The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan - Part 9

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 104

  April 14, 2017 

Book 31 - The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan (1997)
 Part 9 - pages 258-281
Reading Time - 1 hour

Sooo... you know what bored housewives do, right? They become rabid sex monsters of course! They are searching for that magical "romantic love" and after a while, they're not finding it from their husbands... or extra-marital affairs. Women want sex... demand sex... and men are disinterested. They are demanding fulfillment from their husband and it's not happening. So you end up with predatory sex-crazed housewives and passive, martyred husbands.

Women basically go a little crazy cooped up at home all day while the husband is at work doing exciting stuff and the kids are at school learning differential equations. She's bored silly and no amount of Harlequin romances are going to fill that boredom. She's looking for fulfillment in all the wrong places and not finding it... cause it doesn't come from house-cleaning, or sex... it comes from fulfilling her potential as a human being. Hopefully we get to that soon...

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan - Part 8

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 102

  April 13, 2017 

Book 31 - The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan (1997)
 Part 8 - pages 233-257
Reading Time - 1 hour

Here's the thing with housewives... they take more time to do housework than working women who have other jobs. What a working woman can do in an hour takes a housewife 6 hours. Why is that? Well... there's a law somewhere that says nature abhors a vacuum and that work will expand to fill the time available. Gotta be busy... gotta make housework look "important" to fulfill your own sense of worth. Not wonder housewives feel so empty!

Friedan says that the more your intelligence exceeds your job requirements, the greater your boredom. What an appalling waste of woman power... on cleaning and dusting and chauffeuring and goodness knows what else.

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan - Part 7

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 101

  April 12, 2017 

Book 31 - The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan (1997)
 Part 7 - pages 206-232
Reading Time - 1 hour

So, we all know that the chief business of America is business. The almighty Dollar is king in the U.S. And, as it turns out, women (at least in the 1960s) are the chief consumers of American business. Friedan interviewed some advertising/marketing consultant who had this to say about women and shopping:

"Properly manipulated, American housewives can be given the sense of identity, purpose, creativity, the self-realization, even the sexual joy they lack, by buying things".

Let's get the housewives to enjoy housework and have fun with it!! Let them be creative with their ready-made cake mix! Let them use as many different products to clean their house (rather than just vinegar and baking soda) so that they feel less like an unskilled labourer (which is what they are) and more like an engineer or expert!!! Oooohhhh...  Let's create the illusion of some sense of "achievement"! Let's get them all to buy Sterling Silver (which is horrible to keep untarnished) because they need to keep up with appearances. "What... you only have stainless steel cutlery... you must be so poor." Let's make the housewife feel a sense of achievement for cleaning her silver! Cause Sterling Silver and China symbolize her success as a Modern Woman.

Well... this answers my question as to why everyone had to have China and Sterling Silver in their cupboards... stuff that they only used once a year (maybe twice) but had to keep clean. Crazy... it was like a make-work project.

Cause... it's all connected with the kind of person a woman is. Gotta sell the housewives things to satisfy their needs. Good grief... it sounds a bit like modern society actually. Where people keep buying things... bigger houses, bigger cars, more toys, more electronics, more more more... to satisfy that need... that identity, that purpose (see Advertising guy's quote above). The things is.... things will NEVER fill that hole. But we keep buying them. My Dad is getting Home Support twice a day and I know Home Support workers do not make a lot of money. But I tell ya... they drive the snappiest, new vehicles you ever did see. The question isn't "how can they afford those cars"... the question is "how deep in debt are they"?

Friedan closed off this chapter by asking... is this buying frenzy a sign of a sick/immature society and people. I'd raise my hand and say... "yup, it is".

