And of course it was "destined" for me to read this book.
I actually was not very perceptive to this idea of "feminism"- what does it actually mean?
I'm very good friends with a radical feminist and she kept telling me "You are a feminist, but you just don't know it."
The longer I lived in Russia the more I realized what women have dealt with and come out of. More or less- in America. Of course there are still struggles of equality, and the old conservative ideologies are still very deeply integrated in our society. But, in Russia it is a lot more black and white. Russia is still in the 50s concerning women's rights. Yes, some may say that the Soviet system brought women out of the homes and into the factories. But that doesn't address the woman as a person. I have lived there for long enough to see that women accepted this typical role without question. Mothers encourage their daughters to dress "modestly" with their matching purses and shoes, walk down Nevski (I lived in St. Petersburg) with a hand elegantly open (this indicates submissiveness- Body Language) while strutting their "goods" for any man that would have them. Provided he has money. They are instructed to "hook" a young boy while in college. Marriage is still an economic alliance, which is why you end up seeing beautiful drop-dead gorgeous young women with burned-out older men. CHING CHING.
I am not judging them- but for a young woman which has discovered her own femininity while in Russia- of all places- it became very oppressive. I got tired of this out-dated ideology. Please- I had a masters by then! I KNEW that there was something better out there, I KNEW I mattered as a PERSON and that I didn't need a man to fulfill me and my life. But of course- I also am a citizen of the great US of A. And my future is a lot brighter than theirs.
Russia still needs a feminist revolution.
And yet America is not so far off. I mean it has lived through the feminist Revolution, although much like after the Civil War ending in Segregation, the women's rights movement of the 20s and 30s ended in wasp corsets and women dying to pop out children and become mothers. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm pointing out a very striking contrast.
Nowadays, we can see women portrayed as sex objects, while women willingly participate. It is not about their "assigned role" that was forcefully dictated by the media and government (the colloquial phrase "one side of the same coin" occurs to me). Nowadays, vanity further destroys what women have fought for for so long.
But I am not a feminist in the sense that I don't agree with blaming the man. What women seem to forget is that the man too, is targeted by the media. And so are children... minorities, gays, historical figures... anything that can be of their use. Everyone is made to fit a stereotype in order to tell us what people are REALLY like. I don't watch much tv, but from what I've seen- men have been emasculated it seems to me as a way of making up for all that sexism against women. So let's make men sensitive and insecure. Make them wear pink and horrible polo shirts. Make them nervous and scared, while the woman is dominant and controlling. Switch the roles! That's what America wants. Make him be a house-HUSBAND!!!! It's so simple- just reverse the roles.
Gays are nothing more than walking accessories- portraying a superficial consumer. Children are idiots that don't know anything but to not make eye contact and play on their phones. Minorities- don't even get me started. I am sure the black community has a lot to say on this subject.
Living human beings have become useless concepts. We don't exist as people, we exist as a cliche.
Oh media- just so easy.
What Betty Friedan writes about is actually very relevant. Not only has media created a new reality for women, but for every human being. We don't know who we are anymore... and that is why it is so much more efficient to fill our brains with emptiness. So we can STAY empty.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The end of the road, in an almost literal sense, is the disappearance of the heroine altogether, as a separate self and the subject of her own story. The end of the road is togetherness, where the woman has no independent self to hide even in guilt; she exists only for and through her husband and children."
"And whether the victim is man, woman or child, whether the living death is incurable cancer or creeping paralysis, the housewife reader can identify."
Women felt they were victims and identified with the oppressed in each fictional story.
"Thus the service article takes over, replacing the internal honest, objective, concrete, realistic domestic detail- the color of walls or lipstick, the exact temperature of the oven."
"The line between mystique and reality dissolves; real women embody the split in the image."
"When a mystique is strong, it makes its own fiction of fact. It feeds on the very facts which might contradict it, and seeps into every corner of culture, bemusing even the social critics."
"Is there a growing divergence between this image of woman and human reality?"
"This is the real mystery: why did so many American women, with the ability and education to discover and create, go back home again, to look for 'something more' in housework and rearing children? For, paradoxically, in the same fifteen years in which the spirited New Woman was replaced by the Happy Housewife, the boundaries of the human world have widened, the pace of world change has quickened, and the very nature of human reality has become increasingly free from biological and material necessity. Does the mystique keep American woman from growing with the world? Does it force her to deny reality, as a woman in a mental hospital must deny reality to believe she is a queen? Does it doom women to be displaced person, if not virtual schizophrenics, in our complex, changing world?"
