Betty Friedan, Excerpt from The Feminine Mystique, 1963
In the excerpt from The Feminine Mystique, Friedan writes about the societal obligations white suburban middle-class women (mostly mothers) felt during the mid-20th century, including the need to marry, raise many children, maintain femininity at all times (often at the expense of health and well-being), engage in domestic life as a housewife, and delegate important decisions to men. She pays special attention to the allure society has attached to this way of life. Women during this time seem to experience an unidentifiable problem which includes feelings of dissatisfaction, inadequacy, and unworthiness with their quality of life. They are not necessarily overwhelmed, but instead unfulfilled. Some women she interviewed indicated feeling “as if I don’t exist” (Freedman ed., 2007, 275) and lacking an identity “except as a wife and mother” (277). Friedan uses the phrase “quiet desperation” (274) to describe the tone of voice of a single woman and also describes a collective of women as desperate on the following page. This may indicate that the problem has to reach a degree of severity before it can and will be addressed. The excerpt closes with her encouragement toward women, suggesting that each woman seeks “creative work of her own” (280) outside of the home and education so that she can use her ideas and skills in productive manners. Friedan addresses the issues these women face each day with a great degree of detail and universality, personalizing her argument to readers.
Simone de Beauvoir, Excerpt from The Second Sex, 1949
Simone de Beauvoir introduced a really interesting perspective to our class study of the history of feminism, that of a French individual and of a philosopher. She sets up dichotomous relationships between what is believed and what is reality related to the experience of women. For example, she writes “All agree in recognizing the fact that females exist in the human species; today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And yet we are told that femininity is in danger” (Freedman ed., 2007, 252). These statements lead readers to question and to be critical of what they hear and also suggest through irony that the former tenets of feminism may benefit from re-conception. By starting with the question “what is a woman?” (254), de Beauvoir notes the historical constructs of womanhood, including Aristotles’ view that the female possesses “a certain lack of qualities . . . [and] “a natural defectiveness” (254-255) and Michelet’s observation that “woman [is] the relative being” (255), ultimately coming to the conclusion that women belong to “the category of the Other” (255). She explains the distinction between naming people as the Other from the position of the One and being an Other yourself, and identifies the submissive and powerless nature of the position of the Other. de Beauvoir mentions that separation between women and the firm attachment between women and men, who are referred to as “her oppressors” (258), make gaining female power and privilege difficult. Similar themes of unfulfillment and dependancy resonate in this excerpt and the piece from The Feminine Mystique. de Beauvoir also transforms feminism and sexism, issues regarded by many as frivolous, into significant issues that can be examined with an intellectual lens.
Alice Echols, “The Re-Emergence of the Woman Question,” 1989
The chapter titled “The Re-Emergence of the Woman Question” from Alice Echols’ work Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 offers an extensive history of the involvement of women in the civil rights and anti-war movements in organizations such as SNCC and SDS. Echols discusses how the women working within these movements advocated for others who were oppressed and were successful in organizing and working interpersonally with other women. However, they felt detached from the first-wave feminists and thus did not initially think of themselves as being oppressed, even though their positions within these supposedly empowering organizations furthered female oppression. An important moment seemed to be when “female activists began to question culturally received notions of femininity” as they encountered young and old black women in leadership roles (Echols, 1989, 27). However, these “positive role models,” as explained later by Cynthia Washington, were not indicative of the success of women in these organizations and SNCC specifically. As black women, Washington and her colleagues “were often treated as though they were somehow sexless” (32). The chapter also brings up the tensions between civil rights and anti-war movements and the second-wave feminist movement. The marginalization of women in SDS led them to apply the skills and knowledge they had acquired from their work to their own issues. This brought the personal to a public level, connecting their struggles within SDS as female employees and volunteers to a larger struggle encompassing women across America. Interestingly, the women’s rights movement of the mid-20th century resembled the black power movement to a greater extent than the civil rights movement, which was both empowering and detrimental to the second-wave movement, since the issues of women seemed to pale in comparison to those in the black power movement, who affirmed their status as “most oppressed” (49). The historical account of the factors leading up to the development of the second-wave feminist movement were presented objectively in this text with a curiosity to understand why certain aspects of the movement were present and where they may have originated from.
Ariel Levy, “The Future that Never Happened,” 2006
Levy writes about radical women during the 1970s who wanted “to be neither oppressor nor oppressed . . . [and] really wanted [] a total transfiguration of society-politics, business, child-rearing, sex, romance, housework, entertainment, academics” (Levy, 2006, 48). Previously, women like Friedan had chosen specific goals to work toward, but the goals adopted by these women were more undefined and extreme, like Susan Brownmiller’s goal to “overthrow [] the patriarchy” (50). Much legislation was passed, court decisions were made, and organizations were formed to benefit women during the 1960s and 1970s, considered successes by both the women’s liberation movement and the sexual revolution (53-54). The chapter examines how, ultimately, the success of Roe v. Wade dissipated and these two movements would separate and the women’s movement would suffer from internal division. The sexual revolution, though experiencing victories for women in birth control and abortion rights, seemed to focus on men and a double standard developed in which women who were sexually promiscuous were “filthy” (58) whereas men were “experienced” and glorified in a sense. Also, the movement did not promote women’s capacity for intelligence. Within the women’s movement, there were different ideas about what types of sex were acceptable. One faction, at times, seemed to be against sex (anti-porn feminists). The other promoted the freedom to look at or appear in pornography (62-63) and be connected with one’s body (sex-positive feminist), which created division within the movement. CAKE, a recently developed group, represents what the founders describe as the current meeting point between “sexual equality and feminism” (70) and what Levy describes as “confusion” resulting from unresolved conflict between the movements (74). In some ways, groups like CAKE “demean[] women” just as society does (76), which does not benefit the empowerment of women, and this group can a limited scope of the possible manifestations of female sexuality. Levy points out that what used to be considered revolutionary in the women’s movement “now seem self-evident” (85) and the previously existing radicalism doesn’t exist currently except in a few forms which Levy categorizes as somewhat distorted. The chapter presents data and quotes that contributed to both the women’s liberation and sexual revolution movements and analyzes these sources, identifying where these movements have “gone wrong” for women and, in some cases, where Levy felt the movement lost sight of what past feminists were fighting for.
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