Word: friedans
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Although the Class of 1961 graduated two years before Betty Friedan debunked the myth of the happy American housewife in The Feminine Mystique, many Radcliffe graduates were already struggling with having to chose between family and career...
...Betty Friedan has dubbed it a "deceptive, backlash book." Erica Jong has called it the kind of work that "could start a revolution" and "serve as blueprint for a new era of feminist activism." Those heated reactions were only a small part of a new controversy slowly beginning to churn in U.S. feminist circles. Its focus: a newly published 461-page study that examines why, despite the furor of the feminist revolution in the '60s and '70s, women in the U.S. labor force remain substantially poorer than their West European counterparts. The book's most startling claim: the feminist movement...
...divorced or taken jobs, and Bombeck, somewhat ironically, was almost the last stay-at-home mom left on the block. The winds of feminism had swept through town, ruffling feathers. One evening, Bombeck recalls, she drove into town with some other women to hear a lecture by Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique. "She started talking about yellow wax buildup and all that, and all of us started laughing." Friedan shook her finger and scolded them; these were supposed to be demeaning concerns, not funny ones. Bombeck remembers thinking, "God, lady, you can't make it better tonight...
TWENTY YEARS AGO, Betty Friedan wrote what is now considered to be the original feminist bible: The Feminine Mystique. Setting the tone for the bra-burning feminists of the 1960's. Friedan began a revolutionary and radical questioning of a woman's place in society. Since then, the polemical rhetoric of the women's movement's early stages has gradually been replaced by a more moderate and rational argument for sexual equality. More and more feminists are asserting that women can be "different but equal...
MANY OF THE FIRST radical feminists not only detested men, but also criticized women harshly. They caricatured and decried prototypical female role models. Betty Friedan called suburban households "comfortable concentration camps" for married women, implying that it was up to these women to improve their own lives. But Friedan's criticism was aimed principally at middle class housewives. Later feminists recognized that women's problems are not merely self-imposed by a certain socioeconomic class of woman, but are endemic and imposed by a historically sexist society...