Response post Jan. 25

Reading Betty Friedan made me draw some comparisons to the matriarchs of my own family and how they have been affected by the suburban ideals of domesticity. This summer I took the opportunity to interview my grandmother about herself and her younger years. She led a fairly unusual life for a woman of her class growing up when she did (she is 95). For instance, she was a competitive athlete as a teenager and drove cross-country with her sister when she was 21 and unmarried; these were things that women of the time usually would not have considered possible or proper. She was a teacher (in a one-room school house for six grades) in up-state New York but had made plans to leave for a new life in California, which she loved after visiting. Unexpectedly, she began dating a man, who later became my grandfather. So, she stayed in New York to be with him and eventually get married and have kids. Her sister couldn’t make the trip alone, and so she stayed in New York as well.

When she got married, she was forced to resign as a teacher in order to take care of her husband and the children everyone (including herself) expected she would soon have. When I asked if she was ever upset by the fact that they would not let her keep her job, she shrugged indifferently and said she was happy to be raising children. She was lucky, she had everything that her generation equated with happiness: her health, her fertility (and therefore, her femininity), six sons, one daughter, and a husband to provide for them. Today, she gives no signs of ever being unhappy. She went back to teaching when all of her children were raised, but only for a few years. Perhaps her happiness with this life was a result of the success she achieved in light of her generation’s standards, perhaps she would have been happier in different circumstances; regardless, this environment would carry its influence into the next generation.

My mother proudly claims that all she wanted, for her entire life, was to be a mother. Luckily, she was able to have children and fulfill this dream. I know that if she read Friedan’s article she would say that “some people want to be mothers and wives, and there is nothing wrong with that choice if it makes them happy.” Fair argument, mom. But she will also be the first to admit that this challenges one’s sense of identity upon raising the children and arriving at the “empty nest.” Friedan’s article works hard to show that many women of the fifties and sixties were experiencing the same pressures from society and similar emotions toward those pressures. After considering the women closest to me (even though they bookend the time period at hand) it makes it harder for me to think that this same “problem” can be applied so generally; every woman has different desires, and even if those desires are a product of their society and their time period, they aren’t inherently wrong. That doesn’t mean that women, or men for that matter, shouldn’t question why they expect certain things to make them happy or whether or not they would be happier challenging the norm; it only means that we have to respect the choices that people make, even if they aren’t the most progressive choices for whatever demographic they might fall into.

Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex (and ironically often defined by her relation to Jean-Paul Sartre) touches on the difficulty that women’s individuality poses to the progress of the sex. She makes the strong point that every other “minority” that has gained ground in any political or social movement has had the advantage of common plight, common politics, common race, or common enemy. Women, a group that can’t even be defined as a minority, is divided on all of these fronts. Women fight different governments and different societies for different definitions of equality. Women span every race and political standpoint and are therefore likely to be divided before they can truly unify. De Beauvoir’s philosophy claims that this is a result of our way of viewing the world, dichotomized between the primary subject and the “other.” I think this is one reason why it is hard to apply Friedan’s diagnosis so broadly. The female sex encompasses so many different experiences of any one society at any one time; any unity they feel from common circumstance can only go so far.

Response Post: Jan. 25

All of these pieces were very powerful readings that gave me insight into the types of feminism that exists. Friedan’s comparison between the ideal portrait of the suburban housewife and reality was very interesting to read. This made me think about how important it is to balance quantitative research with qualitative research. According to statistics, more and more women are entering into the workforce, which could be interpreted as a positive step towards equality. Friedan does a wonderful job building up this ideal picture of a happy woman, satisfied solely by her devotion to her children and husband. However, what quantitative research reveals is that the women are actually unhappy and are plagued with a feeling of emptiness. If progress in this movement is measured solely by numbers, it depersonalizes the situation and reduces women to just numbers, which may not be the most reliable perspective.

What Brownmiller tried to do with her life’s work is to show how human women are. At times, Brownmiller makes the claim that women are purely victims and the fault is all in the male gender’s hands. I found this uncomfortable to read because I disagree with her claim and Levy’s example of the CAKE organization allows us to see that women are involved in pushing the progress bar back. By reducing women to mere sex symbols and naming one’s organization to represent something crude and raunchy in the name of feminism, women are shown to share the fault as well. I don’t necessarily think that any one group can be blamed for the entire world’s way of thinking about gender. In fact, I think pointing fingers distracts from the important social issues that need to be discussed and reformed.

