Betty Friedan

Since its outset in its earliest forms, feminism has pigeon-holed the predicament of women as its primary concern. However, it has been castigated accordingly, for the reason that it is exclusively, concerned with women and their own dilemma. Not only it deemed women as a priority, but also white upper-middle-class women as a prototype for their feminist discourse. Correspondingly, Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir were exposed to this backlash as they saw this struggle from a middle-class prism. Using Valorie Bryson’s Introduction to Feminist Political Theory as a datum, this paper seeks to document the historical changes that feminism went through. In this, I would like to argue that the stride that feminists took to encompass the frustration of other classes, races, and genders played a pivotal role in the theorizing of gender, through resorting to a diversified, rather than an exclusive approach. This intersectionality of races, as bell hooks, would come to contend, is part and parcel of feminism as a movement that seeks to redeem the rights of all women. Second-wave feminism showed the first seeds of endorsing other possibilities, while Third-wave feminism, will break away from structural binary thinking (using the likes of; Elizabeth Grosz’s espousal of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of thousand plateaus with Thousand Tiny Sexes, Foucauldian notion of Discourse, Deleuze’s theory of Rhizome as a benchmark for their theorization).

Second wave feminists used a particular form of memoir – personal testimony – in the then new political practice of consciousness-raising. Now, contemporary scholars have argued the recent practice of mothers writing about their lives online and in print are the inheritors of the consciousness-raising tradition. Using two first-person accounts by contemporary Australian journalists and feminists (Pryor 2014, Freedman 2015) of juggling work, study and motherhood through consuming anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication, this chapter examines how these newer forms of memoir/consciousness-raising represent both a continuity with, and a break from, earlier forms of the practice. These contemporary stories still provide readers with consolation and relief; but where personal stories were once used to interrogate problems in women’s social worlds (Friedan, 1963, Summers 1975), the contemporary feminists’ stories discussed here emphasise individual choice, adaptation and personal transformation (including a medical transformation at a fundamental level of self). The use of memoir by these contemporary writers is also considered in the context of a new version of celebrity feminism, one where the author’s life story is now foregrounded. Finally, this chapter argues that the personal story, once harnessed by second wavers to build a movement, is now recruited by contemporary feminists to build a personal brand.

The American feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan, in her canonical work Feminine Mystique (1963), vocalizes the discontentment and estrangement of mid-century American women. After World War II, many women with small children had to leave their jobs due to the drastic decline in both wages and wartime, government-supported childcare facilities. These women were asked to give up the image of Rosie the Riveter and be “gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home” (Friedan, 1963). Almost two decades before Frieden, housewife‐mother‐writer Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) protested this celebration of domestic idealism by depicting the specifically female experience of white middle‐class women in mid‐century America. In between bearing and raising four children, Jackson wrote six novels, two memoirs about childrearing, four children’s books, and dozens of short stories. Both her Gothic novels and domestic stories encompass the feelings of guilt and fear that permeate the lives of all women in a society of domesticity. Whether married or unmarried, all women clearly suffered from the “problem that had no name” (Friedan, 1963): the silent discontent mirrored in Jackson’s domestic fiction and bubbling just beneath the surface of placid peacetime American society. We will
explore this protest against the often cruel and violent, post-war American patriarchy, in two of Jackson’s stories: “The Renegade” and “Flower Garden.”

Movie is considered as modern form of literature. Apart of the ability to formerly convey what was depicted inside the novel, prose, play, or poem (movie adaptation), movies nowadays can stand alone as purely new form of literature. The making progress of movie involves such ability, which also includes writing, interpreting, reading, and acting. The only written form of a movie is the script. This is why movie nowadays is considered as a new form of literary work which can stand alone. There are feminism perspectives depicted in Mad Max: Fury Road Movie, and this paper would give you the evidences.

This contribution wants to retrace American feminist Betty Friedan’s fascinating biography and controversial reflection, adopting as focal point the book which allowed her to become a strong reference for the Liberal Women's Rights Movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and at the same time made her an extremely discussed and criticized public figure within the new Radical Feminist Reflection: The Feminine Mystique (1964).
This brilliant work was able to bring to light the famous “problem that has no name”, the sense of frustration and incompleteness lived in ‘50s by many American middle-class women, placed in name of their docile and uncompetitive femininity within the domestic sphere of suburban reality, in order to ensure political and social stability to the so-called “American way of life”.
Can we really affirm that Betty Friedan has consciously removed part of her young radical engagement – as historian Daniel Horowitz affirmed in his Friedan’s provocative biography of 1998 – to embrace a more comfortable liberal feminist discourse? Can we actually consider The Feminine Mystique «the revolutionary manifesto of women's liberation», as it was by many defined? Is Friedan’s liberal analysis – aimed to examine the status of white heterosexual middle-class and educated American women – based on a primary exclusion according to class, race and sexual orientation? I will move from these still open questions to reconstruct the political debate which arose around Friedan’s work and her later commitment within the National Organization for Women (NOW), with a particular emphasis on the main criticisms to the structural limits of her political vision.

