Having read more critiques than I can name about Friedan's "Feminine Mystique", I decided it was time to read the actual book. Some of the noted critiques are harsher than others - some academic, some not...the academic critiques are worth evaluating for content...and examining for validity (which I have done some, though not much...yet). At the surface, what I've found of the academic critiques of Friedan's claims, is that the rebuttals ring hollow - and examining the evidence shows distinct traces of dishonesty in statistics. This isn't to suggest that the authors providing critique are being deliberately dishonest - for I don't have that feeling or notion. It's more or less subjective interpretation combined with dislike of her findings that led to writing the now immortalized words within the book, presented in an attempt at objectivity and failing spectacularly. Academia is not without its arrogance and elitists...nor is it without its hardline gender feminists. Like other segments of society, academia is a broad cross-section of everyday.
I am particularly amused when the critics happen to be men. *chuckle*
Now wait, before I'm accused of being a misandrist, let me be very clear here. I do not dislike men in the least. I have my moments when I think they ALL suck, but really -- those moments are more misanthropic than misandric. *laughing* Why? Well...the history, of course. In the century+ since the first wave of feminism rolled across American shores, equality has not ever been achieved. It's improved, of course, but it's not complete. Not by any stretch of the imagination. In the halls of academia, an institution historically governed by men, the last century has seen its feminist movements. There are specific universities that champion gender feminism, which is a segment of the feminist movement with which I happen to strongly disagree, though I understand their frustration and anger. Most books about women a century ago were written by men. Psychology has been strongly influenced by Siggy Freud, who -for all his contributions to the field of study- did a disastrous disservice to women with his "findings".
See...a man can write about women. He can meet women. He can talk with them. He can have sex with them. But he can never understand them fully. Why? Because he's a man.
AND...women, the reverse of that is ALSO true. We're just as guilty of painting harsh and ugly stereotypes that are quite far removed from truth or reality. As an individual, I've been guilty of this, too...on more than one occasion, and usually in angry response to a man who *fits* the ugliest stereotypes. But I won't sit here and pretend I understand them. I don't and I can't, because for all the research and study and attempts at understanding, I am not and I will never be a man.
But the history of disparity - the vast majority of writings and "things known" about women? Were written by men.
Kinda brings a sensation of...duh.
So with the reading of her actual words, not just the critiques about her words...
...I found myself startled, slightly unsettled...like I'd been sighted, seen, identified, understood...
And she wrote the words almost a decade before I was even a thought.
I'll share a small portion of her words here:
"Of the growing thousands of women currently getting private psychiatric help in the United States, the married ones were reported dissatisfied with their marriages, the unmarried ones suffering from anxiety and, finally, depression. Strangely, a number of psychiatrists stated that, in their experience, unmarried women patients were happier than married ones. So the door of all those pretty suburban houses opened a crack to permit a glimpse of uncounted thousands of American housewives who suffered alone from a problem that suddenly everyone was talking about, and beginning to take for granted, as one of those unreal problems in American life that can never be solved--like the hydrogen bomb. By 1962, the plight of the trapped American housewife had become a national parlor game. Whole issues of magazines, newspaper columns, books learned and frivolous, educational conferences and television panels, were devoted to the problem.
Even so, most men, and some women, still did not know that this problem was real. But those who had faced it honestly knew that all the superficial remedies, the sympathetic advice, the scolding words and the cheering words were somehow drowning the problem in unreality. A bitter laugh was beginning to be heard from American women. They were admired, envied, pitied, theorized over until they were sick of it, offered drastic solutions or silly choices that no one could take seriously. They got all kinds of advice from the growing armies of marriage and child-guidance counselors, psychotherapists, and armchair psychologists, on how to adjust to their role as housewives. No other road to fulfillment was offered to American women in the middle of the twentieth century. Most adjusted to their role and suffered or ignored the problem that has no name. It can be less painful, for a woman, not to hear the strange dissatisfied voice stirring within her.
