Women's Rights - A Chronicle of Reform

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

In this chapter of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan denounces a fundamental notion of the mystique: The role for women in the home is equal to the role of men in society. To further explain this notion, she makes use of several different rhetorical devices such as antithesis, when she establishes a connection between the dreadful physical and mental health of full time housewives plus men working on assembly lines, and she does so in order to accentuate the hidden problems of “alcoholism, obesity, chronic fatigue, and lack of interest in sex” due to preconceived ideas about gender roles. Moreover, she makes use of logos, when she provides her readers with statistics about how “Women constituted nearly half of the professional workforce;

The Feminine Mystique is a first person narrative about the struggles of feminism. It highlights the problems of women in the 1950s to the 1960s and challenges gender roles. The book includes several first person interviews and discusses the Second Wave of feminism. It introduces the idea of the sexulization of women being used in consumerism and the lack of sexual education in school during the time. The Feminine Mystique is a useful resource because it is considered the groundbreaking book about feminism and lists issues that women have had to deal with from the 1960s until now. The book could be used to argue the struggles that women have faced and continue to face.

Betty Friedan wrote a book in 1963 called The Feminine Mystique, this book changed many American women by bringing their unhappiness to the public's attention. This was highly recognized in the development of the second wave feminism in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In this book, it touched upon “The Problem That Has No Name”. Each suburban housewife struggled with it, she was afraid to ask “Is This All?” Very rapidly, numerous American socio-cultural powers were promoting this American dream: suburban house, 3-5 kids, wife at home.

In her essay “The Importance of Work,” from The Feminine Mystique published in 1963, Betty Friedan confronts American women’s search for identity. Throughout the novel, Betty Friedan broke new ground by seeking the idea of women discovering personal fulfillment away from their original roles. She ponders on the idea of the Feminine Mystique as the cause for the majority of women during that time period to feel confined by their occupations around the house, restricting them from discovering who they are as women. Friedan’s novel is well known for creating a different kind of feminism and rousing various women across the nation.

Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” was prompted by the social norms and attitudes toward women and traditional gender roles during the 1950’s. Friedan had observed a general sense of dissatisfaction in her own life as a homemaker but also in lives of those around her inspiring her to conduct an initial survey of 200 post war graduates from Smith College, A women’s only liberal arts university. Questioning social order and gender roles during this era was seen as a hallmark of psychological disturbances or mental illness. The stigma of expressing doubts regarding the ways of society are what led to Friedan’s Smith Survey being rejected by publishers who had previously published her other work. An editor of Redbook was quoted saying that Friedan herself was “off her rocker…” and that “only the most neurotic of housewives could identify.” This type of reception and the refusal of magazines and journals to publish her finding led to her decision to extend the project and publish her work as a book instead.

Betty Friedan wrote the Feminine Mystique in 1963. It acted as a catalyst that started discussion of the elephant in suburbia’s living rooms. Wives and mothers were fed up with simply being wives and mothers and wanted to do more with their lives. While this may seem like a simple issue with a simple fix such as getting a hobby or extracurricular activity, Friedan present’s this as a multidimensional issue rooted deep within the nation’s history.

Celebrating its 50th anniversary, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is widely credited as sparking the second-wave of feminism. The book became a manifesto for the larger body of the women’s movement during the 1960-70s and Friedan became ‘the mother of feminism’ (Lecture). The Feminine Mystique began with a noble goal, to define and analyze ‘the problem with no name’ and ‘the feminine mystique’ that plagues all American women. Friedan saw the need for women to “break through the feminine mystique to their own political and economic participation and empowerment in the mainstream of society” (Friedan 26). Yet Friedan’s arguments regarding work and fulfillment speak solely to the experience of educated middle-class white women. By utilizing

In her report, Veronica Loveday writes about Women’s Rights Movement, during World War two, and many restrictions women faced. Women’s rights movement in the U.S. begun in the 1960s as a reaction to the decades of unfair social and civil inequities faced by women. Over the next thirty years, feminists campaigned for equality, such as equal pay, equal work , and abortion rights. Women finally gained the right to vote with the passage of the 19th amendment to the constitution in 1920.

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan was published February 19, 1963, a book that some have said single-handedly started the feminist movement of the 1960’s through the 1980’s. The book’s core message was that women were letting society take away their identity and in the process, were becoming more and more unhappy with their lives, even as they lived out the “ideal” life. As Friedan said, “Our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role.” (pg. 133) The Feminine Mystique, while well-written and correct in many situations, not all people felt that is was always correct.

Betty Friedan could be argued as one of the most prominent figures of the 2nd wave feminist movement in the United States of America. While she was most prominently know for her activism, she was also a writer. She used her passion for writing and fight for equal rights and wrote the best-selling book, The Feminine Mystique. This book looks to fight against “the feminine mystique,” which convinces women that to be a fulfilled woman they must be sexual passive, be dominated by males, and act as a maternal and nurturing type of lover. The argument is women are unable to satisfy themselves or their husbands not because of any sexual problems, but due to the fact that they have an identity problem. The problem most people have with her writing is that she puts all the blame on society and none on the individuals who make the decisions.

Betty Friedan explores the troubles that women have faced and the reason behind these troubles in The Feminine Mystique. She defines the “feminine mystique” as a limitation set on women’s femininity across America in the 1950s and early 1960s. She explains how she believes it came to be so widely upheld due to magazines written by men and how it has had an effect on women in a negative way. According to Friedan, due to the feminine mystique developed from magazine stories, society forces women to abandon any career aspirations in order to devote their lives to being housewives and mothers, as well as be completely fulfilled with this life path.

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.

Women have always been fighting for their rights for voting, the right to have an abortion, equal pay as men, being able to joined the armed forces just to name a few. The most notable women’s rights movement was headed in Seneca Falls, New York. The movement came to be known as the Seneca Falls convention and it was lead by women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton during July 19th and 20th in 1848. Stanton created this convention in New York because of a visit from Lucretia Mott from Boston. Mott was a Quaker who was an excellent public speaker, abolitionist and social reformer. She was a proponent of women’s rights. The meeting lasted for only two days and was compiled of six sessions, which included lectures on law, humorous

It 's not a mystery that society 's ideals of beauty have a drastic and frightening effect on women. Popular culture frequently tells society, what is supposed to recognize and accept as beauty, and even though beauty is a concept that differs on all cultures and modifies over time, society continues to set great importance on what beautiful means and the significance of achieving it; consequently, most women aspire to achieve beauty, occasionally without measuring the consequences on their emotional or physical being. Unrealistic beauty standards are causing tremendous damage to society, a growing crisis where popular culture conveys the message that external beauty is the most significant characteristic women can have. The approval of prototypes where women are presented as a beautiful object or the winner of a beauty contest by evaluating mostly their physical attractiveness creates a faulty society, causing numerous negative effects; however, some of the most apparent consequences young and adult women encounter by beauty standards, can manifest as body dissatisfaction, eating disorders that put women’s life in danger, professional disadvantage, and economic difficulty.