Essay Question #2 Albert Kinsey helped change the American Public’s preconceptions on sexuality by publishing two bestselling books from 1947 to 1953 on the topic. Titled “American Sexual Behavior” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female”, these books both confirmed and challenged the generally held beliefs dealing with marriage, sexual gratification, and sexual orientation. Sex was deemed important for a healthy marriage, adultery was frequent and homosexuals weren’t weird anomalies. Hugh Hefner, who founded Playboy Magazine, was a proponent of sexual freedom who began circulating his magazine in 1953 with Marilyn Monroe as his first centerfold model. Hefner capitalized on the changing attitudes on sex and parlayed them into a very profitable enterprise. A catalyst of that enterprise, Marilyn Monroe soon became the center of male fantasy. After posing nude in 1949 for fifty dollars, she quickly rose to stardom and eventually acted in many major movies. Betty Friedan was the author of the 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique”, a book that actually criticized its title. Feminine mystique was the idea that women primarily found purpose and satisfaction through marriage and motherhood. Friedan also founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 as a means to gain female equality and rights. The group was moderate but had members with extreme views. Ti-Grace Atkinson and Susan Brownmiller were radical feminists that felt sexual relations with men should be terminated
Betty Friedan, who lived from 1921-2006, constructed her activism through her writing. She wrote for trade unions and magazines, and later, at the age of 42, published her best known work The Feminine Mystique. This book stirred up a following among urban, white, middle-class American women who felt that their male counterparts
Betty Friedan advanced the Women’s Rights Movement in many ways. One of them being the publishing of the Feminine Mystique. The Feminine Mystique vented
However, the methods they used to strive to change these ideals differed from those employed by ethnic minorities. Writers, such as Betty Friedan, voiced many of the views of the feminism movement that emerged in this decade. According to Friedan in her book, The Feminine Mystique, women in the 1960s realized the, “delusions of the feminine mystique” were their, “perception[s] of entrapment.” (Doc A) Friedan’s purpose in writing The Feminine Mystique is to convince women that their current status is unsatisfactory, thus sparking a new wave of women attempting to escape the trap they had fallen into and urging her audience to redefine the role of women. Her purpose is significant because it enables her to convey to a large audience that women, in their current state, were unable to achieve social equality with men. Additionally, the National Organization for Women (NOW) emphasized the necessity to redefine the democratic and social role of women from its inception in 1966. In its purpose statement, the NOW stated, “Working women are becoming increasingly—not less—concentrated on the bottom of the job ladder.” (Doc J) The purpose of this statement is to explain what the NOW seeks to accomplish and how it strives to do so. This purpose is significant because the NOW will not falsely represent what it intends to achieve and will employ facts supporting its intentions, even if slightly
The reading of “Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Report”, it really point out interesting opinion and reports, that he had throughout his life. Many of his surveys, opinions, and research put him in a fight with other other professional’s opinion, such psychiatrists, educators, physicians that dominate this subjects of sexual activities. Kinsey strategy was to interview people in order to obtain information from cases that help him to find these number that helps him to find a conclusion in sex behavior activities. One of the tactics that he had that help him was the “seven-point bipolar scale” (Kinsey, 58). This method helps him to find the answers to their questions in an in a controversial way on how he collected his information with topics
Women were growing tired of playing the traditional roles that were expected of them, especially after experiencing an independent life outside of domesticity during the wartime period. Feminist writer Betty Friedan participated in the movement by publishing The Feminine Mystique in 1963 in which she “contested the post-World War II belief that it was women’s destiny to marry and bear children. Friedan’s book was a bestseller and began to raise the consciousness of many women who agreed that homemaking in the suburbs sapped them of their individualism and left them unsatisfied” (889-890). Their efforts to participate in the protest movements came with a lot of difficulty as many women experienced sexual harassment and gender discrimination, causing them to later turned to the feminist movement in the 1970s. Members of the feminist movement were focused on contributing to their cause through the achievement of important accomplishments:
In 1963, Friedan wrote and published her book “The Feminine Mystique,” which aimed toward bringing attention to equality for women. Most impressively, she helped to form the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. Later on in 1969, she co-founded the National Abortion action League,
Alfred Kinsey’s extensive research into sexual orientation has brought about some of the greatest and perhaps most controversial findings of the 20th century. His findings range from sexual activities to sexual orientation, including “facts” that were considered shocking at the time of their publication, such as 10% of men are gay and almost half men have had adulterous affairs, etc. Not only have they changed the ways people view sex and sexual ethnics in the U.S., but these findings are also still deeply embedded in the public imagination. However, a closer look at the great man’s research reveals some major flaws. Even though nobody has yet been able to replicate the research due to its magnitude, in the 21st century, we have other approaches to explore the same field, the results of which both confirm and challenge Alfred Kinsey’s findings.
