Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique Essay -- Betty Friedan The Femin

Betty Friedans The Feminine MystiqueThe Feminine Mystique is the title of a book written by the late Betty Friedanwho also founded The topic Organization for Women (NOW) to help US women gainequal rights. She describes the feminine mystique as the heightened awarenessof the expectations of women and how each woman has to fit a certain role as alittle girl, an uneducated and unemployed teenager, and finally as a wife andmother who is happy to clean the house and cook things all day. later WorldWar II, a lot of womens organizations began to appear with the goal of bringingthe issues of equal rights into the limelight.The stereotype even came down to the color of a womans hair. Manywomen wished that they could be blonde because that was the ideal hair color.In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan writes that across America, three out ofevery ten women dyed their hair blonde (Kerber/DeHart 514). This serves asan exemplar of how there was such a push for women to fit a certain mold whi chwas portrayed as the role of women. Blacks were naturally excluded from thenotion of ideal women and they suffered superfluous discrimination which was evengreater than that which the white women suffered from.In addition to hair color, women often went to great lengths to achievea thin figure. The assist that women were striving for was the look of the thinmodel. Many women wore tight, uncomfortable clothing in order to create theillusion of being thinner and some even took pills that were supposed to makethem withdraw weight.The role of women was to find a husband to support the family that theywould raise. Many women dropped out of college or never went in the first placebecause they we... ... becomes apparentthat there sport been great advances through history. Lesbian women were forcedto repress their sexuality and get married in order to live a normal life.Even later homosexuality began its emergence in the 1970s, lesbianismwas often forgotten somewhere among the c ontroversy. In the words of feministauthor Kate Millett in her book, Sexual Politics which was written in 1970,Lesbianism would appear to be so little a threat at the moment that it ishardly ever mentioned Whatever its potentiality in sexual politics, pistillatehomosexuality is currently so dead an issue that while male homosexuality gainsa grudging tolerance, in women the event is observed in decline or in silence (pt.3, ch. 8). There seems to be no distinction made between homosexual men andhomosexual women in the media and this causes another stratum of separation.