James Tiptree, Jr., The Author Of The Story “The Women

The woman’s role in society had many changes during the era of WWII to the baby boom era. It went from the strong independent woman that can work in a factory to a house wife that takes care of the family to the final slightly dominant, but still dependent female. All of these different feminine mystiques were changed because of society and through indirect propaganda in TV shows and

The period 1940-1975 represented a time of trouble within the United States and overseas. As World War II ended in 1945, many Cold war conflicts erupted shortly after that, increasing social controversy among teenagers, minorities and especially women. During this time period, gender inequality was ongoing in many aspects of life. Women were tired of constantly staying home engaging in domestic activities and were dissatisfied in their roles as “housewives”. The rise of the women’s rights movement was spurred by the growth of women joining the workforce, resentment of being treated as inferior to men, and the rise of unity among women.

During the 1950s and 1960s, there was a period of unhappiness that affected American housewives across the nation. For years leading up to this, women had been conditioned to find academic careers unfulfilling and were instead taught to find happiness in becoming committed housewives who were heavily involved in their community. If a woman had a problem, she assumed it had something to do with her marriage or herself. Women were told that they should be grateful and just accept their role as a submissive housewife. These women felt unfulfilled by their lives, which manifested in deep dissatisfaction.

Women filled these positions and did a great job doing work that had only been done by men up to that point. When the war ended, women were forced out of their jobs so that the men could take them back. “Wartime polls showed that between 60 and 80 percent of these women wanted to keep their jobs when the war ended” (Pg. 882). Women were then treated like they were helping during the Cold War by staying home and taking care of the family. The pressure to be the “perfect housewife” was made worse by popular television shows that celebrated “traditional families” or “nuclear families” during a time when more and more women were going off to college and working outside the home (Pg 924). Advertisement for new appliances to make life easier targeted women because they got to “at least exercised authority over many household purchases” while the men worked and earned money, at times really far away from home. By the time the 1960s rolled around, women were “demanding equality in both public and private life” (Pg. 963). Women were starting to realize that the family dynamic was not always what the media portrayed it to be so they changed their attitudes toward marriage and divorce. New feminism became main objective when it came to activism. Women led marches and rallies for gender discrimination. The main goal was to pass an Equal Rights Amendment. Unfortunately, numerous Latinas and African American women considered the push for women’s rights a white middle-class movement. Even though the Equal Rights Amendment did not go through for countless years, women advanced in education and the workplace. During the 1970s and 1980s, courts started to strike “down numerous statutes and regulations that limited women’s rights to property, employment, and reproductive choices” (Pg. 964). Women held about half the jobs in the 1990s and moved into higher professions, including law, medicine, accounting, and higher

First, what was the Culture of Female Domesticity of the 1950s/1960s? This time period saw the age for marriage dropping rapidly, a huge increase in birthrates, and a steady decrease in divorce rates. After World War II ended, men returned home expecting women to move aside as they regained their jobs that they had left behind. “These men also harbored fantasies of wifely submission as payment for their soldiering sacrifices” (Campbell, 65). Marjorie Ferguson points out what Betty Friedan has also argued, that the “purveyors of commodities were wary of an increase in female employment and believed that women’s appetites for goods and services were the mainstay of increased sales” (Ferguson, 34). Women were expected to care for their husbands and their children and also

Feminist ideas are used throughout this story in both explicit and implicit ways to help describe the gender roles placed upon females in the 1950s. “That figure was a garish blond showgirl, a Hollywood ‘sexpot’ of no interest to intellectuals”. (Page 79) The author explicitly includes the

The position of women throughout American society changed vastly throughout 1940-1975. The 1940s saw women change from predominant homemakers to working woman to support the war effort. However, the 1950s forced women back inside the kitchen by using mass media and propaganda to make them believe they were inferior to men. The portrayal of women in the fifties gave women the idea that they could do nothing more than be wives and mothers. Although the idea of feminism was pretty much non-existent in the 1950s, women still had a feeling they were supposed to do something more with their lives than be housewives.

