The Feminine Mystique

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The Feminine Mystique

• Postwar America

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Everybody was having a babyeverybody and her
sister

• Quote from
• Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter
• (Lola Weixal)

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Legacies
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1945-1963

• Fulfillment domesticity and motherhood
• ??
• Rise in married womens work-force participation
• 1940 15 of all married women worked
• 1950 24
• 1960 30
• 1970 40

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1950

• 1 in 4 women were in the workforce
• 1 in 10 women with a child under 6 years old was
  working outside the home
• 1 out of 3 married women with no children under
  18 worked
• So, to what extent did the idea that women could
  best find fulfillment in marriage, motherhood and
  domesticity characterize the aspirations of young
  unmarried women?

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Lynn White, president of Mills College(he was
white it was a womans college)

• "Why not study the theory and preparation of a
  Basque paella . . . an authoritative curry. . .
  even such simple sophistications as serving cold
  artichokes with fresh milk?"
• The Feminine Mystique 1963 (151-52)

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2 out of 3 women who entered college dropped out
before graduating

• Many women feel frustrated and far apart from
  the great issues and stirring debates for which
  their education has given them understanding and
  relish.  Once they read Baudelaire.  Now it is
  the Consumer's Guide.  Once they wrote poetry. 
  Now it's the laundry list.  Once they discussed
  art and philosophy until late in the night.  Now
  they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the
  dishes are finished. There is, often, a sense of
  contraction of closing horizons and lost
  opportunities.  They had hoped to play their part
  in the crisis of the age.  But what they do is
  wash the diapers." Adlai Stevenson,
  Commencement, Smith College,1955

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Work that entices women out of their homes and
provides them with prestige only at the price of
feminine relinquishment, involves a response to
masculine strivings.  The more importance outside
work assumes, the more are the masculine
components of the woman's nature enhanced and
encouraged.  In her home and in her relationship
to her children, it is imperative that these
strivings be at a minimum and that her femininity
be available both for her own satisfaction and
for the satisfaction of her children and
husband.
"The psychosocial rule that takes form, then, is
this  the more educated a woman is, the greater
chance there is of sexual disorder, more or less
severe.  The greater the disordered sexuality in
a given group of women, the fewer children they
have" Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham
from  Modern Woman  The Lost Sex , 1947
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• "It was a strange stirring, a sense of
  dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered
  in the middle of the 20th century in the United
  States.  Each suburban wife struggled with it
  alone.  As she made the beds, shopped for
  groceries, matched slip cover materials, ate
  peanut butter sandwiches with her children,
  chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside
  her husband at night, she was afraid to ask of
  herself the silent question -- 'Is this all?'"
  Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

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