Betty Friedan

Module 9- Document Paper Richard Nixon like most men in the 50’s and 60’s believed that women belonged in the home as a wife and mother. The wife was to cook, clean, take care of the kids and please the husband. As far-fetched as this sounds today this used to be considered a social norm for most American families. Society condemned women whose goal was not to get married, have children and be an accomplished homemaker. In the document, “What Freedom Means to Us” Richard Nixon discusses all the…

one major underlying problem, one that was coined in Betty Friedan’s, The Feminine Mystique, as ‘the problem that has no name’. The problem of no name, one that can only be understood by the women experiencing it, was the implicit unhappiness of women adhering to the fabricated image of the happy housewife depicted…

videos really captured the emotions of the time, especially when Muriel Fox was talking about the ERA. You can just sense her sadness. During our lectures, we learned about the National Organization for Women, aka NOW. We know it was created by Betty Friedan, that is was part of the “second wave of feminism”. It was considered a radical group, as the made women’s…

The 1950s-1960s will be remembered as one of the most significant time periods in American history due to calls of action by leaders, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Betty Friedan, the calls for action by these very influential leaders sought for unification of America as a whole by giving equal rights to minorities such as African-Americans and…

simply going with the flow of society (476). In an excerpt from the book “The Feminine Mystique”, Betty Friedan defines “the problem that has no name” as the unhappiness of women in the 1950’s. The “problem that has no name” is identified as the dissatisfaction that upper class married women have with their lives as well as the longing for something more grand than their household duties. Friedan blames the media of that time for this growing…

However, as women’s roles were being questioned by feminists who were not associated with pre-War women’s groups, like Betty Friedan, a spark was ignited. These women questioned every aspect of society, including the legal system and society’s attitudes toward them, but most importantly they demanded that something be done. The demands these women made became the fire that fuelled further activism in the 1960’s, which led directly to the 1970’s Women’s Movement. The fact is that World War…

abilities of men and women are not superior or inferior, but reciprocal. Later exponents of feminism like Simone De Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Kate Millet, Betty Friedan, Elaine Showalter, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigarayand many others carried on the fight for the equality of women. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1969) are books that advocate this view. The writings of Toril Moi and Julia…

In the 1960s, Betty Friedan advanced the Second Women’s Rights Movement with her book The Feminine Mystique (“Betty Friedan”). The principles of the Movement trickled into prospective years, specifically the eighties. During the 1980s, women’s roles became more like the modernized roles known today. Woman held high-paying jobs with less scrutiny than years past, divorce and remarriage became more acceptable, career opportunities higher or equal to men grew available (Roca). However, society was…

This is perfectly illustrated in the Feminine Mystique, written by Betty Friedan, in which Friedan discussed the unhappiness of many young women in the 1950’s and early 1960’s despite many of them being married and having children, living the life a woman is “supposed” to have. Furthermore, Friedan complained of young women who were being taught that “truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights” (Friedan, p. 271). Instead, they were being taught that it was a…

While Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique captured the all-so-common “housewife syndrome” that plagued women like Friedan all across America, it failed to address the full range of problems that every other woman faced, not only in America but worldwide. And while expecting Friedan to address all groups of women and their individual struggles is impractical, she makes the assumption that the problems detailed in her book apply to all women. In reality, the “problem that has no name” is a…