Yeah, No. Not Happening. by Karen Karbo

Author:Karen Karbo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Wave
Published: 2020-05-18T23:00:00+00:00

Not every girl went straight from her father’s house to her husband’s. Young women from the upper classes, and often the daughters of progressive or intellectual fathers, went to college. Betty Goldstein attended Smith in 1938. She won a scholarship for her top grades and edited the school newspaper. After she graduated summa cum laude in 1942, Goldstein received a graduate fellowship to study at Berkeley. She was an avowed leftist, articulate, and mouthy. She left academia to write for labor union publications, and it was while working for the United Electrical Workers’ UE News that she met and married Carl Friedan, with whom she would have three children. While pregnant with their second, Betty Friedan was fired, and returned home to take care of the house and raise their kids. She continued to freelance from home.

Friedan surveyed her fellow Smithies for their fifteen-year reunion, and was dismayed, though probably not surprised, to find a universal sense of dissatisfaction among the women. Had they really gone to college to make beds, vacuum, scrub toilets, and burn pork chops? Was comparison shopping for laundry detergent really going to be the best use of their educations?

In 1963, she published The Feminine Mystique, an investigation into why housewives were tired and miserable. The Problem That Had No Name did have a name, of course. The boredom felt by upper- and upper-middle-class housewives was perhaps one of the original first-world problems. But that realization doesn’t solve the issue. Nor does feeling guilty because you don’t feel grateful for a roof over your head and a pan of lasagna in the fridge. This sense of being limited and labeled, of being battered by hundreds—no, thousands—of articles, essays, books, speeches, advertisements in magazines and newspapers, and television and radio commercials instructing you how to improve upon tasks you could already do with your eyes closed, was yet another iteration of Wollstonecraft’s gilt cage.

The Feminine Mystique doesn’t really hold up. The introduction is bracing, and some of Friedan’s riffs could and should be transformed into a rap by Missy Elliott: “A baked potato is not as big as the world, and vacuuming the living room floor—with or without makeup—is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman’s full capacity.” Then you get to chapter 12, where she compares being a suburban housewife to living in a comfortable concentration camp, and the whole thing goes off the rails.*

Even so, the book sold over a million copies; it was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1964. It’s hard to say how many read it to the end, but no matter. It was the right message for the right time. Women were getting restive. Advertising, mass media, and popular culture had overplayed their hand. A 1960s ad for Dormeyer appliances features a row of small appliances, including an “automatic toaster.” The copy reads: “WIVES. Look this ad over carefully. Circle the items you want for Christmas. Show it to your husband. If he does not go to the store immediately, cry a little.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.