Fifty Years After "The Feminine Mystique"
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2013-02-20/fifty-years-after-feminine-mystique
Fifty years ago, Betty Friedan published her groundbreaking book "The Feminine Mystique." Diane considers its relevance today and the ongoing debate over gender equality at work and at home.
Guests
Judith Warner
senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, author of "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety" and "We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication" and a columnist for Time.com.
Michelle Bernard
founder and president of the Bernard Center for Women, Politics and Public Policy.
Terry O'Neill
president of the National Organization for Women.
Stephanie Coontz
director of research and public education of the Council on Contemporary Families, professor of family history at The Evergreen State College and author of "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s"
Comments
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Can you comment on the eugenicist Margaret Sanger and her influence on Betty Friedman?
"Sanger’s genius was to advance Ross’s campaign for social control by hitching the racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation. In her “Code to Stop Overproduction of Children,” published in 1934, she decreed that “no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit…no permit shall be valid for more than one child.”47 But Sanger couched this fascistic agenda in the argument that “liberated” women wouldn’t mind such measures because they don’t really want large families in the first place. In a trope that would be echoed by later feminists such as Betty Friedan, she argued that motherhood itself was a socially imposed constraint on the liberty of women. It was a form of what Marxists called false consciousness to want a large family."
Ms. Rehm,
Can someone on your panel address the anti-feminist attitudes that all-too-many women now hold? Younger women and conservative women of my generation whomI have encountered have looked down upon the feminists who worked tirelessly to obtain the rights they now enjoy. I cannot understand how they can stand on the shoulders of such women while looking down upon them.
An example of progress in the women's rights movement:
Several years ago, my nephew was required to memorize part of the Declaration of Independence in school. He was marked down because he stated the following:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, ..."
Michelle Bernard - You stated that The Feminine Mystique does not mention black women specifically. Does the book mention Jewish women? Asian's? Hispanic's? Or Arab women? Why is it that time and time again we must focus on the plight of black women, when so many other groups have been left out of our history?
I'm currently attending Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College Negotiation Academy for Women, a program that looks at the big and subtle ways in which women are socialized not to negotiate and ask for what they need, and provides participants with practical coaching and training in the art of networking and negotiation. It includes both gender theory and practical applications of it in the working and corporate world.
One of the topics that has come up recently is “benevolent sexism” (after Fiske’s and Glick’s research), that other side of the sexism coin that puts women on pedestals and urges our culture to protect women, to romanticize and praise their beauty and humility as mothers, daughters, sisters. While pretty and feel-good on the surface, it’s an ideology that patronizes and tends to infantilize women: it discourages agency and outspokenness. Friedan’s research and writings on this “mystique” that holds such sway in our culture were the forerunner of Fiske’s crystallization of this cultural tendency. I wonder if you could talk more about how the values associated with benevolent sexism are still a problem both at home and in the workplace?
A robo-comment, or a robo-called comment is when a right wing extremist, or any ignorant or hateful person parrots the worst propaganda on a subject without any effort to inform or self-inform.
We hold that children
1-Should be conceived in love.
2-Born of the mother's conscious desire.
3-And only begotten under conditions which render possible
the heritage of health.
Therefore we hold that every woman must possess the power and freedom to prevent conception except when these conditions cannot be satisfied.
These are the founding tenets of Margaret Higgins Sanger's Birth Control League which evolved into Planned Parenthood.
If these principles are eugenic, it is a beneficial and human rights enabling eugenics and not the sterilization programs that originated under government agencies about the same time.
I believe I own my body and its reproductive capacity.
I believe the intent of the fascist robo element is to deny women this ownership, and to force pregnancy or denial of pregnancy on them for the interests and convenience of oppressive forces. But there are ignorant childish sexist men about hurting women. These fools don't know nothin' about birthin' no babies, or rearing children, and should keep their uninformed mouths closed until such time as they know more, know enough to show some empathy for women.
I was glad to hear at the top of the show the discussion about rape and how it was legislated. I think we have a ways to go as a nation. For example, rape against a homosexual man can be tried as a hate crime but rape against a woman has never had hate crime status. Not all rapes would fit this distinction, but there are plenty that do. So why isn't it happening?
The word "feminism" does seem to hit a nerve; however, if you are a female and want to have control over the laws regarding your choices or opportunities available to you in life, then you are a feminist.
The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda
By Margaret Sanger
"As an advocate of Birth Control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the "unfit" and the "fit", admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit though less fertile parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective."
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?san...
Published in 2012, The Good Girls Revolt, by Newsweek writer Lynn Povich, covers some of this ground. An excellent book contrasting the struggles of the "girls" of Newsweek to get recognition and better positions there with the current young women who work in publishing who were shocked when they also found a glass ceiling after years of success in school where they had been treated to equality with the men.
The world is finally awakening to the force that women present in the world for developing economic sustainability. The U.N. Millennium Project recognized "empowering women" as the best way to see that children are fed, educated and treated for disease. It's unfortunate that Ms. Friedan didn't include African American woman in her book, but now it remains for us to bring awareness to her cause for all women.
