The Feminine Mystique and the Second Wave of Feminism
1963
The Second Wave of Feminism is after the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920, which allowed women to vote. After this, feminism seemed to slow down greatly. During this time, there was the Great Depression and then World War Two took place. Women have always worked outside of home but never in the great numbers as during WW2 when the men were overseas. After the war, most women returned home, and let go of their jobs to the men. Over this time, there was activists fighting for women’s rights but the next greatly significant feminist movement is believed to have been started in the 1960s. This second wave of feminism broaden the debate of issues: sexuality, workplace, reproductive rights, and legal inequalities. This took place along with other social and political movements. Historians view the end of the second-wave feminist era in America to end in the early 1980s due to intra-feminism disputes over issues as pornography ad sexuality.
Ten years after the publishing of "The Second Sex", “The Feminine Mystique" was published by American feminist writer Betty Friedan in 1963. She builds up the foundation of Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas and implemented the philosophical thought into her own personal experiences. Friedan was a writer, journalist and activist but she then got married and had children. She was a housewife in the suburbs for years and was unhappy and saw society’s pressure for women to be pink-collar workers, mothers and homemakers. Friedan wanted to see if she was alone in her feelings so she conducted interviews over 5 years to white middle-class women and they all felt the same dissatisfaction. These women felt trapped and unfulfilled in a world where men monopolized the positions of power and autonomy.
In the book she criticized that the separation and constraint of motherhood and homemaking, were just to women. When in comparison to men, they were allowed to excel in power, politics and work while women were trapped. Friedan encouraged women to fight gender oppression, which she called “the problem that has no name”. Also, she wanted women to pursue careers that were “the life long commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession” (Friedan). Although there was a blind spot with “The Feminine Mystiques” with her not taking account systemic barriers especially towards working-class women and women of color where having a job isn’t a choice but a necessity. Although her book brought great attention to the disparities of the work force and the realization for women’s efforts to reform and realize the needed new rights at the workplace. This then helped make gains though civil rights and labor movements.
Works Cited
Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 286, 289. On women’s responses to the book, see Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: Th e Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (New York: Basic Books, 2011
Turk, Katherine. “‘To Fulfill an Ambition of [Her] Own’: Work, Class, and Identity in The Feminine Mystique.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, 2015, pp. 25–32. EBSCOhost, doi:10.5250/fronjwomestud.36.2.0025.