The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan is widely credited with sparking second - wave feminism.
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What I found fascinating about this book is that until I read this book, I thought I was completely alone in my frustration of being a stay at home mom. I was a very busy and happy mom when the boys were little. I would not trade these early years for anything. The boys grew and the years passed, and I took on various projects over the years which were satisfying and took all of my free time. The projects varied from hours of volunteering in the classroom, being room mom, involved in the PTA, coaching their AYSO teams, gardening, being involved in Boy Scouts, sewing, house remolding and decorating, overseeing rental units... The list goes on and on and too much to try to sum up here. I have always stayed very busy running the house, caring for our pets, keeping the boys on track with school, and trying to work out in any free time I have.
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I have never had an abundance of free time. Nor have I suffered from boredom. But as the boys have gotten older, there is a restlessness that has crept in. I have tried to ignore it by working out to exhaustion or numbing it by evening wine. When I mentioned my frustration, I was told I should be so grateful for all that I have. I was told how beautiful my house was and I was so lucky to have my health and all the things I have. I was told I am so lucky to stay home as it is the best, most fulfilling, most important job in the world. I was told to get a massage, or manicure, or take a little weekend trip to relax and recharge. I was told to enjoy more leisure activities, or take a board position on the PTA or foundation.
I was grateful. I acknowledge that I am very fortunate that my husband has been so successful and I am not lacking any material wants. I was grateful, and, I was frustrated to the point of despair. I grew to believe that this was a ME problem. Something was wrong with me. I must be an awful person to be unsatisfied living the life I am living. I was a good mom, but over the years, I had lost my whole identity. I felt I had nothing to show for my college degree, my JD degree. I was nearing 50 and I had yet to make my mark on the world: to make a difference in other people's lives that I had so wanted to make. To fulfill my life dreams, which honestly, I didn't even know what they were. All I did know is that I had not yet reached my full potential. I had yet to prove myself outside of motherhood.
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Then I came across this book, and although it was written in 1963 about the 1950 housewife, it completely resonated with me. I was blown away that Friedan discussed how thousands and thousands of housewives felt dissatisfied with their lives. I had been taught, trained, conditioned to believe that I should be entirely fulfilled. I was led to believe that all my anger was my own issue. It was me being ungrateful, selfish and that I was crazy. This book made me understand that maybe I am not crazy after all. That perhaps women cannot gain all their fulfillment from the home alone. That perhaps being a stay at home mom does not utilize all the potential one has to offer the world, and a woman can lose her identity and remain at a low lower of self actualization. This book made me realize that actually thousands and thousands of women share this same problem that I have.
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So I wanted to summarize the book so I could refer to the main points. I am using Friedan's words and not trying to rewrite them in my own words. I am giving all the credit to Friedan and this entire rest of this article is her words.
Many of the younger generation of wives who married early did not suffer the lonely terror of men and women their same age who were deciding on what job to pursue and who to become. They thought they did not have to chose. To look into the future and plan what they wanted to do with their lives. They thought that they only had to wait to be chosen; marking time passively till husband, the babies, the new house decided what the rest of their lives looked like. They slid easily into their sexual role as women before they knew who they were themselves. It is these women who suffer most, the problem that has no name.
Thesis: the core of the problem for women today is not sexual, but a problem of identity. A stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique. It is my thesis that as the Victorian cultural did not let women satisfy their basic sexual needs, our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need that is not fully defined by their sexual role.
Crises of women growing up. Under feminine mystique -women are not expected to grow up, to find out who they are, and discover their identity. Anatomy is their identity. Identity of women is determined by their biology. More and more women are asking this question, as if waking from a coma, asking where am I? What am I doing here? For the first time in human history, women are becoming aware of an identity crisis in their own lives, an immaturity that has been called femininity to full human identity.
Feminist revolution had to be fought because women were stopped at a stage of their evolution far short of their capacity. The domestic function of women does not exhaust her powers. To make 1/2 the human race consume its energies in the functions of housekeeper, wife, and mother is a monstrous waste of the most precious material god ever made. Degradation of women also degraded marriage, love and sex.
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Please note- the rest of this summary is entirely from wikipedia. None of this is my own words. It is all just info I copied and pasted from Wikipedia so I could remember the main points. I am not trying to review it here - just strictly presenting the info in condensed form.
The Feminine Mystique begins with an introduction describing what Friedan called "the problem that has no name"—the widespread unhappiness of women in the 1950s and early 1960s. It discusses the lives of several housewives from around the United States who were unhappy despite living in material comfort and being married with children. Furthermore, Friedan questioned the women's magazine, women's education system and advertisers for creating this widespread image of women. The detrimental effects induced by this image were that it narrowed women into the domestic sphere, and that it led many women to lose their own identities.
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Chapter 1: Friedan points out that the average age of marriage was dropping, the portion of women attending college was decreasing and the birthrate was increasing for women throughout the 1950s, yet the widespread trend of unhappy women persisted, although American culture insisted that fulfillment for women could be found in marriage and housewifery. Although aware of and sharing this dissatisfaction, women in the 1950s misinterpreted it as an individual problem and rarely talked about it with other women. As Friedan pointed out, "part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold." This chapter concludes by declaring "We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'
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Chapter 2: Friedan states that the editorial decisions concerning women's magazines at the time were being made mostly by men, who insisted on stories and articles that showed women as either happy housewives or unhappy careerists, thus creating the "feminine mystique"—the idea that women were naturally fulfilled by devoting their lives to being housewives and mothers. Friedan also states that this is in contrast to the 1930s, at which time women's magazines often featured confident and independent heroines, many of whom were involved in careers.