On June 30, 1966, Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray, and other activists founded the National Organization of Women, or simply NOW. After constant discrimination based on sex and the federal government’s lack of enforcement of the guaranteed constitutional rights, stating that discrimination based on sex was illegal, women felt the need for a change. Betty Friedan, a feminist activist and an author of The Feminine Mystique, and Pauli Murray, an African American civil rights activist, women's rights activist, and author, felt that without a feminist group like the National Organization of Women, equality of sexes would never be achieved. Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, inspired many other women to partake in female protest for equality. She became the first president of NOW.
Lingering inequalities and other social trends from previous decades brought forth the modern feminist movement in the 1960s. These feminists campaigned for gender equality with causes such as equal pay for equal work, abortion rights, and social parity. In 1963, author Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, which contained reports from a study conducted on female college graduates during the 1950s and early 1960s, which uncovered that most women labelled themselves exclusively as mothers and housewives, and were unsatisfied with the roles forced upon them. Friedan argued fervently that women needed to discover their own identities outside the roles of a wife and mother. Many believe that the arguments made in The Feminine Mystique marked the start of the modern feminist movement (Loveday, 1)
The Feminine Mystique is the title of a book written by the late Betty Friedan
There are many different aspects of American Culture. One part of this culture is the idolization of beautiful women. Playboy is one of many examples of how Americans idolize women. Playboy Enterprises, recognized by their iconic Playboy Bunny symbol, started off as just a men’s magazine that includes journal articles, fiction, and of course, photographs of nude women. Playboy Magazine was founded by Hugh Hefner in Chicago, Illinois in 1953. Hefner incorporated HMH Publishing Co., Inc. in Delaware on October 1, 1953. In December of 1953 Hefner released the first issue of the magazine that would feature Marilyn Monroe on the cover. It would become very successful, selling more than 50,000 copies of the first issue.
Betty Friedan wrote the book based on a survey she did for her former Smith College classmates on the their fifteenth anniversary reunion. The results of the survey showed that many of her former classmates were unhappy, despite being affluent and married with children. The reason her Smith College alumnus were so unhappy was due to the fact that their lives consisted of taking care of her family and children, but not doing anything that held significance to themselves and the nation. Her book The Feminine Mystique, was a major influence of the 1960s and 70s American Feminist Movement, selling 1.4 million copies.The Feminine Mystique, made in 1963 is a nonfiction book that is based on the lives and unhappiness housewives felt during the early 50s and 60s. The reason this book was so popular and influenced the 1960s and 70s American Feminist Movement was due to the books widespread relatability among housewives who were financially stable with children, the book impelled women to fight for a change in salary, the workplace, and laws; during a time where women did not have the same equal rights as men. Another popular writer during the 1960s and 70s American Feminist Movement is Robin Morgan. Robin Morgan is an
The change in society’s views on sexuality during the 1960s created a moral shift in which people and cultural values shifted away from many traditional biblical ethics. With inspiration from African American and their movements in civil rights, many young women sought to achieve gender equality with males despite the society’s cookie-cutter view of women as housewives in the 1950s. In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique as an outlash against the view of the traditional American housewife. Friedan took inspiration from Holocaust survivor Bruno Bettelheim’s analysis of the psychological abuse imposed by the Germans on their prisoners and compared the average suburban home to “comfortable concentration camps” (Wolfe). Alan
Betty Friedan believed that women should feel and be treated equal to men. Friedan fought for women to embody their power and worth. She was an activist for the women’s rights movement and a founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Her book, The Feminine Mystique, connected with her readers by illustrating the standards that women were put under for decades. In the 60’s, women were viewed as nothing but maids and child-bearers. Many women were hesitant to take a stand for this taboo subject; their own rights. Friedan took initiative when everyone else was afraid to. Betty Friedan’s contribution clearly advanced the progression of women’s equality. She accomplished this by writing her famous book, giving a debatable speech, and founding the National Organization for Women.
As scholarly reviews started to trickle in, it became clear that there were problems with Kinsey 's work. Reviewers complained that he ignored love, emotion, and the complexities of culture. However, the most damaging critiques focused on his sampling method; questioning whether the enormous number of people, he interviewed, were a true representation of the American population. Indeed this was not an idle question, given Kinsey 's predilection for recruiting college students, prostitutes, and prison inmates to participate in the study. He rigorously interviewed thousands of Americans about their sexual histories and practices. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published in 1948 (Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948). Sexual Behavior in the