A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (2011) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

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People edit see section history

• Betty Friedan: Add a description of this character.
• Rose Wilder Lane: daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder - "reformed" feminist of the 1930s
• Eve Merriam: leftist journalist for the Nation in early 1950s
• Mirra Komarovsky: 1950s sociologist - decried society's failure to understand the importance of work and education in women's lives

Quotes edit see section history

• “One of her first tasks in the book was to remind women of what they had done in the past. Pg. 36”

  Stephanie Coontz

• “Her limitless world shrunk to the cozy walls of home. Pg. 36”

  Betty Friedan

• “The attempt to drive women back into the home, she argued, was spearheaded by Freudian psychiatrists, conservative social scientists, and educators who increasingly claimed that when women prepared themselves for anything other than marriage and motherhood they were turning their back on their true feminine nature. Pg. 37”

  Stephanie Coontz (quoting Betty Friedan)

• “Again and again, women told me there was "something different" about the postwar era, "something deadening." Pg. 39”

  Stephanie Coontz

• “Give up such self-defeating independence, she urged women, and abandon the attempt to use any of your talents as anything more than "adornments... for your femininity." Your true "career is to make a good marriage." Pg. 45”

  Rose Wilder Lane

• “If I had a daughter who wanted to be a novelist, Thompson wrote, I would tell her "that little talent of yours" is unlikely to produce anything truly worthwhile and urge her to abandon any dream of a career. She would do better to raise "a fine man" than to write " a second-rate novel." Pg. 46”

  Dorothy Thompson

• “Society was "veering toward a matriarchy," he claimed, in which mothers kept their sons "paddling about in a kind of psychological amniotic fluid rather than letting them swim away . . . from the emotional maternal womb." Pg. 49.”

  Edward Strecker

• “But those who failed to experience homemaking as the ultimate expression of their "individual freedom" were beset by feelings of self-doubt and guilt to a degree that is difficult for contemporary women to grasp -- not despite their education but precisely because of it. Pg. 113.”

  Stephanie Coontz

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• Friedan captured a paradox that many women struggle with today. The elimination of the most blatant denials of one’s rights can be very disorienting if you don’t have the ability to exercise one right without giving up another. The lack of support for women’s ability to exercise both rights at once forces them to choose half of what they really want, and to blame themselves if that half fails to satisfy their needs. Today many women find this out when they try to balance motherhood and work.

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• But two new feminine mystiques stand in the way of the equality and harmony Friedan envisioned. The first—the hottie mystique—reaches its height during the teen years and the early twenties, before most young women are thinking seriously about marriage and motherhood. The second—the supermom mystique—kicks in not at marriage, as did the happy housewife ideology, but at childbirth.

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• The feminine mystique defined the ideal wife as having no interests or obligations outside the home. The career mystique defines the ideal employee—male or female—as having no familial or caregiving obligations that compete with work.

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• three themes still resonate today. One is Friedan’s forceful analysis of consumerism. “The sexual sell,” as she termed it, is even more powerful than in the 1950s, although it is now most destructive for girls and teens rather than for housewives. Second is Friedan’s defense of meaningful, socially responsible work—paid or unpaid—as a central part of women’s identity as well as men’s. And third is her insistence that when men and women share access to real meaning in their public lives, they can build happier relationships at home as well.

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• Women, like men, have the need and desire to find larger meaning in their lives.

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• In 1963, women who worked full-time earned only 60 percent of what men earned; black women earned only 42 percent. On average, a woman with four years of college still earned less than a male high school graduate.

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• But in 1963, seventeen states still restricted women’s access to contraceptives. Massachusetts flatly prohibited their sale and made it a misdemeanor for anyone, even a married couple, to use birth control. Not until 1965 did the Supreme Court rule that it was an unconstitutional invasion of privacy to deny married women access to contraceptives. It took several more years for unmarried women to obtain equal access to birth control.

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• The Feminine Mystique contained no call for women to band together to improve their legal and political rights. Instead, it urged women, as individuals, to reject the debilitating myth that their sole purpose and happiness in life came from being a wife and mother, and to develop a life plan that would give meaning to the years after their children left home.

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• Once a woman becomes a mother, however, her options tend to narrow. New limits, mystiques, and mixed messages come into play. Motherhood may in fact have replaced gender as the primary factor constraining women’s choices.

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• So we must get beyond the notion that resolving work-family tensions is a women’s issue, a notion that threatens to perpetuate or even revive the old feminine mystique. As long as women continue to make all the compromises needed for families to coexist with the career mystique, we deny children the benefits of involved fathers, we deny men the rewards of shared parenting, we reinforce gender inequalities in pay and work opportunities that have been largely eliminated for childless women, and we risk once more forcing women to choose between love and work.

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Organizations edit see section history

• National Organization for Women (NOW): Founded by Betty Friedan after published The Feminine Mystique
• National American Woman Suffrage Association: Add a description of this organization.
• National Woman's Party: more militant than NAWSA

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Stephanie Coontz (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 305.4209045

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › History › Americas › United States › 20th Century
• Books › Nonfiction › Women's Studies › Feminist Theory
• Books › Nonfiction › Women's Studies › History
• Books › Gay & Lesbian › History
• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences

More Books Like This edit see section history