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I finished Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) today. In her final chapter, “A New Life Plan for Women,” she basically tells women how they can be fulfilled. One minute, she appears to be open to women volunteering, since that’s an opportunity for them to demonstrate leadership skills. The next minute, however, she says that most volunteer jobs consist of busy work that leads to nowhere. She prefers for women to be doing something for which they are paid, for payment is a sign of recognition and accomplishment. She’s not big on dabblers in the arts, or dilettantes who take classes with no intention of going anywhere with their education.
On pages 359-360, she says that women should feel free to pursue jobs in which they will have to compete with men. That’s what happens when women “take their education and their abilities seriously and put them to use”, and “there is competition in every serious pursuit of our society” (360). And women need to be doing serious pursuits in order to feel good about themselves, Ms. Friedan maintains. In The Power of the Positive Woman (1977), Phyllis Schlafly said that women should not be made to compete for men in a time of high unemployment, for that could deprive male breadwinners of jobs. I’m not sure if the economy was as bad in 1963—when Ms. Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique—as it was in 1977—when Mrs. Schlafly wrote The Power of the Positive Woman. Ms. Friedan does note, however, that husbands with wives who work outside of the home are happy about the extra cash that’s coming in.
Ms. Friedan says that women may need to work a 9-5 job to get away from the distractions of their home life, yet she wants various institutions to realize that women have responsibilities as wives and mothers. Consequently, she supports maternity leave (even a maternity sabbatical) as well as nurseries. And she believes that colleges should allow women to study part-time, and that a GI bill for women should defray the cost of their education.
Something I’ve learned throughout my reading of the Feminine Mystique is that the Mystique—the notion that women can only find fulfillment as wives and mothers—is in part a reaction against the feminism of the nineteenth-early twentieth centuries. Many advocates of the Mystique, for example, asserted that women were dissatisfied as homemakers because they went to college, and that filled their heads with all these hopes and expectations for life. And, while Ms. Friedan says that homemakers are dissatisfied sexually because they haven’t found an identity outside of the home, advocates of the Feminine Mystique blame their dissatisfaction on them not being feminine enough: they’ve allowed feminism to disrupt their sex lives!
I’ll stop here. I’m glad that I finished this book, to be honest, because I was spending a lot of time writing about it. While it’s not a book that blew me away, I’m happy that I read it, as I’m glad to have read Phyllis Schlafly’s The Power of the Positive Woman. I had stereotypes in my mind about what these women believed, and it was good for me to read them in their own words. Sometimes, they agree. Sometimes, they disagree. Sometimes, they contradict themselves. Sometimes, I found myself agreeing with Mrs. Schlafly. Sometimes, I agreed with Ms. Friedan.
I’ll still be blogging for Women’s History Month, though it’s up in the air what my posts will be about. Mrs. Schlafly and Ms. Friedan will probably come up in my future posts. I’ll be watching some movies, such as Mona Lisa’s Smile and Firefighter, along with an American Experience documentary on Dolly Madison. I will also be taping a Little House on the Prairie episode, which is about the women’s rights movement. And, somewhere in my mind as I read Mrs. Schlafly and Ms. Friedan, there was a question: “How does this relate to the women in my life—my grandmothers, my mom, my sister, my aunt, my cousin?” Do they gravitate more towards the Feminine Mystique, or (slightly to the left of that) Phyllis Schlafly? Or did they find satisfaction outside of the home? I may get into this, or I may not, since it’s pretty personal, and there are people in my family who actually read my blog (not that I’d say anything bad about them). I’ll play it by ear!