"As the motivational researches keep telling the advertisers, American women are so unsure of who they should be that they look to this glossy public image to decide every detail of their lives. They look for the image they will no longer take from their mothers."
"'Only sometimes I wonder how it would feel to be able to stretch and stretch and stretch, and learn all you want, and not have to hold yourself back."
"I think that this has been the unknown heart of woman's problem in America for a long time, this lack of a private image. Public images that defy reason and have very little to do with women themselves have had the power to shape too much of their lives. These images would not have such power, if women were not suffering a crisis of identity."
"What if those who choose the path of "feminine adjustment"- evading this terror by marrying at eighteen, losing themselves in having babies and the details of housekeeping- are simply refusing to grow up, to face the question of their own identity?"
"The expectations of feminine fulfillment that are fed to women by magazines, television, movies, and books that popularize psychological half-truths, and by parents, teachers and counselors who accept the feminine mystique, operate as a kind of youth serum, keeping most women in the state of sexual larvae, preventing them from achieving the maturity of which they are capable."
But Freud was interpreted to American woman in such curiously literal terms that the concept of penis envy acquired a mystical life of its own, as if it existed quite independent of the women in whom it had been observed. It was as if Freud's Victorian image of woman became more real than the twentieth-century women to whom it was applied."
"It filled the vacuum of thought and purpose that existed for many for whom God, or flag, or bank account were no longer sufficient- and yet who were tired of feeling responsible for lynchings and concentration camps and the starving children of India and Africa."
"If reproduction were the chief and only fact of human life, would all men today suffer from 'uterus envy'?)"
"Women, it is true, make human beings, but only men can make men." Margaret Mead
Garden of Eden = traditional roles
If Man's achievement = child-bearing (men are "inferior" in that case)
"As a woman who unconsciously thinks sex a sin is not there, is somewhere else, as she goes through the motions of sex, so these girls are somewhere else. They go through he motions, but they defend themselves against the impersonal passions of mind and spirit that college might instill in them- the dangerous nonsexual passions of the intellect"
This reminded me of the book I read about D.H. Lawrence and how he used the same motif. The girls were too smart for "sex" and so became defensive but it's a facade. They actually "go through the motions".
"A sublte and almost unnoticed change had taken place in the academic culture for American women in the last fifteen years: the new sex direction of their educators. Under the influence of the feminine mystique, some colelge presidents and professors charged with the education of women had become more concerned with their students' future capacity for sexual orgasm than with their future use of trained intelligence."
"Instead of stimulating what psychologists have suggested might be a "latent" desire for autonomy in the girls, the sex-directed educators stimulated their sexual fantasy of fulfilling all desire for achievement, status, and identity vicariously through a man."
Therefore, "Somehow, the student gets the point that she doesn't not want to be the " 'exceptional woman.' "
"The needs of sex and love are undeniably real in men and women, boys and girls, but why at this time did they seem to so many the only needs?"
"The mystique spelled out a choice- love, home, children, or other goals and purposes in life. Given such a choice, was it any wonder that so many American women chose love as their whole purpose?"
"Properly manipulated ('if you are not afraid of that word,' he said, American housewives can be given the sense of identity, purpose, creativity, the self-realization, even the sexual joy they lack- by the buying of things."
"The moral of the study was explicit: 'Since the Balanced Homemaker represents the market with the greatest future potential, it would be to the advantage of the appliance manufacturer to make more and more women aware of the desirability of belonging to this group. Educate them through advertising that it is possible to have outside interests and become alert to wider intellectual influences (without becoming a Career Woman. The art of good homemaking should be the goal of every normal woman.' "
"As one housewife remarked, 'As for some magical push-button cleaning system, well, what would happen to my exercise, my feeling of accomplishment, and what would I do with my mornings?"
The problem was- how to KILL TIME.
"Get them in schools, churches, sororities, social clubs; get them through home-economics teachers, group leaders, teenage TV programs and teenage advertising. 'This is the big market of the future and word-of-mouth advertising, along with group pressure, is not only the most potent influence but in the absence of tradition, a most necessary one.' "
Absence of tradition = money. When you don't have traditional ideals to contradict, anything is permitted. (ex: wasting food)
"Does sex become unreal, a phatansy, when a person needs it to feel 'alive', to feel 'my own identity'?
