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Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique

2208 Words9 Pages

Friedan’s Chapter One and Two Karly Marin Sacramento State University Communication Studies Major Gender Ideology Introduction Women play a pivotal role in the growth and development of social, economic and political spheres. There are countable women in the history of the world who have made remarkable contributions to the various spheres. Their accounts are recorded in books, magazines and journals amongst others. The Feminine Mystique is one of the books that received a wide audience in the 1950s. Written by Betty Friedan, the book is highly associated with the revolutions that led to the women liberation movements. The chapter on the “Problem that has No Name,” explains the dilemma of women and the challenges they faced …show more content…

In addition, they formed the majority of the suburban housewives who were doing far much better compared to the working-class women of color. In her work, Friedan discriminates African-American women to a large extent even in the light that many of them formed the category of working-class women. She actually, entirely underscores their contributions to the economy at the time. The reason why she left them out of the book could be because they never participated in the roles that she deemed “fulfilling” or those that she advocated. While Friedan generalizes the idea that all women were struggling to achieve equality with men at the time, she fails to understand that there were others who were not under the broad “category of Feminine Mystique.” In fact, many African-American women and working class women did not share the perception that Friedan had. Majority of them did not view their families as a limiting factor towards political involvement and incompatibility with …show more content…

She believed that gay men were disrespectful and that they could not be respected in the society (Nardi & Schneider, 2013). At a particular instance, she described the spread of homosexuality in the United States as “murky smog”. Still in the research, the mistrust for gay people was drawn from unscientific ideas and methods of collecting data. For instance, the information that Alfred Kinsey, an author whose views concerning homosexuality are widely used in Friedan’s book, was collected from a prison facility. The fact that the facility had more men than women means that random sampling was not employed in collecting research (Nardi & Schneider,

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