Discussion

READ THE5E GUIDELINE5!

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The "Woman Question" on Both Sides of the Atlantic

Betty Friedan's equally influential bestseller drew heavily on de Beauvoir. Frieda the "feminine mystique," her term t'or the model ot' femininity promoted by experts, seemingly accepted by middle-class housewives in postwar lJnited States. As Frieda new postwar mystique was in many ways more conservative than prewar ideals had greater range of careers opening up to women, expansion of women's education, an, Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, and served as its president until 1910.

n (1921 -2006) sought the origins of

been, despite continuing social d so on. She cofounded the National

Simone de Beauyoi4 The Second Sex (1949)

l3I[;i*i:T;ii,.::;';: cies; today, as in the past, they make up about half of humanity; and yet we are told that "femininity is in leopardy;" we are urged, "Be women/ stay women,

become women." ... Although some women zealously strive to embody it, the model has never been patented. lt is typically described in vague and shim-

mering terms borrowed from a clairvoy-

ant'svocabulary.... lf the female function is not enough

to define woman, and if we also reject the explanation of the "eternal femi- nine," but if we accept, even temporarily,

that there are women on the earth, we then have to ask: what is a woman?

lr4erely stating the problem sug- gests an immediate answer to me. lt is significant that I pose it. lt would never occur to a man to write a book on the singular situation of males in humanity. lf I want to define myself, I first have to say,

"

"l am a woman"; all other assertions will

arise from this basic truth. A man never begins by positing himself as an individ- ual of a certain sex: that he is a man is obvious. The categories "masculine" and

"feminine" appear as symmetrical in a formal way on town hall records or iden- tification papers. The relation of the two sexes is not that of two electrical poles: the man represents both the positive and

the neuter. , . . Woman is the negative, to such a point that any determination is imputed to her as a limitation, with- out reciprocity [A] man is in his right by virtue of being man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. . . . Woman has ova- ries and a uterus; such are the particular

conditions that lock her in her sub.lectiv- ity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Azlan vainly forgets that his anatomy also includes hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct

and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity whereas he considers woman's body an

obstacle, a prison, burdened by every- thing that particularises it. "The female

is female by virtue of a certain /ach qualities," Aristotle said. "We s regard women's nature as suffering

natural defectiveness." And St. in his turn decreed that woman "incomplete man," an "incidental" be This is what the Genesis story rses, where Eve appears as if from Adam's "supernumerary" bo Bossuet's words. Humanity is male, man defines woman/ not in hersel{ in relation to himself; she is not ered an autonomous being. . . , is nothing other than what man she is thus called "the sex," meaning the male sees her essentially as a being; for him she is sex, so she is the absolute. She determines and entiates herself in relation to man, he does not in relation to her; she inessential in front of the is the Sub1ect, he is the Absolute the Other.

Source: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second

Constance Borde and Sheila M (London: 2009), pp. 3-6.

984 CHAPTER 28 Red Flags and Velvet Revolutions: The End of the Cold War, 1960-1990

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How didWestern culture det'inefemininity? Did women internalize those definitions? These questions were central -il to postwar feminist thoughi, and they were sharply posed in two classic texts: Simone de Beauvoir'sThe Second Sex -il (9a9) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963). De Beauvoir (1908-1986) started from the existentialist ' premise that humans were "condemned to be t'ree" and to give their own lives meaning. Why, then, did women accept the ; $l

fi:t':'J;[g::x';:::[rti!;rilirli.ziii,r's words"'dream the dreams of men"? Atthough dense and ohitosolhicat' il

il

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)

II:{:"ffiir[:t::fl;r: certain sense they were younger than their fictional counterparts today. They were young in the same way that the American hero has always been young: they were New Women, creating with a gay determined spirit a new identity for women-a life of their own. There

The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity. lt says that the great mistake of Western culture, through most of its history, has been the undervaluation of this femininity . . . The mistake, says the mystique, the root of women's troubles in the past, is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing mater- nal love.

But the new image this mystique gives to American women is the old image: "Occupation: housewife." The new mystique makes the housewife- mothers, who never had a chance to be anything else, the model for all women; it presupposes that history has reached a final and glorious end in the here and noW as far as women are concerned. . . .

It is more than a strange paradox that as all professions are finally open to women in America, "career woman" has become a dirty word; that as higher

education becomes available to any woman with the capacity for it, educa- tion for women has become so suspect that more and more drop out of high school and college to marry and have babies; that as so many roles in modern society become theirs for the taking, women so insistently confine themselves to one role. Why . . . should she accept this new image which insists she is not a person but a "woman," by definition barred from the freedom of human exis- tence and a voice in human destiny?

Source: Betty Friedan, fhe Feminine Mystique (New York: 2001; first publication, 1963), pp. 38, 40, 42-43, 67-68.

Questions for Analysis. 1. Why does de Beauvoir ask, "What is

a woman?"

2. Why does Friedan think that a "femi- nine mystique" emerged after the Second World War?

was an aura about them of becoming, of moving into a future that was going to be different from the past. . . .

These stories may not have been great literature. But the identity of their heroines seemed to say some- thing about the housewives who, then as now read the women's magazines. These magazines were not written for career women. The New Woman heroines were the ideal of yesterday's housewives; they reflected the dreams, mirrored the yearning for identity and the sense of possibility that existed for womenthen....

ln 1949 . . . the feminine mystique began to spread through the land. . . .

women's expectations and possibilities. Friedan cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966; and smaller, often more radical, women's movements multiplied across Europe in the following decades.

For this generatlon of feminists, "reproductive free- dom was borh a private matter and a basic right-a key to women's control over their lives. Outlawing contracep- tion and abortion, they argued, made women alone bear responsibility for the consequences of sweeping changes in Western sexuai life, and such measures were ineflfective as well as unjust. French feminists dramatized the point

by publishing the names of 343 well-known women, including de Beauvoir, who admitted to having had ille- gal abortions. A similar petitlon came out in Germany the followingyear, which was followed by petitions from doctors and tens of thousands o[ supporters. In sum, the legal changes followed from political demands, which in turn reflected a quiet or subterranean rebellion of many women (and men)-one with longer-term causes. Mass consumption, mass culture, and startlingly rapid trans- flormations in public and private life were all intimately related.

Soctal Change and Cultural Dynamism, 1945-1968 I

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