The feminine mystique

[Natasha]

The feminine mystique

http://tgnotwhatyouthink.blogspot.com/2008/12/feminine-mystique.html
11/21/2008

I wrote a while back that some of us, at least, go in foolish pursuit of beauty, not the best female trait to take on. Today, I'm thinking that our pursuit is perhaps somewhat different, and a lot more understandable. We want femininity.

As far as I know, woman born female-bodied rarely think about how feminine they look or feel. (If that's not so, I'm always open to correction. How else will I learn?) Natal women range from ultra-feminine to not very feminine at all. There are natal women who are way more butch than I am. I imagine some are unhappy about their
state, but for most, they are the way they wish to be.

[Lisbeth]

"I imagine some are unhappy about their state, but for most, they are the way they wish to be."

*Lisbeth makes an extremely rude noise at this nonsense statement*

I have yet to meet a woman who was happy with her looks. The rest of the article wasn't any better.

[tekla]

for most, they are the way they wish to be.

If this was true the fashion, cosmetic, plastic surgery, diet, industries would be scraping along. 

[Lisbeth]

It might do her good if she did read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. It might make up for some the experience of womanhood she seems to be lacking.

[tekla]

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique

A book by for, and about upper class white women.  It has very little to say beyond its target.

[Lisbeth]

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique
A book by for, and about upper class white women.  It has very little to say beyond its target.

I would dispute that. "White" certainly, but not "upper class." It is definitely dated, but it speaks a great deel to the way the (lower class) women in my family were raised in the middle of the last century. It has given me insight into my mother, my sister, and myself. It tells me nothing about my daughters.

[tekla]

Well it tells you nothing about your daughters because the world has changed much since then.  Much, if not all the real stuff in that book pertains to her classmates and alum from Smith at a time when Smith and Wellesley girls did not go on to become U.S. Senators or Secretaries of State.  They do now, and thanks to the work of a lot of women who were working even as that book came out.

It was a research project against being the "happy housewife" that came out exactly as that entire deal became both economically and socially unstable, and began to fall apart.  What she was describing as the complaint with no name was a luxury even then.  It was something that not all women, not lower class, or women of color there in the early 1960s, shared.  It was a book for bored elite college educated women to read while the maids did the floor and who had the luxury of being able to afford that lifestyle. 

[Lisbeth]

It was a book for bored elite college educated women to read while the maids did the floor and who had the luxury of being able to afford that lifestyle.

You have an interesting perspective on the world.

[tekla]

Well I know what the survey sample was, and it was kind of interesting, its really the last group of women to go through the most elite womens schools that ever existed (The Seven Sisters, the female version of the Ivy League - Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, Mount Holyoke College, Radcliffe College, Smith College, Vassar College, and Wellesley College.)  The sixties would have a profound effect on these institutions, but BF was dealing mostly with women who went through college post war - but who were not a part of baby boom, they were caught inbetween in a way.  Most were too young to have been Rosie the Riveter in the war, and too old to be a part of that huge swell coming on under them.  And, they were the daughters of the old line, pre WWII elites in the U.S. at a time when those schools were the female bastion of East Coast industrial wealth.  Hardly a random cross sample. 

[Lisbeth]

The survey really hadn't anything to do with the book.

[tekla]

I think that the survey was the heart of the book, not her voice, but the voices of those she interviewed.  Remember she really was not of those women either, in that she was not a housewife, she went from Smith to Berkeley during the war, and worked as a full time writer for a number of years before starting the survey, which I think she did in like '57, then she expanded it and that is the basis for the book, which came out in '63, right as the Sixties were really starting.