"Just as college girls used the sexual phantasy of married life to protect them from the conflicts and growing pains and work of a personal commitment to science, or art, or society, are these married women putting into their insatiable sexual search the aggressive energies which the feminine mystique forbids them to use for larger human purposes?"
They were boxed in and therefore directed their whole happiness towards sex.
"It is not an exaggeration to say that several generations of able American women have been successfully reduced to sex creatures, sex-seekers. But something has evidently gone wrong."
"Men in general spend most of their hours in pursuits and passions that are not sexual, and have less need to make sex expand to fill the time available. [...] American women are doomed to spend most of their lives in sexual phantasy."
"The most frequent manifestations of vicarious living is a particularly structured dependence on another person, which is often mistaken for love. Such extremely intense and tenacious attachments, however, lack all the essentials of genuine love- devotion, intuitive understanding, and delight in the being of the other person in his own right and in his own way. On the contrary, these attachments are extremely possessive and tend to deprive the partner of a 'life of his own' ... The other person is needed not as someone to relate oneself to; he is needed for filling out one's inner emptiness, one's nothingness. This nothingness originally was only a phantasy, but with the persistent self-repression it approaches the state of being actual.
All these attempts at gaining a substitute personality by vicarious living fail to free the person from a vague feeling of emptiness. The repression of genuine, spontaneous impulses leaves the person with a painful emotional vacuousness, almost with a sense of nonexistence..."
Andras Angyal, Evasion of Growth
Women used love as a way to fill their unfulfilled lives/emptiness.
"Then the patient accepts a confined world without conflict, for now his world is identical with the culture. And since anxiety comes only with freedom, the patient naturally gets over his anxiety: he is relieved from his symptoms because he surrenders the possibilities which caused his anxiety... There is certainly a question how far his gaining of release from conflict by giving up being can proceed without generating in individuals and groups a submerged despair, a resentment which will later burst out in self-destructiveness, for history proclaims again and again that sooner or later man's need to be free will out."
Rollo May, Contributions of Existential Psychotherapy
One removes anxiety by removing the possibilities.
"In our culture, the development of women has been blocked at the psychological level with, in many cases, no need recognized higher than the need for love or sexual satisfaction."
Stunted at a hormonal level.
"For, as such a person, with the years, becomes more and more himself, and truer to himself, he seems also to have a deeper and more profound relations with others, to be capable of more fusion, greater love, more perfect identification with others, more transcendence of the boundaries of the self, without ever giving up his own individuality."
"All these words that have been written criticizing American women for castrating their husbands and sons, for dominating their children, for their material greediness, for their sexual frigidity or denial of femininity may simply mask this one underlying fact: that woman, no more than man, can live by sex alone; that her struggle for identity, autonomy- that 'personally productive orientation based on the human need for active participation in a creative task'- is inextricably linked with her sexual fulfillment, as a condition of her maturity."
"Evidently, the further women progressed from that state, the more sex became an act of human intercourse rather than a dirty joke to men; and the more women were able to love men, rather than submit, in passive distaste, to their sexual desire. In fact, the feminine mystique itself- with its acknowledgement of woman as subject and not just object of the sexual act, and its assumption that her active, willing participation was essential to man's pleasure- could not have come without the emancipation of women to human equality. As the early feminists foresaw, women's rights did indeed promote greater sexual fulfillment, for men and women.
"No one has warned them that sex can never be a substitute for personal identity; that sex itself cannot give identity to a woman, any more than to a man; that there may be no sexual fulfillment at all for the woman who seeks her self in sex."
"Maybe a woman has to be by herself to be really with her children."
The frustrations were in turn also unleashed on the children which resulted in negligence on the part of the mother.
"But a job, any job, is not the answer- in fact, it can be part of the trap. Women who do not look for jobs equal to their actual capacity, who do not let themselves develop the lifetime interests and goals which require serious education and training, who take a job at twenty or forty to 'help out at home' or just to kill extra time, are walking, almost as surely as the ones who stay inside the housewife trap, to a nonexistent future.
The solution is not a job but meaning in life for the development of the individual. Something that requires one's full commitment which they are happily willing to give.
