Discontentment Between Women And Women In The 1950's

Many women of the mid to late 1950’s were silently unhappy with their lives as homemakers. Although careers for women outside the home were nonexistent at this time, women felt disregarded by the accepted division of labor and commitment. They did not choose this, nor did they have influence over it. In today’s society, nearly fifty years later, there is an unusual, but interrelated problem taking place. It’s not so much the traditional confines and ideas of what it means to be a woman, a housewife, and mother that are affecting women today, but the stress of balancing a career and a family at the same time. Thus, in today’s society, women are struggling to manage a career with being a mother and housewife, while, at the same time, being burdened with too many responsibilities. Furthermore, the limitations women had, and currently have, both similar, yet different, signify discontentment between women of today and women in the 1950’s.
Betty Friedan’s, essay The Problem That Has No Name, addresses that during the middle of the twentieth century, “books and articles by experts …show more content…
Today, women have more opportunities and are more eager to work; therefore, equality between genders is starting to balance for both men and women entering the workforce. Women are more willing to go to work for financial reasons, self-fulfillment, and because of the vast amount of childcare facilities available. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, “young women in the U.S. are now more likely than their male counterparts to earn a college degree and/or master’s degree, and women comprise half of the workforce employed in jobs requiring [extensive] education, such as management and professional jobs (Bleske, 276).” I believe this statement is true because many women, today, are so career-focused, that getting married and having a family at a young age is happening less than it was fifty or so years