The Feminine Mystique

For one of my classes, I've been reading "The Feminine Mystique," by Betty Fridan. Here are some random quotes from the book, which I happen to be falling in love with (aka, it is making me think and creating an awareness of my own inadequacies as a woman with an identity):

“It is my thesis that the core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity—a stunting or evasion of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique. It is my thesis that as the Victorian culture did not permit women to accept or gratify their basic sexual needs, our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role.” P 77

“The myth that these women [feminists] were ‘unnatural monsters’ was based on the belief that to destroy the God given subservience of women would destroy the home and make slaves of men… There were excesses, of course, as in any revolution, but the excesses of the feminists were in themselves a demonstration of the revolution’s necessity. They stemmed from, and were a passionate repudiation of, the degrading realities of woman’s life, the helpless subservience behind the gentle decorum that made women objects of such thinly veiled contempt to men that they even felt contempt for themselves.” P 87

The great question was, “Did women want these freedoms because they wanted to be men? Or did they want them because they also were human?” p 82

“Women who accepted the conditions which degraded them felt contempt for themselves and all women. The feminists who fought those conditions freed themselves of that contempt and had less reason to envy man.” P 92

“This is the real mystery: why did so many American women, with the ability and education to discover and create, go back home again, to look for ‘something more’ in housework and rearing children? For, paradoxically, in the same fifteen years in which the spirited New Woman was replaced by the Happy Housewife, the boundaries of the human world have widened, the pace of world change has quickened, and the very nature of human reality has become increasingly free from biological and material necessity. Does the mystique keep American woman from growing with the world? Does it force her to deny reality, as a woman in a mental hospital must deny reality to believe she is a queen?” p 67

Sociologists, psychologists, analysts, and educators called women’s high rate of emotional distress and breakdown by women in their twenties and thirties “role crisis” because women have received too much education making women feel equal to boys. Playinb baseball, riding bikes, conquering college boards, off to college, getting a job, living alone in Chicago, “testing and discovering their own powers in the world,” and then when marriage comes along, women are forced to adjust to a new submissive role. “If girls were educated for their role as women, they would not suffer this crisis, the adjusters say.” P 75 However, Fridan makes an interesting statement. What if this terror a young twenty-year old faces is the terror of growing up—“growing up, as women were not permitted to grow before? What if the terror a girl faces at twenty-one is the terror of freedom to decide her own life, with no one to order which path she will take, the freedom and necessity to take paths women before were not able to take? What if those who choose the path of ‘feminine adjustment’—evading this terror by marrying at eighteen, losing themselves in having babies and the details of housekeeping—are simply refusing to grow up, to face the question of their own identity?” p 76