The piece I found most interesting was Echol’s text on “The Re-Emergence of the “Woman Question”,” because it illuminated the pros and cons of having the civil rights movement coexist with the women’s rights movement. The women spoke about being empowered and silenced at the same time. Thinking about this, I could not decide what was better: to go separately or to keep having it be this way. I don’t think that society was ready for two big revolutionary movements at that time and unfortunately, the women’s rights movement ended up being overshadowed by the goals of the civil right’s movement. However, I found it particularly interesting when Echols commented on how “white female activists” (Echols, 27) were moved by how strong and independent the “black women in SNCC” are. No matter the setbacks of being a passive participant of such a powerful social movement, it is a great step forward to have women connect and inspire each other across different races. This showed their ability to look past racial barriers and to see that they essentially shared the same injustices, dilemmas, hopes, and visions. This is pivotal to uniting women. Not just particular women, but all women. Reading Echol’s piece about this simple connection that was made between very different women was amazing.

Levy, Echols, Friedan, Beauvoir: Main Post

The Future That Never Happened (Levy)

In this chapter from Female Chauvinist Pigs, Levy discusses a brief history of feminism while specifically analyzing the actions of Susan Brownmiller, Hugh Heffner, and other colorful characters, such as Candida Royalle and the CAKE group. The main point discussed in this chapter is the conflict between two spheres of feminism: the women’s liberation movement and the women’s sexual revolution. Levy argues that the conflict between these two different goals of feminism have resulted in what we see today, which is “the residue of that confusion” between the two goals (74). Levy then brings up the idea of “raunch feminism” and explains that the idea is rebellious, but raunch feminism also has good intentions of continuing the positive work for the women’s movement.

I thought that Levy’s discussion of Hugh Heffner was particularly interesting. He is an incredibly symbolic person in our society, and many people would consider him to be extremely sexist. I was shocked to learn that Mr. Heffner does not understand why women’s activists do not agree with his life choices. Anyone who pays attention to American media is bound to come across the Playboy bunnies, and I believe that Playboy (and, therefore, Hugh Heffner) portrays women in a terrible light. It confuses me that Heffner is unable (or unwilling?) to see the sexism in his industry.

The Re-Emergence of the Woman Question

The second reading, “The Re-Emergence of the Woman Question”, was written by Alice Echols. The chapter begins with a discussion of the SNCC (Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), which were student groups that were very involved in social change movements. The author believes that these two groups are connected in an important way to the women’s liberation movement. Echols discusses multiple organizations that fought for social equality in the second half of the 20^th century, and she argues that women took on important roles within these organizations. The organizations, such as the ERAP, served not only to fight for social change, but to empower women as well. The author gives many examples of women becoming involved in the multiple social movement organizations. There were many complicated issues between gender and race within the movement, including sexual relationships between white women and black men, and vice versa. Finally, Echols concludes that “black power enabled them to argue that it was valid for women to organize around their own oppression and to define the terms of their struggle” (49). While “black power” empowered women, it also “provided radical men with a rationale for ignoring or disparaging women’s liberation” (50). In this sense, the social equality movement both helped and hurt the women’s liberation movement.

The Feminine Mystique

The third reading for this post was written in 1963 by Betty Friedan, and is titled “The Feminine Mystique”. I think this piece was extremely powerful and it really spoke to me, because I am from a suburban town and my mother is a “housewife”. Freidan’s piece talked about the “problem” that suburban housewives faced in the 60s; they had a terrible feeling of emptiness in their lives but could not figure out what the problem was. I can imagine why this text was described as “life changing” by many women who read it back in the 60s. Before this was written, the media (especially in America) enforced the stereotype of the perfect housewife, suggesting that being anything more than a housewife was wrong. Women were taught to embrace their children and their husbands as the only important things in their lives. Although women claimed to love spending all of their time in the home, psychiatrists saw an extremely high proportion of female patients in the early 60s, and they all complained of the unnamable “problem”. Friedan attempts to explain this problem, and she suggests a solution. At the end of her piece, Friedan argues that “what is needed now is a national education program, similar to the GI bill, for women who seriously want to continue or resume their education” (280). She believes that this bill will make female education much more feasible, in light of a woman’s commitment to her family at home.

The Second Sex

In her piece, “The Second Sex”, Simone de Beauvoir writes about the inequalities that women face in their lives. She begins her piece with a discussion of “what is a woman?”, and focuses on the fact that women are known as the “second sex” in comparison to men. She argues that men define women in relation to themselves, and that the “terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form” (254). Next, Beauvoir delves into a discussion of female oppression. I think her most interesting point is that women face a type of discrimination that is unlike the discrimination that other groups face. She mentions that minority groups are commonly the people who experience discrimination. Women, on the other hand, are not a minority group, and there are as many women in this world as there are men. She argues that “anti-feminists” can only accept “equality in difference” between the sexes, and she likens this to the horrible Jim Crow laws of the south.