The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan - Part 11

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 106

  April 16, 2017 

Book 31 - The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan (1997)
 Part 11 - pages 310-337
Reading Time - 1 hour

Here we get to the meat of the matter. Humans have an inborn need to grow. It gets expressed as the courage to be an individual. We are called to the highest excellence of which we are capable. If we surrender or give up our drive to growth... it can lead to despair and resentment.

So we have whole generations of women who evaded the frightening feeling of self discovery but ended up in despair. Housewives ended up being victims of "dailyness"... the endless boring days of sameness. Similar to what prisoners experience I guess. In some ways, you could say that housewives were prisoners in gilded cages... but with the doors wide open. But they were convinced that the gilded cage was safer than the world "out there".

Thing is... if people lose their sense of power and are barred from realizing their true nature, you end up with some serious sickness. Friedan brings in Maslow's heirarchy of needs and concludes that women got stuck fulfilling their physiological needs but blocked the higher needs - the search for knowledge and truth.

So, really... it's not about whether one is masculine or feminine... which are just stereotypes... it's about whether one is self-actualized... whether one's individuality is strengthened or not. A self-actualized person, whether they are a man or a woman, can bring together active/passive, masculine/feminine. We are all called to full growth, to be complete... to maturity.

As far back as 1900, a South African woman saw that "if women did not win back their right to a full share of honored and useful work, woman's mind and muscle would weaken in a parasitic state; her offspring, male and female, would weaken progressively, and civilization would itself deteriorate". Was that South African woman right?

Friedan would argue that the feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.