The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan - Part 3

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 98

  April 8, 2017 

Book 31 - The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan (1997)
 Part 3 - pages 80-125
Reading Time - 2 hours

Friedan takes us back to the 1800s and the early stirrings of the feminist movement. It's an interesting read, to be sure, but makes me a bit angry. In the mid 1800s, feminists set out to abolish the notion that women were dependent feminine objects. Women essentially fulfilled through sexual passivity, acceptance of male domination and nurturing motherhood. Women were defined as objects, not as subjects in their own right. They were talked about in relation to their husbands or their children. But women wanted more.. they wanted the same freedom as men - to stand alone and to understand oneself. Women wanted to develop their soul, their mind, their intellect - to reach their full potential. No surprise then, that women were involved in the movement to abolish slavery. But that in participating in that movement, they also realized that they wanted to be liberated too. Here's an interesting tidbit... you know the Battle Hymn of the Republic.... yeah... that one... Well, the words to that song were written by American writer Julia Ward Howe using the music from the song "John Brown's Body". But she did it anonymously... crazy.

Friedan also takes us into the twisted back alleys of Sigmund Freud... All I've got to say about Freud is that he was one twisted puppy. Friedan admits that Freud was a prisoner of his own cultural time... no matter how brilliant he was in other areas. Most of his theories rest on his own psychoanalysis of himself and his own strange brand of sexuality. He saw every neurosis as having a sexual origin (maybe because his did?). His Victorian theories were then taken out of their context and weirdly twisted and imposed on modern people. Freud saw women as fundamentally inferior, child-like dolls and that it was woman's nature to be ruled by men... her sickness to envy him. An uncritical acceptance of Freudian doctrine in America settled everywhere like toxic dust. A very few doctors realized that if the patient doesn't fit the book, throw away the book and listen to the patient. But, by and large, American women were given the Freudian shrink job... much to their detriment.