Ain't it a shame kathleen (about our Israeli police procedures)?
He had his Oscars Invitation in hand, and luckily Michael Moore was able to make some calls and get him admitted into our great Austerity.
On the ethnic question: Margaret Sanger had a birth control clinic way uptown in Harlem as early as the 20s. Most of her advisees were from immigrant families. Later she traveled globally to establish International Planned Parenthood. She went through many tactical changes in her 87 years of service.
It's nice that Betty Friedan also lived long (85) to remain available as a chronicler of women's rights struggles.
Welcome FranG. Your comment history indicates a well-informed and compassionate individual.
And whatever happened to the ERA?
Women are represented in the constitution only as voters.
I find NO women younger than myself, and few of my own age who understand or quite frankly care about this.
Young women today don't realize what it took to get equal opportunity and equal pay in the early 70s.
When women choose to wear suggestive clothing and show a lot of cleavage in the workplace, I don't think that they realize that they are damaging the credibility of all professional women.
Women should realized that they don't need to suggest that they are willing to be flirtatious to advance their position. Worse, they cause men to revert to seeing all of us as sex objects.
I'm a stay at home Mom of two young girls. With our first child I had to go back to work when our daughter was 8 weeks old. It BROKE my heart to leave her. I went back to work for financial reasons. When she was 10 months old, my husband was able to get a higher paying job and I was able to stay home.
This was not just a race/class issue when Freidan wrote her book - it still is a socioeconomic class issue. When I was able to stay home - I cannot tell you how many female relatives and coworkers told me how desperately they wanted to be home with their young children. One cousin said she would give her right arm to be able to stay home with her kids.
I'm a strong feminist - but this debate still strikes of a debate of the elites - those well off, well educated women who have a choice to stay home or not. Many, Many women do not have a choice still - the HAVE to work and they want to be home with their babies.
Can you comment on Consciousness Raising groups?
I was in my late 20s when I received my MBA in Accounting -- was told by a recruiter from a large accounting firm that I could be a full charge bookkeeper!! I am now an accounting professor and see that my female (and male) student have absolutely no clue about what it was like for their mothers and grandmothers. Thanks for your wonderful show.
Can you comment on the unusual percentage of women on Fortune 1000 boards that were graduates of women’s colleges? Are these schools somehow preparing woman in a better way to "make it" in what is still a man's business world?
In the short part of the conversation I was able to listen to, the main concern was that there is not a public instituition for child care. Later, a comment was made that the author had a promising career and then got pregnate. Thus, ending her career. In another piece I heard on NPR, there were interviews with minority women and many remarked that deciding not to have children at an early age was the key to success.
I do not understand why families feel that they can bring another human into this world and then feel frustrated because thier career is "burdened" with it. In the other countries that were noted as having public child care there is also not an inherent desire toward what we like to refer to as "Affluenza" or the pursuit of the thought that you "can have it all".
No one is born pregnate and getting pregnate is a choice. I do believe that child rearing is not just a female job, but numerous men also have to make the decision in their professional life of being an active father or working their way to the professional elite. What makes anyone entitled to both?
Not all young women today are ignorant about the injustices toward women. Before starting my professional career I worked in a fast food restaraunt and worked my way up to manager. A little while later a young man was also promoted. We were friends and even though we weren't supposed to, we taked about how much we made because we felt we weren't being paid enough. It was then that I discovered that i was making a whole dollar less than he was and I had been working at that restaraunt a year longer than he had been. When I asked my boss for a raise he would only relent and give it to me when I told him I was getting married and then he only gave me 15 cents more per hour. This was in 2010! I do feel, however, that I am being paid fairly at my current job.
Thank you Betty! I read The Feminine Mystique in the 1990's and was amazed at its continued relevancy. I can't tell you how often I was tempted to write her a letter while bringing up my children. I had my first babies in the early 90's. When my children entered the school system I was shocked and confused by my fellow mother's uber involvement in their children's lives. There were constant discussions of what everyone could do to make their children's lives better. As if feeding, loving, reading to them, and making sure they were clean and healthy weren't enough. It appeared that you were doing your job only if you were spending hours carting their children to every lesson the children might be interested in. Watching every baseball practice, not to mention games. Elaborate snacks for every event. At school, lotteries were routinely held to decide which mothers would be allowed on field trips, everyone was so desperate to be at every possible event. If I volunteered to help with a holiday party, I discovered that I would have to attend at least two meetings to discuss and plan the arrangements. My last holiday party volunteer experience required some six hours of work, not including my attendance at the actual party. These women were on fire. If I suggested that perhaps we we were taking our children's activities a bit too seriously, I was looked at as if I had suggested something close to child abuse. I was definitely odd woman out. I look back and wish I hadn't wasted a second feeling guilty. As an aside, today, my three daughters and I are extremely close and enjoy each other's company enormously. They are incredibly decent young women and have never fallen into peer pressure situations. Just saying.
