Feminine Mystique, Part 2

I'm really enjoying Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique. It's an opinion/history book, meaning that it is an opinion book that uses (sometimes manipulates) historical facts to support the opinion. At times it is abrasive and angry (actually it is mostly abrasive and angry), but I think probably it is necessarily so. It might not have attracted so much attention if the text didn't shout as much. Betty F. said some pretty insightful and powerful things in it that for sure helped out her own and subsequent generations of women recognize the unfairness of the society they lived in.

Just a little history on the book so far. By the way, she published this in 1963, so cultural references are made according to this time period...

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"The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity." (p. 43) And according to Betty, society tells us that femininity IS passivity, caretaking, gentleness, children, husband, and suburban home. "...the root of women's troubles in the past is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love." (p. 43)

So another generation of women grew up, got married, had children and tended to them at home and somehow felt a longing for something more. Friedan writes about the typical housewife. "As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself this silent question--"Is this all?" (p. 15) Friedan calls this silent dissatisfaction, this yearning among suburban housewives, "the problem that has no name."

God forbid the woman does anything about this silent dissatisfaction, for "They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights..." (p. 16). So what to do about this "problem that has no name"?

"In a sense that goes beyond any one woman's life, I think this is the crisis of women growing up--a turning point from an immaturity that has been called femininity to full human identity. I think women had to suffer this crisis of identity, which began a hundred years ago, and have to suffer it still today, simply to become fully human." (p. 79)

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And now y'all don't even need to read the book, cuz there it all is. And the reason I think that this book is brilliant is because it holds water even today. True, we've gone through women's liberation, there are as many working moms as stay-at-homes. But everybody comes into adulthood with certain cultural biases of what they should do. True movement into adulthood is examining these biases and breaking them if necessary. We all need an identity crisis to become "truly human."

And indeed, Betty had one of her own I think when she wrote this book. She, too, married, had 3 kids, and then at age 42 was inspired to write this book. A few years later she divorced. Her ex-husband was quoted as saying, "She changed the course of history almost single-handedly. It took a driven, superaggressive, egocentric, almost lunatic dynamo to rock the world the way she did. Unfortunately, she was that same person at home, where that kind of conduct doesn't work. She simply never understood this." (From Wikipedia).

God bless strong women. And God bless every person who needs to go through an identity crisis to become fully human.