There are many women writers who fight for women’s rights by their works in
America. In 1960, the world of American women was limited in almost every respect, from
family life to the workplace. A woman was expected to follow one path: to marry in her
early 20s, start a family quickly, and devote her life to homemaking. As such, wives bore
the full load of housekeeping and child care, spending an average of 55 hours a week on
domestic chores. They were legally subject to their husbands via "head and master laws,"
and they had no legal right to any of their husbands' earnings or property, aside from a
limited right to "proper support"; husbands, however, would control their wives' property
and earnings.3 If the marriage deteriorated, divorce was difficult to obtain as “no fault"
divorce was not an option, forcing women to prove wrongdoing on the part of their
husbands in order to get divorced. Betty Friedan’s work shows the frustration and even the
despair of a generation of college-educated housewives who felt trapped and unfulfilled at
that time.

This essay deals with one chapter of Betty Friedan's landmark book, The Feminine Mystique (1963). The purpose is to show some shortcomings and debatable aspects, especially regarding the authour "middle-class" approach in a changing time. The essay point out that Friedan's critic of the "subburban housewife condition" arised from a distanciation from her radical past, excluding from her analysis many aspects of the women's condition in the American society of the 1960's. Moreover, Friedan did not question the material and social conditions that lead to the creation of huge suburbs in the post-war US. Something which leads to an underestimation of a whole range of questions regarding the feminist struggle.

The work is focused on the problem of feminine identity in the contemporary world. Modern discussion about the feminine identity is still alive and lead by most of engaged feminists. One of them is Elisabeth Badinter, French feminist, historian and professor of philosophy at the École Polytechnique in Paris. Her standpoint is called liberal feminism and it accepts all achievements of modern naturalism and pro-maternity organization of La Leche League. The main controversy of Badinter’s views is the conviction that women themselves are responsible for the crisis of their feminine identity. Presenting this radical statement, the work shows various roots of feminist philosophy, indicating in particular existentialist thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, who was the first to speak about independent feminine identity. In addition, it is crucial to compare Badinter with another modern liberal feminist Betty Friedan, with a view to show that the problem of feminine identity has an essential meaning in the modern feminist philosophy.

This essay establishes a conversation between Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and its instantiations in Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides and Green's Paper Towns. Through close readings of these works, this essay establishes the ways in which both authors adapt Friedan's theory to understand the way in which young female teenagers develop resistance to the 'mystique' through suicide and escape.

This seminar paper firstly sets out to investigate how the Feminine Mystique had an impact on articulating the problem of being a woman in the patriarchal male-based American Society as it provided a space for the representation of women in many areas such as political representation, equal pay and education; secondly to stress how Friedan highlighted this representation for the sake of white, heterosexual, middle class American women and, therefore, ignored to put a stress on the voices of gays, lesbians, Asians, Blacks, Latinos, and lower classes.

Part of Cornell Department of Architecture graduate student seminar Gastro•porn, a class-curated digital exhibition launched in May 2015. The full exhibition available online as funded and hosted by Cornell's College of Art, Architecture, and Planning (see the attached links to the entire exhibition as well as my essay where, in the latter, you will find links to the videos referenced in the article text available for download here).

The proliferation of therapeutic culture after World War II helped pave the way for a feminist critique of motherhood and gender roles more broadly. This at first seems counterintuitive, given the often quite breathtaking sexism that runs through much of 1940s and 1950s psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature. But an overweening emphasis on the repressive aspects of postwar therapeutic culture has obscured some of its less immediately apparent implications. Because experts viewed maternal overprotection as so pernicious, and because they placed such a high premium on the cultivation of emotional autonomy, they inadvertently opened up cultural and psychic space for some mothers—predominantly white, well-educated women who had enjoyed a history of satisfying employment prior to marriage and motherhood—to think of themselves in more individualistic terms. Therapeutic culture primed such women to respond favorably to the indictment of suburban motherhood and domesticity that Betty Friedan leveled in her groundbreaking 1963 bestseller, The Feminine Mystique, as letters to the author reveal. Readers who conceptualized motherhood in therapeutic terms, and who freely discussed their own recourse to therapy, typically embraced Friedan’s damning assessment of postwar domesticity. In contrast, women who viewed motherhood in non-therapeutic terms—as not only a familial role, but also a civic and Christian duty—uniformly condemned both Friedan’s critique and the growing tendency to turn to psychological experts to resolve personal problems.