Knotguy @ 10:35- Sanger was including her own poor mother who was perpetually pregnant, and frequently mourning early deaths and stillbirths. (at least 22 pregnancies) By taking this position you advocate forced impregnation and suggest that a nation populated by those brain damaged from malnutrition and other poverty conditions is preferable to one where the mothers' judgement and well-being is respected and enabled. Readers here can judge for themselves (unless they robo) whose opinion betrays feeblemindedness. (see James Trent "Inventing the Feeble Mind" on the history of this term)
I was a homemaker in my teens in 1965 when i found this book and OMG! I was admitted to the Univ of Penn and my husband a graduate of this univeersity was so angry with me it was the end of our marriage. I started a home daycare as it was so hard to find a job to support myself and baby. Now I teach nursing in Cleveland to young women such as I was and they have no idea what the femnist movement was - my specialty is psychiatry and we are able to talk a little bit about this movement in the context of all the changes in the 60's and am able to do a little educating about the way things were. They have no idea that in the mid 70s a woman could not buy a home in the Phila area (and in most areas) without a man signing the mortgage and I tell them the true story of my mortgage company Bell Savings and Loan asking outrageous questions about where the money was coming from, what I knew about taking care of the home (roof, heater etc) systems etc. I was able to use the equal rights amendment in Pa and the threat of a suit to counter the intimidation I faced to buy my first home. This and other examples seem to drive my points home. Thank god this grandma can tell the young ones so that they know they need to protect their rights.
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Diane, I would like your guest to address another aspect of the changes since the first printing of TFM:
Women like myself, who are choosing to not have children. I do not want them, and I am happy about that choice.
We need to do more than make men's fields of work and power available to women, we need to validate 'traditional' female spheres of power - childcare, home maintenance, etc - for both women and men. Misogyny won't go away until the stigma of being 'feminine' does. For example, a man taking care of a child, or preparing dinner, should not be seen as degrading towards the man, just as working in a job outside the home is not, now, seen as degrading towards (or outlandish of) a woman.
I work in an engineering firm and in my early 50's.
I remember when MS magazine arrived on the scene and the men in my area were so disturbed. A Feminist was not a positive term.
However my family gave me the courage to be " anyone I wanted to be."
I do not recall many women in electrical engineering in the early 80's. Now there are many female engineers and it amazes me they do not know Gloria Steinem.
My generation has failed to teach the younger women, we practice our engineering careers due to other women's hardships and struggles.
I was born in 1960 and it has been a struggle for me to realize, to adjust to the fact that I don't need to earn as much money as my wife. Intellectually, I understand, but it is not easy to do.
I married late and my wife knew that she was marrying a massage therapist (a good one). She has started her own successful recruiting business and I just started my own massage practice after 17 years in the industry.
I was able to be a stay-at-home father for two years and have a huge amount of freedom to be with the children, and do the things that I love---like cooking. I even started blogging, 20 + years after my last by-line as a freelance writer. Please check out my blogs on Mothering in the Middle, where I speak as the voice of a stay--at-home dad.
On topic, I have more regard for women in the workforce then most men. Women struggle to mix their work and personal life together and still get paid less then men. I admire not only their ongoing battle to gain more and more equality, but to fight without drawing blood. Men seem to think that the harder they "fight," the more sincere their cause. Happy 50 to The Feminine Mystique. Maybe more men can begin to catch on.
MP
When I worked in the government and in private law firms, my impression was that the jobs were increasingly for single persons only, since it was impossible to handle well my responsibilities as a dad and an employee simultaneously. Your guests make clear that this impression was accurate, but it appears that neither the private sector nor Congress nor the Executive Branch is seriously thinking of making the U.S. workplace family friendly.
It seems everytime this equality issue is brought up in media, the difference in wages for a similar job is never compared with the employee's exPERIENCE as well as education and the payrange for the job.
Also, the focus on European style child-leave is ill-fitted in a multicultural U.S. where fathers are continuing to be shoved out of the family structure by court abuses, PC-thought re-entrenching tender year doctrine, etc. The focus on maternity leave is part of an overt attempt to drive women to conceive with a knowing they can extort financial gain from fathers while pushing them outside the family home, all-the-while meeting their 'parental obligation' of mothering by paying an army of ad hoc sitters/family members (who just happen to not be the father).
We will see the product of generation who ignored long-term affects of ANYthing for the gains of "having it all", "getting mine", each day selfishly looking away from those paths that are sustainable for 30 - 50 years.etc.
I found it so telling that the panelists labored to "hurry-up-&-cuddle" when told that while women had opps minority women have rarely had until very recently.
One person was never supposed to "have it all". What is so sad is that after striving for those C-suite jobs & independence, you'll find long hours, divorce, children complaining they never see you & a corporate structure that aims for next-fiscal quarter goals. And the reward? "Sorry Melissa, your job's being outsourced next week."
I so remember this. My husband said that "feminism was the end of our marriage." That is hardly the whole story!
I share these stories with my granddaughters. My son and daughter-in-law have home-based businesses (even with their stellar degrees) so they can both be involved in parenting.