves. In 1963, Betty Friedan published her exposé of domesticity, The Feminine Mystique. Friedan was a postwar wife and mother who spoke directly to women and lived according to the domestic containment ideology. In her book she encouraged women to go back to school, pursue careers,…
The Feminist movement of the 1960's focused on braking down workplace inequality. In 1964, Representative Howard Smith of Virginia planned on adding a prohibition on gender discrimination into the Civil Rights Act that was under consideration. The law passed with the amendment intact. Later realized that the Equal Employment Opportunity commission, was not going to help enforce the new laws protecting women at work.…