Women of the 20th Century

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“I feel empty somehow… incomplete… I feel as if I don’t exist.” A sense of numbness was not uncommon for many women who lived in the suburban world of the 1950’s. Confined by a strong emphasis on family and gender roles, women acted as wives and mothers, but did not live as individuals; always being their child’s mother, or their husband’s wife, led these women to lose their sense of self. As prisoners of their own lives, suburban housewives experienced an identity crisis that stripped them of the desire to become whoever they wanted to be, and forced them to become what they were expected to be. The traditional housewife was not the only woman who found herself in a prison during the middle of the twentieth century, as a decade earlier Japanese Americans were sent to prison camps for the sake of national security, and the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties resulted in arrests on a massive scale. Each prison, whether mental or physical, offered different challenges to the women inside. The purpose of this essay is to argue that although the women of each period faced different challenges and varied circumstances, by embracing their unique identities they broke free of their prison’s hold and were able to live as individuals with fulfilling lives. In the 1940s Japanese-Americans faced discrimination based on association, becoming war hostages in their own country after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. In Looking Like the Enemy, Mary Matsuda Gruenewald shares her experiences as a young Japanese-American taken with her family to different internment camps throughout the war. Gruenewald shares one of these experiences as she tell us about how her family is given a number to take the place ... ... middle of paper ... ...rd/St. Martin's, 2009. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Gruenewald, Mary Matsuda. Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese- American Internment Camps. Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 2005. Nicholas, Denise. "A Grand Romantic Notion." In Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner, 257- 265. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010. White, Annette J. "Finding Form for the Expression of My Discontent." In Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner, 100-115. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

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