5.0 out of 5 stars
ANOTHER LANDMARK (IF CONTROVERSIAL) BOOK BY A LEADING "SECOND WAVE" FEMINIST, September 8, 2011
Betty Friedan (1921-2006) was an American writer, activist, and feminist, who became one of the leading figures of the feminist movement with the publication of her 1963 book
The Feminine Mystique. She was founder of, and first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW). She also wrote
Fountain of Age,
Life So Far: A Memoir,
It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement, and
Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work and Family.
She wrote in the "Acknowledgements" section of this 1981 book, "This book evolved slowly in my consciousness over the last ten years as I was involved in the exhilarating actions and the disturbing impasses of the women's movement, and as I was beginning to formulate, in my teaching, writing, and conversations with personal friends, the concepts of what I came to call the second stage... While my original sense that we must move now into the second stage came from my personal questions and observations of the conflicts of the young and not-so-young women, and men, trying to live in terms of first-stage feminism, the emergence of full-scale backlash with and after the Reagan election in 1980, when I was halfway through this book, gave enormous political immediacy to my task."
Here are some additional quotations from the book:
"Reviewing the history of the original feminnist movement and why it failed to alter the lives of most American women... the trouble was rooted in the movement's unwillingness to tackle the problems of the family. Most of the early American feminists were either young single women opposed to marriage and family or else married professional women who didn't have children or preferred to concentrate on loftier issues, such as the vote. They assumed that winning suffrage would automatically usher in equality and purify society... the only way that equality between the sexes could have been achieved was through a 'revolution in family life'... a revolution that the first feminists never attempted. And that is why the original feminist movement collapsed after the vote was won in 1920." (Pg. 25)
"...many feminists knew all along that the extremist rhetoric of sexual politics defied and denied the profound, complex human reality of the sexual, social, psychological, economic, yes, biological relationship between woman and man. It denied the reality of woman's own sexuality, her childbearing, her roots and life connection in the family. But our voice was drowned out, for a time, in the media, and even in the movement itself, by the more strident, titillating, angry and less politically risky message of sexual politics... It was easier to fulminate against the male chauvinist pig in your own bedroom and liberate yourself from the missionary position than to take the test for law school, get the union to fight for parenting leave or lobby the state legislature to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment." (Pg. 31-32)
"For women to live their personal lives as a political scenario ... surely violates basic human needs for intimacy, sex, generation." (Pg. 62-63)
"...certain American and British feminists, pursuing more exotic sexual issues now that abortion and homosexuality were becoming banal, were launching a veritable crusade on clitoridectomy... Third World women rose up and told the American feminists to please lay off... they had more pressing problems to worry about right now, such as the fact that technological 'development' ... was taking away from women the chores in the field that used to give them some economic function and power." (Pg. 163)
"The public programs, which once seemed the solution if women and men are to share the joys and responsibilities of parenting, as they must now by necessity share the burdens of earning, are hardly conceivable in the face of political reaction, economic recession, inflation, unemployment and the energy crunch." (Pg. 188)
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Housewives caused the Trojan War, August 20, 2008
This review is from: The Second Stage: With a New Introduction (Paperback)
In 'The Femine Mystique' Betty Friedan told us that housewives were responsible for all the ills of modern society. Idle and underoccupied at home, we turned our malignant attentions to smothering our husbands and children with unwanted attention, meddling in their lives, making them miserable, and generally behaving in a thoroughly destructive manner.
In this book however, she not only blames us for all the ills of modern soceity, she also tells us that we are to blame for the Trojan War, which personally I think is going a bit too far (apparently if Agamemnon, Menelaus etc had had career women for mothers, they would never have thought of going to war against Troy).
Although in the Feminine Mystique she told us that housework was so easy it could be done in an hour, leaving plenty of time for women to have careers without troubling men for any help around the house, she here seems to have changed her mind, and tells us that men should help around the house, and indeed with childcare too (something she never troubles to mention at all in her first book, as far as I can remember). she is quite unrepentent about having said otherwise in her first book though, there is no "oops, I was wrong about that" or any such similar comment.
However, despite the fact that she now acknowledges that the housewife's life is not quite as easy as she formerly suggested, she still doesn't like us much. The sentiment is, as far as I am concerned, reciprocated.
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