"It is the face of the feminine mystique with its powerful hidden deterrents, educators must realize that they cannot inspire young women to commit themselves seriously to their education without taking some extraordinary measures."
"A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she 'adjust' to prejudice and discrimination."
"No woman in America today who starts her search for identity can be sure where it will take her. No woman starts that search today without struggle, conflict, and taking her courage in her hands. But the women I met, who were moving on that unknown road, did not regret the pains, the efforts the risks."
******************************************************************************
"When their mothers' fulfillment makes girls sure they want to be women, they will not have to 'beat themselves down' to be feminine; they can stretch and stretch until their own efforts will tell them who they are. They will not need the regard of boy or man to feel alive. And when women do not need to live through their husbands and children, men will not fear the love and strength of women, nor need another's weakness to prove their own masculinity. They can finally see each other as they are. And this is may be the next step in human evolution."
*******************************************************************************
"The changes necessary to bring about that equality were, and still are, very revolutionary indeed. They involve a sex-role revolution for men and women which will restructure all our institutions: child rearing, education, marriage, the family, the architecture of the home, the practice of medicine, work, politics, the economy, religion, psychological theory, human sexuality, morality, and the very evolution of race."
"It seemed to me that men weren't really the enemy- they were fellow victims, suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill."
The problem of today concerning men and societal expectations of masculinity.
"But the media began to publicize , in more and more sensational terms, the more exhibitionist, down-with-men, down-with-marriage, down-with-childbearing rhetoric and actions. Those who preached the man-hating sex/class warfare threatened to take over the New York NOW and the national NOW and drive out the women who wanted equality but who also wanted to keep on loving their husbands and children."
The media/government sent in "feminist" spies to sabotage the feminist movement.
AUGUST 26th, 1970: Women's Strike for Equality
*********************************************************************************
"Mayor Lindsay wouldn't close Fifth Avenue for our march, and I remember starting that march with the hooves of policemen's horses trying to keep us confined to the sidewalk. I remember looking back, jumping up to see over marchers' heads. I never saw so many women; they stretched back for so many blocks you couldn't see the end. I locked one arm with my beloved Judge Dorothy Kenyon (who, at eighty-two, insisted on walking with me instead of riding in the car we had provided for her), and the other arm with a young woman on the other side. I said to the others in the front ranks, 'Lock arms, sidewalk to sidewalk!' We overflowed till we filled the whole of Fifth Avenue. There were so many of use they couldn't stop us; they didn't even try. It was, as they say, the first nationwide action of women (hundreds of men also marched with us) since women won the vote itself fifty years before. Reporters who had joked about he 'bra-burners' wrote that they had never seen such beautiful women as the proud, joyous marchers who joined together that day. For all women were beautiful on that day."
**********************************************************************************
More wonderful info on the revolutions happening in the 70s here. For example, Earth Day and how it came about.
"And today who is financing the campaign to stop the final act of the women's movement for equality? Not a conspiracy of men to keep women down; rather, it is a conspiracy of those whose power, or profit, rests on the manipulation of the fears and impotent rage of passive women. Women- the last and largest group of people in this nation to demand control of their own destiny- will change the very nature of political power in this country."
"I think the energy locked up in those obsolete masculine and feminine roles is the social equivalent of the physical energy locked up in the realm of E = MC2- the force that unleashed the holocaust of Hiroshima. I believe the locked-up sexual energies have helped to fuel, more than anyone realizes, the terrible violence erupting in the nation and the world during these past ten years. If I am right, the sex-role revolution will liberate these energies from the service of death and will make it really possible for men and women to 'make love, not war.'"
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The Epilogue was breathtaking and inspiring.
Basic points of the book:
Women had this undefinable problem- depression, anxiety because of their lack of meaning in their lives.
Business, Education and Media was directed at the stunting of woman's growth so she could stay in the home.
Women had nothing to look towards as a role model because their only model was being a housewife.
The feminist movements was undermined by the media: men-haters, bra-burners, frigid, spinsters...
It is not about "working" like men traditionally do. It is about finding a passion in life, something that is consistent and therefore stimulating progress in one's self.
All Betty is saying is that women weren't given the chance to develop as individuals, and they deserve this right. No matter what that turns out to be.
This book is life-changing. It relates to everyone.
"For all the new women, and the new men,"
Marvelous and deeply touching address. This summarizes the entire book and her whole message. We are all people- let us all grow together and enjoy this marvelous gift of life that we have!