Before the war, women’s roles in the household were to simply raise the children and maintain the home, or to take these things off of the plates of their busy husbands hands, but in this era of wartime production women who were married, unmarried, or married and had children went to work. Some 14 million women went to work building landing vehicles, ships, planes anything needed so that their boys were properly supplied on the front lines. With this shift from wife and mom to worker, women began to overcome much of the discrimination they previously battled in the work place, like being paid fewer wage than men. This movement was fueled by a massive propaganda campaign that started to change how women thought it meant to be a woman. At the peak of the industrial boom caused by World War II, 40 percent of all women worked for wages in the US and out of the entire workforce, 36 percent were women. Being a women in this period no longer required sitting at home all day cleaning the house while the children were at school and the opportunity to make on honest days wage became increasingly appealing to many housewives. Women, now accustomed to being treated this way, saw this as a step forward in society for them. Sadly, this way of life most women who joined the work force was short lived.

In the 1950’s, the inequality of gender conflicted women in the United States. A woman’s goal in life was to get married, have children, and to primarily take care of the house. An article by Christina Catalano called Shaping the American Woman: Feminism and Advertising in the 1950’s states that women were known for being, “...Stupid, submissive, purely domestic creatures.”(Catalano 45). Men on the other hand are viewed as the more superior gender. The life of a man consist of getting married and working. Although this may seem very little, men are free to do whatever they desire and are more free spirited during the 50’s whereas women are more cautious in what they do. A woman’s main goal is to attract a husband because if they

1a. Source A is an excerpt of a book written by Betty Friedan in 1963 called “The Feminine Mystique.” The excerpt is titled “The Problem That Has No Name,” details how women were expected to be a housewife and how they were unhappy with only having that role. Friedan wrote the book after taking surveys of college students and friends during their 15 year reunion and seeing how unhappy the women were with where their lives had went. She began researching why they were unhappy and saw that they wanted more in life than to be a wife, mother, and housewife. The excerpt talks about how women during the first feminist movement started attending college and having more roles than the traditional roles that were expected. It then began to slack

Women were expected to marry at very early ages, usually between 17 and 20 and they were still to slave at home for their husbands and children. Women previously had fought for higher education, but suddenly they were going to college to meet a husband, or they were not going to college at all, as they feared higher education would make marriage more difficult (Friedan, 1963). Women were gladly conforming to these expectations as they all aimed to have four or five kids, live in a suburban neighborhood where they could kiss their husband goodbye as they left for work and they could cook and clean while their children were at school. Many women even turned down job opportunities and claimed it was because all they ever wanted was to be a housewife (Friedan, 1963). However, women slowly began to realize their conformity was not what they wanted for themselves at all. In the 1960’s, many housewives reported that they had felt there was no point in their day to day routines, they had felt depressed in their own homes without a clue why, and getting so angry with their children it scared them. These women were afraid to admit that they wanted more for themselves besides their husband and children (Friedan, 1963). However, women were able to fight this expectation through the sexual liberation movement. The women were empowered by this movement because it gave them more freedom to do what they wanted to

Haney-Peritz attributes this to it being, “unreadable in its own time because neither men nor women readers had access to a tradition of shared context which would have made the “female meaning” of the text clear” (122). However, in 1973, “the story’s feminist thrust” (113) was illuminated and these key ideas that embody a feminist story are examined by Haney-Peritz.

Later on the mother says she’d been scared to death, but the narrator couldn’t believe that because her mother had been so positive and assured, “as if she knew a foolproof magic formula: gesture and word. She was wearing her leather jacket” (78). This passage clearly sets an appreciation that the narrator has for her mother, and likely all women that are strong and defiant in the face of demeaning stereotypes. In the context of the book, the narrator plainly states her distaste for the typical sex role of the female. This appreciation for strong women is made visible throughout the book.

In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the way women have been represented and characterized gives us an idea of how the female gender are treated differently from the male gender as well as children in Latin America during the 1950s. The husbands were given all the authority, also known as machismo, whereas women weren’t allowed to take charge of anything, and were portrayed as weak and impotent.

Their position in society was no longer just in the home as a wife, they now had the choice to work outside the home if they wanted to and through the introduction of contraception they could decide when and if they wanted children. They now could make decisions and have an impact on society. Macionis & Plummer (2002:31) highlight the fact that it is evident that sociology was centred on men and the voices of women were devoid. They argue that it was because of feminism and feminist theories that there was a significant change within society for women.