Steven Ye
When American women are living their daily lives, Betty Friedan’s legacy is in action. Her criticism on “the problem with no name” had spurred a generation of women to the idea that life was beyond the confines of domesticity. Betty Friedan’s novel The Feminist Mystique launched the modern feminist movement in America. Friedan’s impressions on equality made it impossible to separate her from the modern feminist movement she spurred.
Looking back that world seems unfamiliarly far away: an exotic time when the duties of women are dominantly domestic. The “happy mothers” of those days are now in their retirement. Most have found new lives beyond their homes in the work place during the 1970s. This has little similarity to the “sweet simpering and sort of stupid” life style which Friedan described as the ideal life style of her day.
We have come very far since then, now women have a sort of self-empowerment which comes with self-economic status; this seems like the world which Friedan had imagined. This was only part of what Friedan had envisioned as the “full human potential of women”. Friedan largely had predicted that the future of women laid not in breaking free of the confines of domesticity, eradicating sexism or equalising the opportunity of job and positions of power. It is in preventing a future where the increasing difficulty of life would once again make” scapegoats of women again”.
Friedan’s work made women realize that their lives were more than just in their homes; it spurred them to fight for an opportunity to be given the same rights as men. Now men and women need to prevent Friedan’s prophesied future where women are once again held as inferiors and shoved back into domesticity, back to a male dominated world.
When American women are living their daily lives, Betty Friedan’s legacy is in action. Her criticism on “the problem with no name” had spurred a generation of women to the idea that life was beyond the confines of domesticity. Betty Friedan’s novel The Feminist Mystique launched the modern feminist movement in America. Friedan’s impressions on equality made it impossible to separate her from the modern feminist movement she spurred.
Looking back that world seems unfamiliarly far away: an exotic time when the duties of women are dominantly domestic. The “happy mothers” of those days are now in their retirement. Most have found new lives beyond their homes in the work place during the 1970s. This has little similarity to the “sweet simpering and sort of stupid” life style which Friedan described as the ideal life style of her day.
We have come very far since then, now women have a sort of self-empowerment which comes with self-economic status; this seems like the world which Friedan had imagined. This was only part of what Friedan had envisioned as the “full human potential of women”. Friedan largely had predicted that the future of women laid not in breaking free of the confines of domesticity, eradicating sexism or equalising the opportunity of job and positions of power. It is in preventing a future where the increasing difficulty of life would once again make” scapegoats of women again”.
Friedan’s work made women realize that their lives were more than just in their homes; it spurred them to fight for an opportunity to be given the same rights as men. Now men and women need to prevent Friedan’s prophesied future where women are once again held as inferiors and shoved back into domesticity, back to a male dominated world.