Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique

Fearing that people would identify them as the working class. Yet, today women stress about their overall figure and bodyweight. Most women dread being overweight because of the way we view being thin vs. being thickset. Weight did not actually become a critical part of the female identity until the 1920's, when home scales and dieting became more common among American women. Until then drug stores and county fairs were the only places women could weigh themselves.

This document will reflect an analysis of sources that substantiates that women wanted to define their own identities within our society and on issues and concerns for family values, women’s freedom to choice, and social change. “The Feminine Mystique,” written by Betty Friedan aimed to inspire women of all races and age to unite together, to face the truth behind women’s unhappiness with their idolized roles as housewives. The theme was to create self-determination for women and deliverance of society’s status quo. Friedan expressed a range of emotions throughout her writing that demonstrated the injustice women were faced with during the 1960s. The writings of “The Feminine Mystique,” started the platform for the Women’s Liberation Movement by inspiring the truth of the hidden secrets that women were unable to confront.

When mothers exercise obsessively, diet constantly, or make derogatory comments about their own appearance it influences the daughter because mothers are the most influential role model for most girls. Fathers also need to be more cautious of how they respond to the media images of sexy, thin women. There have been campaigns started by companies about real beauty that try to teach girls that they should appreciate who they are. The campaigns try to reject the ideal body image and explain that some beauty in the media is not attainable. The company Dove has created a great campaign about Real Beauty.

Many women are trying to meet society’s impossible standard of female beauty. Often women will never talk about their age, and if somebody asked then they would ignore it. “Obsession with a youthful appearance has become commonplace in modern society and has resulted in an upswing in cosmetic procedures trying to reverse the aging process” (web). Most women like to look younger, and they are using Macwan 2 cosmetics and medicines to look younger. Some women are also having a plastic surgery to look young.

Reading through a couple of magazines, Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Shape, I found nothing but hidden agendas and... ... middle of paper ... ...ce in society. And the effects of the ideals behind these magazines are all the more powerful because of their subtlety." Women walk away from these magazines with an empty feeling and feelings of many inadequacies and they really don't know exactly why. The subtle undermining of women's intelligence and cause strips away their sense of worth ever so slowly and leaves them feeling depressed and in search of something that really can't exist together. Growing old while staying young takes many years of complete and internal happiness not many years of collagen injections and the added stress of having to stay unattainably perfect.

Media depicts women as ultra thin actresses and models, with this came an increase in women's concerns with their bodies. As teens grow up watching these images and depictions of women, they idolize them as something that they want to turn into. “The sexualization of girls and women in the media is a growing concern” said Emma Stydahar “It creates a limiting idea of beauty in our society.”(Nackman) We idolize these women that have been continually photo shopped and done up as if they were dolls. Teen girls are being continually subjected to magazine articles telling them that they should not be happy with themselves and to change their appearance. The media has changed the way women are now seen by both women and men alike.

The largely heterosexual audience remains oblivious to the sexualities of both women and when Garbo dies, her relationships with the women she loved are barely mentioned. In history and in fiction, the lesbian is an unknown, unnamed entity. The lesbian’s contribution is forgotten by all but her fellow lesbian. This is not the only example of this happening. In an interview about the impact of sports on lesbian culture and vice versa, Lucy Bledsoe mentions that even with the stereotype that women who play sports are all lesbians, the lesbian is too often forgotten.

One woman was even asked to leave her all-lesbian rap group after her child was born, as her fellow group members believed she was no loner "attuned to lesbian issues" (124). The question remains as to why straight mothers, as a representation of the larger heterosexual community, would be so quick to ally themselves with lesbians, even lesbian mothers. For a scholar of feminist theorist Diana Fuss, this coalition seems to threaten the inside (read: dominant) status of heterosexual society.

Cookbooks during this time period in the 1950’s had a significant role in society in which it impacted and influenced the domestic ideology of postwar America. Many cookbooks were created to advise women and mainly newly-weds in the culinary arts to reassure that their skills in the kitchen would ensure happy marriages. These cookbooks helped to limit women’s role to those of wives, mothers, and homemakers. They are a reflection of the 1950’s popular culture which emphasized conformity, a gender-based society, and gender norms, in which gender roles were very distinct and rigid. They are similar to television in that they can be seen as teachers because they have instructional texts “given detailed account of the correct gender specific way to undertake the activity of cooking” in which their students are mainly women pressuring them to identify themselves as solely housewives and mothers (“The Way to a Man’s Heart”, pg.

“Today the average model wears a size 2, and in contrast the average woman now wears a size 12.” (Childress). So do you think it is fair to let some teenage girls and sometimes adult women starve themselves to death just to get to their desired model body? Women and teenage girls often regard their bodies as a problem because of the society’s view to females that they have to be “pretty” in order to be worthy. “Studies of teenage girls in the United States have found that they are growing increasingly insecure and negative in their feelings about their appearance, an increase that correlates with low self-esteem.” (Sherrow). Women and teenage girls are risking their health and even their lives because they aren’t satisfied with the way their body looks.