Potter 1
Rebecca Potter
Gray
Section 4975
12 May 2015
Primary Source Analysis on The Feminine Mystique The Feminine Mystique is the title of a book written by Betty Friedan who has also founded The National Organization for Women (NOW) to help US women gain equal rights. She describes the "Feminine Mystique" as the heightened awareness of the expectations of women and how each woman has to fit a certain role as a little girl, an uneducated and unemployed teenager, and finally as a wife and mother who is happy to clean the house and cook things all day. After World War II, a lot of women's organizations began to appear with the goal of bringing the issues of equal rights into the limelight. The Feminine Mystique also seems to come from her determination to locate the deeper causes of the frustration that she and women like her feel. There are countless stereotypes mentioned in the book. The stereotypes even come down to the color of a woman's hair. Many women wish that they could be blonde because that was the ideal hair color. In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan writes that "across America, three out of every ten women dyed their hair blonde " (182). This serves as an example of how there is/was such a push for women to fit a certain mold which is portrayed as the role of women. Blacks were naturally excluded from the notion of ideal women and they suffered additional discrimination which was even greater than that which the white women suffered from. In addition to hair color, women often went to great lengths to achieve a thin figure. The look that
Potter 2 women were striving for was the look of the thin model. Many women wore tight, uncomfortable clothing in order to create the illusion of being thinner and some even took pills that were supposed to make them lose weight, which is even still a problem today. The role of women was to find a husband to support the family that they would raise. Many women dropped out of college or never went in the first place because they were lead to believe that working outside of the home was for men and that it would not be feminine for them to get jobs and be single without a husband or children to take care of. An enormous problem for women in this time was the psychological stress of dealing with this role that was presented to them. The happily married, perpetually baking, eternally mopping, Donna Reed that lived in every house on the block with her hard working husband and her twelve children that existed in the media made women feel that there was something wrong with them if they didn't enjoy their housewife lifestyle. And it was not easy for women to deal with this problem. As Betty Friedan talks about in The Feminine Mystique, “For over fifteen years women in America found it harder to talk about this problem than about sex.”(152) Any psychiatrists were baffled and the problem was often ignored with no known solution because everyone found it to not make any sense. Also, Women of low economic status also struggled a great deal because they had to deal with the problems associated with a single income household which could become very frustrating when she has every reason to get a job, but cannot. It is also harder to raise children with a low income and provide for the family as she was expected to. Potter 3 Friedan notes that the uncertainties and fears during World War II and the Cold War made Americans long for the comfort of home, so they tried to create an idealized home life with father as the breadwinner and mother as the housewife. Friedan also notes that this is helped along by the fact that many of the women who work during the war filling jobs previously filled by men faced dismissal, discrimination, or hostility when the men returned, and that educators blame over-educated, career-focused mothers for the maladjustment of soldiers in World War II. Yet as Friedan shows, later studies find that overbearing mothers, not careerists, are the ones who raised maladjusted children. It is interesting to apply the notion of the feminine mystique to modern culture and see that it often still exists. Though there are many women who are getting jobs, there are still a lot of families that fit the mold of the traditional family with the breadwinner and the bread baker with bunch of kids running around. Some counterarguments that could be made against The Feminine Mystique are that it focuses on what was not a universal female problem but rather a problem endured only by white, upper- and middle-class mothers and wives. Friedan's phrase, "the problem that has no name,”(15) could actually refer to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women or housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who want more out of life. Friedan concludes her first chapter by stating: "We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my house.’”(32) That "more" she defines as careers. She does not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were free from their house labor and given equal access with white men
Potter 4 to the professions. She does not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignores the existence of all non-white women and poor white women. Overall, The Feminine Mystique is the title of a book written by Betty Friedan. She describes the "Feminine Mystique" as the heightened awareness of the expectations of women and how each woman has to fit a certain role as a little girl, an uneducated and unemployed teenager, and finally as a wife and mother who is happy to clean the house and cook things all day. Also, After World War II, a lot of women's organizations began to appear with the goal of bringing the issues of equal rights into the limelight. The Feminine Mystique also seems to come from her determination to locate the deeper causes of the frustration that she and women like her feel. The text influences how we understand a given era or theme in US history by letting our generation know what it was like for people who were just like us in history, and what they went through to be able to get where we are now. It has enabled us to grow.