Word: friedans
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Phyllis McGinley did not ask to get into the argument. But since she has been praising domesticity all along, in both essay and verse, her publisher prodded her into assembling her thoughts as rebuttal to all those, like Betty Friedan, who deprecate the very role that Housewife McGinley prefers to fill. The result was Sixpence in Her Shoe, in which she restates the proposition for which her own life has been the best evidence: that even today's educated woman can fit happily into the framework of the home. Sixpence sold slowly at first. But after housewives began...
...Sickness? It was scarcely surprising that The Feminine Mystique, which attacked the whole structure of Phyllis McGinley's convictions, provoked the contented housewife of Grindstone Hill into a spirited response. Betty Friedan's book classified the housewife state as nothing short of "dangerous." "It is not an exaggeration to call the stagnating state of millions of American housewives a sickness," she wrote. "The problem-which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities-is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than...
There is nothing really new about the Friedan argument except its language. Her book, in fact, is merely one more pronunciamento of the 20th century feminist movement. It owes a consider able debt to that formidable French non-housekeeper, Simone de Beauvoir, who in The Second Sex insisted that any woman who submits to housework betrays "a kind of madness bordering on perversion...
...Friedan challenge was irresistible to Phyllis McGinley. "I rise to defend the quite possible She," she had written many years ago-meaning by that the woman with absolute freedom of choice to find her destiny, not just by the rigid and somewhat outmoded rules of the feminists but in the world of today...
...Betty Friedan & Co. discount such talk because, they say, it comes from a woman who is not just a housewife but a poet, and who herself discounts housewifery by employing fulltime help. This attitude is slightly tinged with envy. Phyllis McGinley has managed, with stunning success, the very sort of life they advocate-and, what's more, like the Phi Beta Kappa effortlessly producing scholarship, she has made it look easy. From this housewife's mind, in between unstinted domestic chores, have come nine volumes of excellent verse, two books of essays and 15 children's books...