An examination of the function of the Holocaust and the category of ‘concentration camp’ in  Friedan’s 'Feminine Mystique'. It revisits the analogy as an important feminist use (or rather abuse) of recent history – one that tells us something important about political and intellectual history. It is key to appreciate its positioning and function in the rhetorical composition of The Mystique as a jeremiad. Friedan’s most obvious alternative was the race-gender analogy, enormously popular among her contemporaries. The article suggests some reasons for her choosing World War II over racial segregation as the political evil to which gender inequality ought to be compared. It explores ideological dimensions of the  concentration camp analogy as it functioned in the late 50s and early 60s – namely, its claims to universalism and humanism.

Author: Mimi Haddad
Publisher: CBE International

One source of tension between egalitarians and complementarians is the frequent complementarian claim that egalitarians are the theological descendents of radical feminists such as Betty Friedan, Mary Daly, and Daphne Hampson. This is inaccurate. Egalitarians in fact see mentors in people like Catherine Booth, Jessie Penn-Lewis, Frances Willard, A. J. Gordon, Katharine Bushnell, William Baxter Godbey, Amanda Smith, Fredrik Franson, Sojourner Truth, B. T. Roberts, and Pandita Ramabai. Our theological moorings, as egalitarians, are directly linked to the first wave of feminists—people whose passion for Scripture, evangelism, and justice shaped the golden era of missions in the 1800s. These people not only advanced the biblical basis for the gospel service of women and people of color, but many of them also labored for the abolition of slavery and for voting rights for women.

El texto analiza el contenido de los videos de un canal de Youtube, con base en el texto La Mística de la Feminidad, de Betty Friedan. En el análisis se pone en juego el concepto de la "mística de la feminidad" para deconstruir la idea que se promueve en los videos acerca de cómo ser una mujer, especificamente un niña bien.

Mateos de Manuel, Victoria (2018) Precariedad del populismo/ Pueblo y hombre nuevo: los peligros de las comunidades de futuro [texto de conferencia rechazado para su publicación], 56º Congreso Internacional de Americanistas (12-20 julio), Universidad de Salamanca. Disponible en https://eprints.ucm.es/view/people/Mateos_de_Manuel=3AVictoria=3A=3A.html

RESUMEN. En este artículo defenderé que el populismo, en su planteamiento político de comunidad de futuro e identidad por crear, es menesteroso respecto de sus precedentes teóricos en la filosofía de Nietzsche: (a) a través de su noción de "superhombre" (Übermensch) y (b) mediante el concepto de "comunidad superior/elevada" (höhere Gemeinschaft) desde la experiencia dionisíaca. Estas ideas nietzscheanas, si bien nacieron con intenciones esperanzadoras, han tenido un desenlace pernicioso si atendemos al resultado totalitario del Movimiento para la Reforma de Vida (Lebensreformbewegung) en Alemania en la primera mitad del siglo XX y el resultado neoliberal de la identidad de la supermujer expuesto por la crítica feminista de Betty Friedan en los años ochenta.

Mateos de Manuel, Victoria (2020) Estudio comparativo de la figura de la esposa en Simone de Beauvoir y Betty Friedan, en Gutiérrez Simón, R./ Mosquera, A. (ed.), Devenires de un acontecimiento. Mayo del 68 cincuenta años después. 263-280. Chile: Editorial Centaltes, 263-280.

RESUMEN. En este capítulo se tratará de mostrar la fuerte influencia del
capítulo quinto, titulado «La esposa», de El segundo sexo de Simone de Beauvoir, publicado en 1949, en el desarrollo de un libro fundamental para comprender el desarrollo de la segunda ola feminista: La mística de la feminidad de la estadounidense Betty Friedan, fundadora de la NOW (National Organization for Woman) en 1966. Se trata de un texto de corte psicosocial y no estrictamente filosófico publicado en 1963. Con ello, se ha dado curso a una cuestión crucial que aparece apuntada, pero no
desarrollada, por la revisión de la obra de Friedan de Avital H.
Bloch en 2013: el hecho de que existe una fuerte influencia del
pensamiento de Beauvoir en Friedan, herencia que la autora no
reconoció hasta años más tarde. Asimismo, a colación de esta
cuestión, desarrollaremos cómo el feminismo de Beauvoir y
Friedan sirvió para criticar dos modelos de realización femenina que surgieron en el siglo XIX: las supuestas posiciones privilegiadas
del ángel del hogar y la consumidora.

Common Ground Conference 2018 - Queen's University, Belfast.