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Chapter 3: Friedan recalls her own decision to conform to society's expectations by giving up her promising career in psychology to raise children, and shows that other young women still struggled with the same kind of decision. Many women dropped out of school early to marry, afraid that if they waited too long or became too educated, they would not be able to attract a husband. Friedan argues at the end of the chapter that although theorists discuss how men need to find their identity, women are expected to be autonomous. She states, "Anatomy is woman's destiny, say the theorists of femininity; the identity of woman is determined by her biology." Friedan goes on to argue that the problem is women needing to mature and find their human identity. She argues, "In a sense that goes beyond any woman's life, I think this is a crisis of women growing up—a turning point from an immaturity that has been called femininity to full human identity."
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Chapter 4: Friedan discusses early American feminists and how they fought against the assumption that the proper role of a woman was to be solely a wife and mother. She notes that they secured important rights for women, including education, the right to pursue a career, and the right to vote.
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Chapter 5: In this chapter, Friedan, who had a degree in psychology, criticizes the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (whose ideas were very influential in the United States at the time of the book's publication). She notes that Freud saw women as childlike and as destined to be housewives, once pointing out that Freud wrote, "I believe that all reforming action in law and education would break down in front of the fact that, long before the age at which a man can earn a position in society, Nature has determined woman's destiny through beauty, charm, and sweetness. Law and custom have much to give women that has been withheld from them, but the position of women will surely be what it is: in youth an adored darling and in mature years a loved wife." Friedan also points out that Freud's unproven concept of "penis envy" had been used to label women who wanted careers as neurotic, and that the popularity of Freud's work and ideas elevated the "feminine mystique" of female fulfillment in housewifery into a "scientific religion" that most women were not educated enough to criticize.
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Chapter 6: Friedan criticizes functionalism, which attempted to make the social sciences more credible by studying the institutions of society as if they were parts of a social body, as in biology. Institutions were studied in terms of their function in society, and women were confined to their sexual biological roles as housewives and mothers as well as being told that doing otherwise would upset the social balance. Friedan points out that this is unproven and that Margaret Mead, a prominent functionalist, had a flourishing career as an anthropologist.
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Chapter 7: Friedan discusses the change in women's education from the 1940s to the early 1960s, in which many women's schools concentrated on non-challenging classes that focused mostly on marriage, family, and other subjects deemed suitable for women, as educators influenced by functionalism felt that too much education would spoil women's femininity and capacity for sexual fulfillment. Friedan says that this change in education arrested girls in their emotional development at a young age, because they never had to face the painful identity crisis and subsequent maturation that comes from dealing with many adult challenges.
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Chapter 8: 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 the father as breadwinner and the mother as housewife. Friedan notes that this was helped along by the fact that many of the women who worked during the war filling jobs previously filled by men faced dismissal, discrimination, or hostility when the men returned, and that educators blamed over-educated, career-focused mothers for the maladjustment of soldiers in World War II. Yet as Friedan shows, later studies found that overbearing mothers, not careerists, were the ones who raised maladjusted children.
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Chapter 9: Friedan shows that advertisers tried to encourage housewives to think of themselves as professionals who needed many specialized products in order to do their jobs, while discouraging housewives from having actual careers, since that would mean they would not spend as much time and effort on housework and therefore would not buy as many household products, cutting into advertisers' profits.
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Chapter 10: Friedan interviews several full-time housewives, finding that although they are not fulfilled by their housework, they are all extremely busy with it. She postulates that these women unconsciously stretch their home duties to fill the time available, because the feminine mystique has taught women that this is their role, and if they ever complete their tasks they will become unneeded.
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Chapter 11: Friedan notes that many housewives have sought fulfillment in sex, unable to find it in housework and children; Friedan notes that sex cannot fulfill all of a person's needs, and that attempts to make it do so often drive married women to have affairs or drive their husbands away as they become obsessed with sex.
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Chapter 12: Friedan discusses the fact that many children have lost interest in life or emotional growth, attributing the change to the mother's own lack of fulfillment, a side effect of the feminine mystique. When the mother lacks a self, Friedan notes, she often tries to live through her children, causing the children to lose their own sense of themselves as separate human beings with their own lives.
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Chapter 13: Friedan discusses the psychologist Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and notes that women have been trapped at the basic, physiological level, expected to find their identity through their sexual role alone. Friedan says that women need meaningful work just as men do to achieve self-actualization, the highest level on the hierarchy of needs.
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Chapter 14: In the final chapter of The Feminine Mystique, Friedan discusses several case studies of women who have begun to go against the feminine mystique. She also advocates a new life plan for her women readers, including not viewing housework as a career, not trying to find total fulfillment through marriage and motherhood alone, and finding meaningful work that uses their full mental capacity. She discusses the conflicts that some women may face in this journey to self-actualization, including their own fears and resistance from others. For each conflict, Friedan offers examples of women who have overcome it. Friedan ends her book by promoting education and meaningful work as the ultimate method by which American women can avoid becoming trapped in the feminine mystique, calling for a drastic rethinking of what it means to be feminine, and offering several educational and occupational suggestions.