The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique

  Women make up a fair portion of the most wonderful people on earth.   They are compassionate, intelligent, patient, careful, independent and focused,   They are business executives, actors, artists, poets, scientists, wives and mothers.   They are, perhaps, the most subtly oppressed and disillusioned group in society.   THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, by Betty Friedan, champions the cuase of the maladjusted, unsatisifed and all too common victim of "the problem that has no name"--the American housewife.
    She is told that she has all a girl could want: a loving husband, beautiful children, a comfortable home.   She is a business manager, cook, nurse, chauffeur, dressmaker, interior decorator, accountant, caterer, teacher and private secretary.   She is a psrt of the glorified "Occupation: housewife" movement.   Yet she searches for something more.   An undefined yearning grips her soul.   She struggles to live up to the societal standard of feminine normality, adjustment and maturity.   The goal of her life is feminine fulfillment, be it in products, magazxines, children or sex.   She is the victim of "the feminine mystique"--the elusive mirage of contentedness and appreciation in the desert of family life and marriage.   Friedan's book examines this problem openly and objectively, observing several key issues.   Women, she argues, are conditioned to think that ultimate success lies in the glorification of their femininity to its utmost potential.   Education and equal rights are simply the consequences of neurotic women wishing to be men.   Those things offer no feminine affirmation; hence, they are unable to satisfy the modern woman who revels in the glory of her sex.   In the same way, independence and hard-nosed perseverance leave women loveless and alone.   True women, those who win romance and eduring love, are gentle, graceful and intoxiacatingly (or sickeningly, for that matter) sweet.   Childbearing is seen as the pinnacle of human achievement (as evidenced in studies of South...