This paper analyses how space as both a physical environment and a social construct affects what Judith Butler calls ‘gender regulations’: how does the intersection of the private and the public influences the development of personal identity? How can these stereotypes be challenged within the confines of structured social hierarchies?
The notion of suburbia as a response to a post-World-War-II crisis in masculinity is introduced. In particular, the paper looks at how a male authoritarian rhetoric that sees happiness as a commodity rejects the idea of individual identity and serves to generate the conventional role of the all-American housewife as the only aspiration for female characters. Through an investigation into the development of different female characters, the paper then highlights the ways in which adherence to the suburban social norm that regulates gender relationships leads to a renunciation of personhood in favour of conformity and designates the ostracisation of April Wheeler as an outcast. The semiotics of female identity that surrounds the character of April are examined to show how this ostracisation is not only an external process of separation form society, but becomes an internalised action that leads to a fracture in the female consciousness.

The humanities study the human condition, something that begins at birth and ends in death. But if the scholarly production on these two topics is any indicator, then academics are more fascinated with death than they are with birth. The top listing that popped up when I searched under “childbirth” in Oxford University Press, for example, was “Death in Childbirth,” and searching under “birth” in the same publication brought to the top a book called “Death before Birth.” Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. Why we choose death over birth goes much deeper than simple intrigue, however. Some investigation reveals that intellectual approaches to birth are suppressed in both active and passive ways. While one could argue that the historical domination of white men in the academy is part of the problem, the lopsided coverage of these two monumental endpoints of life is quite complex and cannot be reduced to it. Understanding the reasons behind this suppression requires a rethinking of how we address major life transitions.

The article probes the social background to the controversial ‘Kitchen Debate’ between the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and the US vice-president Richard Nixon, which occured at the American trade exhibition in Moscow during summer 1959.  Political histories narrowly focus on diplomatic point-scoring between the two leaders, leaving largely untouched the purpose of the landmark exhibition, and its expression of America's ‘suburban’ values.  This discussion traces a broad arc exploring:

- The exchange between Khrushchev and Nixon, especially their discussion of housing
- What was shown in the Moscow exhibition (detailing the display kitchen that prompted Khrushchev’s indignation), and the US State Department’s broad aims.
- The expansion of suburbia in post-war America (census figures quoted), and changes in property development including the emergence of commuter suburbs.
- The influential Levittown model for mass home construction & instant suburbs, and the impact of its highly publicised estates on Long Island, Connecticutt and New Jersey.
- Nature and extent of suburban conformism, including pointed criticisms made by urban planning commentators, the sociologist William Whyte, and the Feminist Betty Friedan.
- Mounting distress of women who did not feel fulfilled as homemakers, and their main grievances.
- Segregation, and enforced racial exclusion at the Levittowns.
- Portrayal of suburban values in the key literary works, ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit’ (1955), ‘Revolutionary Road’ (1961), ‘The Stepford Wives’ (1972)
- Efforts to raise the quality of home and suburb design in California, prompted by the magazine ‘Arts and Architecture’
- The pioneering Case Study House project.
- Role of the Los Angeles firm Eames Office in post-war domestic design.
- Contribution of Eames Office to the Moscow exhibition.
9pp.

This course has four main goals:

1. Theoretical Blueprint:
This course is designed to provide broad overview of contemporary social theory and to introduce students to the writings of important social theorists of the late 20th century. We will discuss complex and interrelated social, religious, cultural, political and economic issues and explore how social theorists have dealt with them. This course will provide you with a foundational understanding of contemporary social theory and familiarize you with terms and concepts such as modernity, post-structuralism, critical theory, postmodernism, feminist theory, post-colonialism, postindustrialism, and cultural studies.

2. Develop a Theoretical Toolbox:
The readings and lectures are designed to help you develop a theoretical toolbox in which to develop a deeper critical perspective of the world around you. We will not engage the readings and authors simply to regurgitate the intentions of the authors, rather we will analyze the ways in which they have engaged the changes and challenges of their worlds within their personal and sociohistorical contexts. This will help us organize the critical tools we have collected in our theoretical toolbox.

3. Organize and Sharpen Critical Tools:
The weekly blog comments and class discussions will be the medium by which we organize and sharpen our critical tools. By reflecting upon our personal and sociohistorical context and engaging the thoughts of our colleagues, we will build a theoretical toolbox better equipped to confront the changes and challenges our society encounters within our own sociohistorical context.

4. Theoretical Internship:
Our blogs will operate as a theoretical internship. This internship will be our opportunity to move from students of theory to theorists of the world in which we live. While writing our blogs, we will be forced to think more deeply about both the readings and our own thoughts. We will train ourselves to think more critically and communicate our theoretical constructions to those around us.