--
Pub by W.M. Norton Company
I actually was not very perceptive to this idea of "feminism"- what does it actually mean?
I'm very good friends with a radical feminist and she kept telling me "You are a feminist, but you just don't know it."
The longer I lived in Russia the more I realized what women have dealt with and come out of. More or less- in America. Of course there are still struggles of equality, and the old conservative ideologies are still very deeply integrated in our society. But, in Russia it is a lot more black and white. Russia is still in the 50s concerning women's rights. Yes, some may say that the Soviet system brought women out of the homes and into the factories. But that doesn't address the woman as a person. I have lived there for long enough to see that women accepted this typical role without question. Mothers encourage their daughters to dress "modestly" with their matching purses and shoes, walk down Nevski (I lived in St. Petersburg) with a hand elegantly open (this indicates submissiveness- Body Language) while strutting their "goods" for any man that would have them. Provided he has money. They are instructed to "hook" a young boy while in college. Marriage is still an economic alliance, which is why you end up seeing beautiful drop-dead gorgeous young women with burned-out older men. CHING CHING.
I am not judging them- but for a young woman which has discovered her own femininity while in Russia- of all places- it became very oppressive. I got tired of this out-dated ideology. Please- I had a masters by then! I KNEW that there was something better out there, I KNEW I mattered as a PERSON and that I didn't need a man to fulfill me and my life. But of course- I also am a citizen of the great US of A. And my future is a lot brighter than theirs.
Russia still needs a feminist revolution.
And yet America is not so far off. I mean it has lived through the feminist Revolution, although much like after the Civil War ending in Segregation, the women's rights movement of the 20s and 30s ended in wasp corsets and women dying to pop out children and become mothers. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm pointing out a very striking contrast.
Nowadays, we can see women portrayed as sex objects, while women willingly participate. It is not about their "assigned role" that was forcefully dictated by the media and government (the colloquial phrase "one side of the same coin" occurs to me). Nowadays, vanity further destroys what women have fought for for so long.
But I am not a feminist in the sense that I don't agree with blaming the man. What women seem to forget is that the man too, is targeted by the media. And so are children... minorities, gays, historical figures... anything that can be of their use. Everyone is made to fit a stereotype in order to tell us what people are REALLY like. I don't watch much tv, but from what I've seen- men have been emasculated it seems to me as a way of making up for all that sexism against women. So let's make men sensitive and insecure. Make them wear pink and horrible polo shirts. Make them nervous and scared, while the woman is dominant and controlling. Switch the roles! That's what America wants. Make him be a house-HUSBAND!!!! It's so simple- just reverse the roles.
Gays are nothing more than walking accessories- portraying a superficial consumer. Children are idiots that don't know anything but to not make eye contact and play on their phones. Minorities- don't even get me started. I am sure the black community has a lot to say on this subject.
Living human beings have become useless concepts. We don't exist as people, we exist as a cliche.
Oh media- just so easy.
What Betty Friedan writes about is actually very relevant. Not only has media created a new reality for women, but for every human being. We don't know who we are anymore... and that is why it is so much more efficient to fill our brains with emptiness. So we can STAY empty.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The end of the road, in an almost literal sense, is the disappearance of the heroine altogether, as a separate self and the subject of her own story. The end of the road is togetherness, where the woman has no independent self to hide even in guilt; she exists only for and through her husband and children."
"And whether the victim is man, woman or child, whether the living death is incurable cancer or creeping paralysis, the housewife reader can identify."
Women felt they were victims and identified with the oppressed in each fictional story.
"Thus the service article takes over, replacing the internal honest, objective, concrete, realistic domestic detail- the color of walls or lipstick, the exact temperature of the oven."
"The line between mystique and reality dissolves; real women embody the split in the image."
"When a mystique is strong, it makes its own fiction of fact. It feeds on the very facts which might contradict it, and seeps into every corner of culture, bemusing even the social critics."
"Is there a growing divergence between this image of woman and human reality?"
"This is the real mystery: why did so many American women, with the ability and education to discover and create, go back home again, to look for 'something more' in housework and rearing children? For, paradoxically, in the same fifteen years in which the spirited New Woman was replaced by the Happy Housewife, the boundaries of the human world have widened, the pace of world change has quickened, and the very nature of human reality has become increasingly free from biological and material necessity. Does the mystique keep American woman from growing with the world? Does it force her to deny reality, as a woman in a mental hospital must deny reality to believe she is a queen? Does it doom women to be displaced person, if not virtual schizophrenics, in our complex, changing world?"
