She advocates a new plan for women readers that involves not attempting to find total fulfillment in marriage and housewifery alone but seeking out meaningful work that exercises all of their mental capacities. As Friedan described in The Feminine Mystique, many women were not aware that other women shared similar frustrations. When her agent sent it to another women's magazine, Redbook, a male editor sent it back saying that Friedan "must be going off her rocker. The Question and Answer section for The Feminine Mystique is a great Her stories were popular and showed a talent for humanizing class, race, and women's issues. After she married, her husband insisted that she quit working and focus on being a housewife and mother. A small industrial city in central Illinois, Peoria was conservative, provincial, racially segregated, and rife with both subtle and overt forms of anti-semitism. Her first job was as a reporter for the Federated Press, an agency that fed news stories to progressive publications and union newspapers. She wrote about the problem of workplace discrimination, but she barely mentioned the issues of childcare and maternity leave. Chapter 13: Friedan refers to Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Two hundred women responded. Bettye's later views about bigotry toward women were shaped at a young age. Moreover, Friedan wanted to do more than write about women's roles. Her editorials challenged her privileged classmates to wake up to issues of social justice, workers' rights, and fascism. Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. She also attacks Freud's concept of "penis envy" and calls it neurotic. The publisher, W.W. Norton, initially printed only 2,000 copies, but the book's sales exploded. She points out that this was in direct contrast with magazines in the 1930s which featured independent and confident heroines who were involved in careers. Chapter 3: One of the things that makes The Feminine Mystique so fascinating is Friedan's personal experiences as a housewife. © 2020 A&E Television Networks, LLC. Freud saw women as childlike and that their sole destiny was to be housewives. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. For the Nov 3 election: States are making it easier for citizens to vote absentee by mail this year due to the coronavirus. ...read more. When maids at the college went on strike, Bettye sympathetically covered the struggle in SCAN. Strongly supported by western mining interests and farmers, the Bland-Allison Act—which provided for a return to the minting of silver coins—becomes the law of the land. She felt vaguely guilty as she worked on it, thinking of the academic star she had been and feeling she had not realized her potential. They talked about creating a women's version of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and in 1966 they formed NOW to lobby and organize for the civil rights of women. Friedan was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois in 1921, and was raised in a prosperous family with a nursemaid, cook, and butler-chauffeur. Chapter 5: Friedan spends the majority of this chapter criticizing Sigmund Freud. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College. E.P. Today women comprise about half of all medical and law students and have a stronger foothold in other formerly all-male professions and occupations. His latest book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame A different version of this article appeared in Truth-out. Although a rise in women's turnout has spurred these gains, men are now more willing to vote for women candidates than ever before. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. However, she also notes that sex cannot fulfill all of a person's needs and many women's attempts have led them to have affairs or drive away their husbands when they become obsessed with sex. Visit your state election office website to find out if you can vote by mail. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. The right to have an abortion, legalized in the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, is still under attack but remains the law. The strife and controversy surrounding the coinage of silver is difficult for most modern Americans to ...read more, Infamous gunslinger John Wesley Hardin is pardoned after spending 15 years in a Texas prison for murder. In 1952, when she became pregnant with her second son, Friedan left the UE News. After reading about Marie Curie, the French researcher who won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry. In 1946 they started the Congress of American Women to address issues facing working-class women. Instead, there has to be some new vision of community. This perpetuated the idea that women should feel naturally fulfilled in devoting their lives to the home. Most Americans now accept as normal the once-radical ideas that Friedan and others espoused. Friedan responded, somewhat disingenuously, that she simply wanted women's equality within the existing system. Chapter 14: Friedan uses the final chapter of The Feminine Mystique to show several case studies of women who have begun fighting against the feminine mystique. It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s -- pushed by younger feminists who had been radicalized by the civil rights and New Left movements -- that Friedan embraced a wider and more progressive agenda: the right to an abortion, protection against sexual violence and domestic abuse, the criminalization of sexual harassment and rape, the demand for childcare centers, equality with men in terms of access to financial credit and other aspects of economic life. She discusses her own decision to conform to societal expectations as a housewife when she abandoned a promising career in psychology so that she could raise children. Although she later tempered her views on homosexuality, she never fully