It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women. This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough. I do not accept the answer that there is no problem because American women have luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of; part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold. The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill. It persists in women whose husbands are struggling interns and law clerks, or prosperous doctors and lawyers; in wives of workers and executives who make $5,000 or $50,000. It is not caused by lack of material advantages; it may not even be felt by women preoccupied with desperate problems of hunger, poverty or illness. And women who think it will be solved by more money, a bigger house, a second car, moving to a better suburb, often discover it gets worse.
It is no longer possible today to blame the problem on loss of femininity: to say that education and independence and equality with men have made American women unfeminine. I have heard so many women try to deny this dissatisfied voice within themselves because it does not fit the pretty picture of femininity the experts have given them. I think, in fact, that this is the first clue to the mystery: the problem cannot be understood in the generally accepted terms by which scientists have studied women, doctors have treated them, counselors have advised them, and writers have written about them. Women who suffer this problem, in whom this voice is stirring, have lived their whole lives in pursuit of feminine fulfillment. They are not career women (although career women may have other problems); they are women whose greatest ambition has been marriage and children. For the oldest of these women, these daughters of the American middle class, no other dream was possible. The ones in their forties and fifties who once had other dreams gave them up and threw themselves joyously into life as housewives. For the youngest, the new wives and mothers, this was the only dream. They are the ones who quit high school and college to marry, or marked time in some job in which they had no real interest until they married. These women are very "feminine" in the usual sense, and yet they still suffer the problem.
Are the women who finished college, the women who had dreams beyond housewifery, the ones who suffer the most? According to the experts, they are, but listen to these four women:
'My days are all busy, and dull, too. All I ever do is mess around. I get up at eight--I make breakfast, so I do the dishes, have lunch, do some more dishes and some laundry and cleaning in the afternoon. Then it's supper dishes and I get to sit down a few minutes before the children have to be sent to bed...That's all there is to my day. It's just like any other wife's day. Humdrum. The biggest time, I am chasing kids.'
'Ye Gods, what do I do with my time? Well, I get up at six. I get my son dressed and then give him breakfast. After that I was dishes and bathe and feed the baby. Then I get lunch and while the children nap., I sew or mend or iron and do all the other things I cant get done before noon. Then I cook supper for the family and my husband watches TV while I do the dishes. After I get the children to bed, I set my hair and then I go to bed.'
'The problem is always being the children's mommy, or the minister's wife and never being myself.'
'A film made of any typical morning in my house would look like an old Marx Brothers' comedy. I wash the dishes, rush the older children off to school, dash out into the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in to make a phone call about a committee meeting, help the youngest child to build a blockhouse, spend fifteen minutes skimming the newspapers so I can be well-informed, then scamper down to the washing machines where my thrice-weekly laundry includes enough clothes to keep a primitive village going for an entire year. By noon I'm ready for a padded cell. Very little of what I've done has been really necessary or important. Outside pressures lash me through the day. Yet I look upon myself as one of the more relaxed housewives in the neighborhood. Many of my friends are even more frantic. In the past sixty years we have come full circle and the American housewife is once again trapped in a squirrel cage. If the cage is now a modern plate-glass-and-broadloom ranch or a convenient modern apartment, the situation is no less painful than when her grandmother sat over an embroidery hoop in her gilt-and-plush parlor and muttered angrily about women's rights.'
The first two women never went to college. They live in developments in Levittown, New Jersey, and Tacoma, Washington, and were interviewed by a a team of sociologists studying workingmen's wives. The third, a minister's wife, wrote on the fifteenth reunion questionnaire of her college that she never had any career ambitions bu wishes now she had. The fourth, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology, is today a Nebraska housewife with three children. Their words seem to indicate that housewives of all educational levels suffer the same feeling of desperation.
The fact is that no one today is muttering angrily about 'women's rights,' even though more and more women have gone to college..."
*blink*
And that was written in 1963.
Still rings altogether TOO familiar almost half a century later.