"As the motivational researches keep telling the advertisers, American women are so unsure of who they should be that they look to this glossy public image to decide every detail of their lives. They look for the image they will no longer take from their mothers."
"'Only sometimes I wonder how it would feel to be able to stretch and stretch and stretch, and learn all you want, and not have to hold yourself back."
"I think that this has been the unknown heart of woman's problem in America for a long time, this lack of a private image. Public images that defy reason and have very little to do with women themselves have had the power to shape too much of their lives. These images would not have such power, if women were not suffering a crisis of identity."
"What if those who choose the path of "feminine adjustment"- evading this terror by marrying at eighteen, losing themselves in having babies and the details of housekeeping- are simply refusing to grow up, to face the question of their own identity?"
"The expectations of feminine fulfillment that are fed to women by magazines, television, movies, and books that popularize psychological half-truths, and by parents, teachers and counselors who accept the feminine mystique, operate as a kind of youth serum, keeping most women in the state of sexual larvae, preventing them from achieving the maturity of which they are capable."
But Freud was interpreted to American woman in such curiously literal terms that the concept of penis envy acquired a mystical life of its own, as if it existed quite independent of the women in whom it had been observed. It was as if Freud's Victorian image of woman became more real than the twentieth-century women to whom it was applied."
"It filled the vacuum of thought and purpose that existed for many for whom God, or flag, or bank account were no longer sufficient- and yet who were tired of feeling responsible for lynchings and concentration camps and the starving children of India and Africa."
"If reproduction were the chief and only fact of human life, would all men today suffer from 'uterus envy'?)"
"Women, it is true, make human beings, but only men can make men." Margaret Mead
Garden of Eden = traditional roles
If Man's achievement = child-bearing (men are "inferior" in that case)
"As a woman who unconsciously thinks sex a sin is not there, is somewhere else, as she goes through the motions of sex, so these girls are somewhere else. They go through he motions, but they defend themselves against the impersonal passions of mind and spirit that college might instill in them- the dangerous nonsexual passions of the intellect"
This reminded me of the book I read about D.H. Lawrence and how he used the same motif. The girls were too smart for "sex" and so became defensive but it's a facade. They actually "go through the motions".
"A sublte and almost unnoticed change had taken place in the academic culture for American women in the last fifteen years: the new sex direction of their educators. Under the influence of the feminine mystique, some colelge presidents and professors charged with the education of women had become more concerned with their students' future capacity for sexual orgasm than with their future use of trained intelligence."
"Instead of stimulating what psychologists have suggested might be a "latent" desire for autonomy in the girls, the sex-directed educators stimulated their sexual fantasy of fulfilling all desire for achievement, status, and identity vicariously through a man."
Therefore, "Somehow, the student gets the point that she doesn't not want to be the " 'exceptional woman.' "
"The needs of sex and love are undeniably real in men and women, boys and girls, but why at this time did they seem to so many the only needs?"
"The mystique spelled out a choice- love, home, children, or other goals and purposes in life. Given such a choice, was it any wonder that so many American women chose love as their whole purpose?"
"Properly manipulated ('if you are not afraid of that word,' he said, American housewives can be given the sense of identity, purpose, creativity, the self-realization, even the sexual joy they lack- by the buying of things."
"The moral of the study was explicit: 'Since the Balanced Homemaker represents the market with the greatest future potential, it would be to the advantage of the appliance manufacturer to make more and more women aware of the desirability of belonging to this group. Educate them through advertising that it is possible to have outside interests and become alert to wider intellectual influences (without becoming a Career Woman. The art of good homemaking should be the goal of every normal woman.' "
"As one housewife remarked, 'As for some magical push-button cleaning system, well, what would happen to my exercise, my feeling of accomplishment, and what would I do with my mornings?"
The problem was- how to KILL TIME.
"Get them in schools, churches, sororities, social clubs; get them through home-economics teachers, group leaders, teenage TV programs and teenage advertising. 'This is the big market of the future and word-of-mouth advertising, along with group pressure, is not only the most potent influence but in the absence of tradition, a most necessary one.' "
Absence of tradition = money. When you don't have traditional ideals to contradict, anything is permitted. (ex: wasting food)
"Does sex become unreal, a phatansy, when a person needs it to feel 'alive', to feel 'my own identity'?