embraced gay rights as a key part of the feminist cause. We made it easy for you to exercise your right to vote! She traveled in left-wing circles and joined a Marxist study group. Functionalism attempted to make the social sciences seem more credible by studying society as if it were part of a social body, similar to biology. Indeed, many other women with similar backgrounds (including Congresswoman Bella Abzug) -- women who played a key role in building the women's liberation movement and later in creating the new academic field of women's studies -- downplayed their past left-wing affiliations. Chapter 1: Friedan discusses the trends in marriage and births that affected women in the 1950s. The book triggered considerable controversy in the postwar era. After its release, much of the criticism essentially labeled Friedan a hysteric, while many women took offense at her suggestion that they were not fulfilled by their family and domestic duties. However, they discourage women from having actual careers outside the home. American culture insisted that women could find happiness in marriage and being a housewife. In 1942 she went to graduate school at University of California, Berkeley, and dropped the "e" at the end of her first name. The book examines the many ways in which women were still oppressed by American society. Women are still more likely than men to be the victims of domestic violence at home and sexual harassment at work, despite advances in our awareness of these issues and legal penalties against perpetrators. Visit your state election office website to find out whether they offer early voting. Like many women in postwar America, Friedan volunteered for a variety of community activities, though some of hers were unconventional, such as participating in rent strikes. In 1972, Friedan ran unsuccessfully as a delegate to the Democratic Party convention, but showed up with a large contingent of feminists to support Chisholm's candidacy for President. Although Bettye had both Jewish and non-Jewish friends growing up, she was turned down for membership in a high school sorority because she was a Jew. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique -- published 50 years ago this week, on February 19, 1963 -- catalyzed the modern feminist movement, helped forever change Americans' attitudes about women's role in society, and catapulted its author into becoming an influential and controversial public figure. Women became helpless, almost childlike, with no privacy, cut off from the outside world, doing soul-killing work. After you claim a section you’ll have 24 hours to send in a draft. More impressive than even The Feminine Mystique's best-seller status and the debate it sparked in the national press is its broader cultural significance. The Feminine Mystique struck a nerve and quickly became a best-seller. The book is credited with mobilizing a generation of feminists who would tackle a number of issues left unresolved by First Wave Feminism. They sought for the comforts of home and attempted to create an idealized home life in which the father was the sole breadwinner and the mother was the housewife. It doesn't look nice for a girl to be so bookish." will review the submission and either publish your submission or provide feedback. "use strict";(function(){var insertion=document.getElementById("citation-access-date");var date=new Date().toLocaleDateString(undefined,{month:"long",day:"numeric",year:"numeric"});insertion.parentElement.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(date),insertion)})(); FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. Victims of a false belief system, these women were following strict social convention by loyally conforming to the pretty image of the magazines, and found themselves forced to seek meaning in their lives only … After the book came out, as Friedan was gaining a platform on TV and radio shows and on the lecture circuit, she described herself as an "educated housewife." She offers examples of women who have overcome each conflict. In 1947 she married Carl Friedan, an actor and stage producer. Chapter 9: Friedan addresses the advertising business that continues to perpetuate some of the problems women have. Chapter 10: Friedan spends this chapter detailing the interviews she had with several full-time housewives. For example, women represent only 3.6 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations. Friedan begins her introduction by discussing "the problem that has no name." In 1971, a year after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, Friedan joined Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and others to form the National Women's Political Caucus to encourage more women to participate in politics and run for office. Because the ancient Egyptians saw their pharaohs as gods, they carefully preserved their bodies after death, burying them ...read more, U.S. officials report that, in addition to the 800,000 people listed as refugees prior to January 30, the fighting during the Tet Offensive has created 350,000 new refugees. After graduating from Bradley College in Peoria, Bettye's mother starting working as a reporter for the local newspaper. Muste, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, upper-class leftist Corliss Lamont (head of Friends of the Soviet Union), and folklorist Alan Lomax visited Smith while Bettye was a student there. Earlier books -- including Elizabeth Hawes's Why Women Cry (1943), Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (published in English in 1953), Mirra Komarovsky's Women in the Modern World (1953), and Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein's Women's Two Roles (1956) -- had diagnosed women's oppression and second-class status, but none of them tapped the vein of dissatisfaction in a way that The Feminine Mystique did.

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