The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan - Part 10

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 105

  April 15, 2017 

Book 31 - The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan (1997)
 Part 10 - pages 282-309
Reading Time - 1 hour

Here we get to the crunch point. Friedan basically says that children are paying the price for this Feminine Mystique. They are ending up soft, passive and bored. They have no direction in life, no drive, no urgency. Their mothers seek infantile gratification through their children and their children end up having a temper tantrum at the age of 13 if she refuses to butter their bread. One boy said she should butter his bread until he got married, at which point his wife would then butter his bread. Good grief.

The thing is... the whole thing becomes stifling after a while and women ended up having mental breakdowns. Cause living a life in a gilded cage is actually a slow death of mind and spirit.