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In my reading today of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, I learned why (according to her) women's magazines went from celebrating the adventurous, independent woman in the late 1930's and the 1940's, to propagating the Feminine Mystique in the 1950's. (The Feminine Mystique is the view that women only find fulfillment in the domestic sphere, as wives and mothers.) In the late 1930's and the 1940's, women ran the women's magazines. When men returned from war, however, they took the women's magazines over. Friedan quotes a woman magazine editor who states, "The new writers were all men, back from the war, who had been dreaming about home, and a cozy domestic life "(47-48). And so they wrote articles about what they believed women should be.
Pages 59-60 are interesting in that they may very well encapsulate Betty Friedan's worldview (though I have much more to learn, for I haven't even gotten to her view of Freud!):
I helped create this image [(the Feminine Mystique)]. I have watched American women for fifteen years try to conform to it. But I can no longer deny my own knowledge of its terrible implications. It is not a harmless image. There may be no psychological terms for the harm it is doing. But what happens when women try to live according to an image that makes them deny their minds? What happens when women grow up in an image that makes them deny the reality of the changing world?
The material details of life, the daily burden of cooking and cleaning, of taking care of the physical needs of husband and children---these did indeed define a woman's world a century ago when Americans were pioneers, and the American frontier lay in conquering the land. But the women who went west with the wagon trains also shared the pioneering purpose. Now the American frontiers are of the mind, and of the spirit. Love and children and home are good, but they are not the whole world, even if most of the words now written for women pretend that they are. Why should women accept this picture of a half-life, instead of a share in the whole of human destiny? Why should women try to make housework "something more," instead of moving on the frontiers of their own time, as American women moved beside their husbands on the old frontiers?
Ms. Friedan (at least here) doesn't appear to be against love, children, and home. But she doesn't think that the domestic sphere is everything. Part of the issue may be the nature of women. The Feminine Mystique and Phyllis Schlafly affirmed that women were nurturers, according to the creation of the Divine Architect. But Ms. Friedan points out that women also have a mind, that they're capable of more than the drudgery of everyday housework, that they need to be challenged.
The Feminine Mystique itself may be complex. In my post yesterday, Feminine Mystique 1, I talked about how, even according to some of the information that Ms. Friedan provides, there was an assumption within the Feminine Mystique that women were intelligent---that a great amount of mental capacity was needed for them to run the household as homemakers. But my reading today revealed another side to it. According to Ms. Friedan, women's magazines in the 1950's even try to discourage women from being too active in the PTA, and they assume that the husband knows more than the wife about how to handle money (41).
Sometimes, the attempts of housewives to be creative are squashed. On pages 39-40, Ms. Friedan tells a story about a homemaker who started a business selling sandwiches to her husband's co-workers, and her husband told her that her sandwiches were "too fancy." But she wanted to do more than put ham on two pieces of rye, for she wanted to be creative! Eventually, she gives up her business when the husband decides to have another baby. He tells her that her role is to be the mother of their children, and he agrees to trust her with a joint account so that she doesn't have to work for the money she wants.
After reading The Power of the Positive Woman, my impression is that Phyllis Schlafly agrees with parts of the Feminine Mystique, while disagreeing with other parts. She would agree that the man should be the head of the home, that a woman should nurture her children and make her husband feel important, and that the role of a homemaker can be challenging. But she doesn't seem to think that a woman should only do housework, for she encourages women to have hobbies, to write, and to volunteer, which are outlets for their creativity. And she states that a Positive Man should be secure and supportive when it comes to his wife's pursuits. She also doesn't fit the Feminine Mystique's profile of women as uninterested in national and international affairs, for she was interested in politics even when she met the man who would become her husband, Fred Schlafly. That's one of the things that drew them to each other!