"Just as college girls used the sexual phantasy of married life to protect them from the conflicts and growing pains and work of a personal commitment to science, or art, or society, are these married women putting into their insatiable sexual search the aggressive energies which the feminine mystique forbids them to use for larger human purposes?"
They were boxed in and therefore directed their whole happiness towards sex.
"It is not an exaggeration to say that several generations of able American women have been successfully reduced to sex creatures, sex-seekers. But something has evidently gone wrong."
"Men in general spend most of their hours in pursuits and passions that are not sexual, and have less need to make sex expand to fill the time available. [...] American women are doomed to spend most of their lives in sexual phantasy."
"The most frequent manifestations of vicarious living is a particularly structured dependence on another person, which is often mistaken for love. Such extremely intense and tenacious attachments, however, lack all the essentials of genuine love- devotion, intuitive understanding, and delight in the being of the other person in his own right and in his own way. On the contrary, these attachments are extremely possessive and tend to deprive the partner of a 'life of his own' ... The other person is needed not as someone to relate oneself to; he is needed for filling out one's inner emptiness, one's nothingness. This nothingness originally was only a phantasy, but with the persistent self-repression it approaches the state of being actual.
All these attempts at gaining a substitute personality by vicarious living fail to free the person from a vague feeling of emptiness. The repression of genuine, spontaneous impulses leaves the person with a painful emotional vacuousness, almost with a sense of nonexistence..."
Andras Angyal, Evasion of Growth
Women used love as a way to fill their unfulfilled lives/emptiness.
"Then the patient accepts a confined world without conflict, for now his world is identical with the culture. And since anxiety comes only with freedom, the patient naturally gets over his anxiety: he is relieved from his symptoms because he surrenders the possibilities which caused his anxiety... There is certainly a question how far his gaining of release from conflict by giving up being can proceed without generating in individuals and groups a submerged despair, a resentment which will later burst out in self-destructiveness, for history proclaims again and again that sooner or later man's need to be free will out."
Rollo May, Contributions of Existential Psychotherapy
One removes anxiety by removing the possibilities.
"In our culture, the development of women has been blocked at the psychological level with, in many cases, no need recognized higher than the need for love or sexual satisfaction."
Stunted at a hormonal level.
"For, as such a person, with the years, becomes more and more himself, and truer to himself, he seems also to have a deeper and more profound relations with others, to be capable of more fusion, greater love, more perfect identification with others, more transcendence of the boundaries of the self, without ever giving up his own individuality."
"All these words that have been written criticizing American women for castrating their husbands and sons, for dominating their children, for their material greediness, for their sexual frigidity or denial of femininity may simply mask this one underlying fact: that woman, no more than man, can live by sex alone; that her struggle for identity, autonomy- that 'personally productive orientation based on the human need for active participation in a creative task'- is inextricably linked with her sexual fulfillment, as a condition of her maturity."
"Evidently, the further women progressed from that state, the more sex became an act of human intercourse rather than a dirty joke to men; and the more women were able to love men, rather than submit, in passive distaste, to their sexual desire. In fact, the feminine mystique itself- with its acknowledgement of woman as subject and not just object of the sexual act, and its assumption that her active, willing participation was essential to man's pleasure- could not have come without the emancipation of women to human equality. As the early feminists foresaw, women's rights did indeed promote greater sexual fulfillment, for men and women.
"No one has warned them that sex can never be a substitute for personal identity; that sex itself cannot give identity to a woman, any more than to a man; that there may be no sexual fulfillment at all for the woman who seeks her self in sex."
"Maybe a woman has to be by herself to be really with her children."
The frustrations were in turn also unleashed on the children which resulted in negligence on the part of the mother.
"But a job, any job, is not the answer- in fact, it can be part of the trap. Women who do not look for jobs equal to their actual capacity, who do not let themselves develop the lifetime interests and goals which require serious education and training, who take a job at twenty or forty to 'help out at home' or just to kill extra time, are walking, almost as surely as the ones who stay inside the housewife trap, to a nonexistent future.
The solution is not a job but meaning in life for the development of the individual. Something that requires one's full commitment which they are happily willing to give.
