Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Betty Friedan asked: "Is this all?"

“The core of the problem today is not sexual but a problem of identity—a stunting of growth that is perpetuated by the feminine mystique.”
—Betty Friedan

When Betty Friedan (1921-2006) attended her fifteenth college reunion at Smith College, she conducted a survey among her fellow alumni. What the women she spoke to had to say about the state of their lives eventually became a book that, upon its release in 1963, would spark a national debate about a woman’s role in American society. The Feminine Mystique begins, famously: “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night-she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: ‘Is this all?’”

To read the complete article, please click here.
(It’s excerpted from my latest book.)

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Rosemarie Jackowski (RMJ) needs our help.

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Bouncy’s Question of the Day:
So, which book will we read next?
1. The Rebel, by Albert Camus
2. A Whale for the Killing, by Farley Mowat
Final vote today

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Posted on 02/07 at 05:54 AM
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