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan - Part 6

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 101

  April 11, 2017 

Book 31 - The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan (1997)
 Part 6 - pages 182-205
Reading Time - 1 hour

Right... so here's the thing... no one would willing take on this feminine mystique thing if it was sold on a store shelf unless it fulfilled some need. Clearly women weren't being forced to return to the home... they were doing it willingly... but why? After the war, there was a pent-up hunger for marriage, home and children... both on the part of returning soldiers and women. But while other countries had the Baby Boom... they didn't end up with the same feminine mystique.

In the US though, it was like the nation fell into a sleep and stopped growing up. Maybe it was easier to think about love and sex than to face the threat of Communism and the Bomb. There was also though, an inwardness that put American women under a Freudian microscope. Because the American soldiers had, by and large, been identified as being rather immature. Their moms were blamed.... because they hadn't raised their boys right. Because, of course, immature moms raise immature children. There you go... it was career moms who were to blame for immature boy soldiers. Except... the moms who raised the soldiers were not career moms... they were stay at home moms. They were women who had devoted too much to their children. But there's that same thing again... "don't confuse me with facts when my mind is made up".

Studies have shown that educated women have a greater chance of sexual fulfillment. Working mothers are generally more mature and raise more mature kids. Maternal over-protection, where the mom lives through her kids and for her kids, is not a good thing... not good at all. Housewives ended up smothering their sons and daughters which led to a lack of independence and individuality.

Which makes sense... if kids are never given the freedom to go out and stumble in life... what kind of adults are they going to grow into. Makes me wonder about the kids today who are shuttled around from ballet to soccer to play dates and never get to go out into the world and catch a frog or run through the forest unhindered... What kind of kids are we raising today?

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan - Part 5

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 100

  April 10, 2017 

Book 31 - The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan (1997)
 Part 5 - pages 150-181
Reading Time - 1 hour

Part of the responsibility for the rush back to the home has to be laid squarely at the feet of educators. They took the theories of Freud and Mead and ran with them. High schools and colleges started educating women to be wives and mothers. College, instead of being a place to get educated, became the place to find a husband. Women didn't want to graduate with a diploma but rather with a diamond ring on their finger.

Men went to college for the intellect while women went to college to fulfill their sexual role. They ended up looking for their identity in their husband rather than themselves. You just know that this is not going to end well though! The thing was... it wasn't smart for a girl to be smart. God help you, your husband might feel threatened by your superior intellect. So women ended up arresting their intellectual growth. They didn't want to stand out as the Brainy Smurfs, so they conformed. Better to shy away from the growing pains of identity... better to just stop growing. Sooo... this image of infantile women became kind of a vicious cycle... if women are seen as being infantile... and then they drop out of college... they essentially become even more infantile... what a self-perpetuating sell-job... does make me wonder what sort of kids were raised by such women.

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan - Part 4

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan - Part 4

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 99

  April 9, 2017 

Book 31 - The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan (1997)
 Part 4 - pages 126-149
Reading Time - 1 hour

I had to scale back my reading of this book. I was trying to get 50 pages done in a session but given the density of the text... it was taking a couple of hours! Sooo... we're down to a chapter a day.

In this section, Friedan takes us through a romp of something called Functionalism.... which was apparently just a word game that allowed the prejudices of social scientists to show up. Basically, the sex roles defined a person. Women's function was to bear children, ergo, that was their role in life. Women were dependent and transferred their dependence from their parents to their husbands when they got married. Women were simply more infantile. (seriously....) Sociologists now admit that functionalism was rather embarrassing but... that was after it had already impacted a whole bunch of women.

Essentially, "woman is what society says she is". Margaret Mead is invoked here... she did some great work but she also had some weird ideas (she was an anthropologist who studied "primitive" tribes) which blurred the glorification of women in the female role. To me... it sounds rather like they came with an idea and then looked for evidence to support their idea. Which is NOT the scientific method. But then... this was the social sciences. The thing was... anyone who didn't fit their theories of how men and women "should" be was deemed as aberrant. Soooo... yes... functionalism was an embarrassment but then afterwards people still quoted it based on their own prejudices...

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.