"It is the face of the feminine mystique with its powerful hidden deterrents, educators must realize that they cannot inspire young women to commit themselves seriously to their education without taking some extraordinary measures."
"A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she 'adjust' to prejudice and discrimination."
"No woman in America today who starts her search for identity can be sure where it will take her. No woman starts that search today without struggle, conflict, and taking her courage in her hands. But the women I met, who were moving on that unknown road, did not regret the pains, the efforts the risks."
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"When their mothers' fulfillment makes girls sure they want to be women, they will not have to 'beat themselves down' to be feminine; they can stretch and stretch until their own efforts will tell them who they are. They will not need the regard of boy or man to feel alive. And when women do not need to live through their husbands and children, men will not fear the love and strength of women, nor need another's weakness to prove their own masculinity. They can finally see each other as they are. And this is may be the next step in human evolution."
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"The changes necessary to bring about that equality were, and still are, very revolutionary indeed. They involve a sex-role revolution for men and women which will restructure all our institutions: child rearing, education, marriage, the family, the architecture of the home, the practice of medicine, work, politics, the economy, religion, psychological theory, human sexuality, morality, and the very evolution of race."
"It seemed to me that men weren't really the enemy- they were fellow victims, suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill."
The problem of today concerning men and societal expectations of masculinity.
"But the media began to publicize , in more and more sensational terms, the more exhibitionist, down-with-men, down-with-marriage, down-with-childbearing rhetoric and actions. Those who preached the man-hating sex/class warfare threatened to take over the New York NOW and the national NOW and drive out the women who wanted equality but who also wanted to keep on loving their husbands and children."
The media/government sent in "feminist" spies to sabotage the feminist movement.
AUGUST 26th, 1970: Women's Strike for Equality
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"Mayor Lindsay wouldn't close Fifth Avenue for our march, and I remember starting that march with the hooves of policemen's horses trying to keep us confined to the sidewalk. I remember looking back, jumping up to see over marchers' heads. I never saw so many women; they stretched back for so many blocks you couldn't see the end. I locked one arm with my beloved Judge Dorothy Kenyon (who, at eighty-two, insisted on walking with me instead of riding in the car we had provided for her), and the other arm with a young woman on the other side. I said to the others in the front ranks, 'Lock arms, sidewalk to sidewalk!' We overflowed till we filled the whole of Fifth Avenue. There were so many of use they couldn't stop us; they didn't even try. It was, as they say, the first nationwide action of women (hundreds of men also marched with us) since women won the vote itself fifty years before. Reporters who had joked about he 'bra-burners' wrote that they had never seen such beautiful women as the proud, joyous marchers who joined together that day. For all women were beautiful on that day."
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More wonderful info on the revolutions happening in the 70s here. For example, Earth Day and how it came about.
"And today who is financing the campaign to stop the final act of the women's movement for equality? Not a conspiracy of men to keep women down; rather, it is a conspiracy of those whose power, or profit, rests on the manipulation of the fears and impotent rage of passive women. Women- the last and largest group of people in this nation to demand control of their own destiny- will change the very nature of political power in this country."
"I think the energy locked up in those obsolete masculine and feminine roles is the social equivalent of the physical energy locked up in the realm of E = MC2- the force that unleashed the holocaust of Hiroshima. I believe the locked-up sexual energies have helped to fuel, more than anyone realizes, the terrible violence erupting in the nation and the world during these past ten years. If I am right, the sex-role revolution will liberate these energies from the service of death and will make it really possible for men and women to 'make love, not war.'"
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The Epilogue was breathtaking and inspiring.
Basic points of the book:
Women had this undefinable problem- depression, anxiety because of their lack of meaning in their lives.
Business, Education and Media was directed at the stunting of woman's growth so she could stay in the home.
Women had nothing to look towards as a role model because their only model was being a housewife.
The feminist movements was undermined by the media: men-haters, bra-burners, frigid, spinsters...
It is not about "working" like men traditionally do. It is about finding a passion in life, something that is consistent and therefore stimulating progress in one's self.
All Betty is saying is that women weren't given the chance to develop as individuals, and they deserve this right. No matter what that turns out to be.
This book is life-changing. It relates to everyone.
"For all the new women, and the new men,"
Marvelous and deeply touching address. This summarizes the entire book and her whole message. We are all people- let us all grow together and enjoy this marvelous gift of life that we have!
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Pub by W.M. Norton Company
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