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.