Letters to the Editor
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Feminism after Friedan
I am a feminist, born in 1958, also, with a very depressed mother who even after divorcing my father clung to her learned helplessness and feelings of victimization, though she supported herself and my two young sisters. I didn't want to be the like her, but I didn't know what else to be. What you have omitted from your article is that not all men or women have fulfilling creative careers which we have chosen carefully. Some of us have jobs that are as unfulfilling as vacuuming and dusting but that pay the bills. Often I'd rather be vacuuming or doing laundry if I had the choice, quite frankly, so some of these arguments just don't hold up. Some of your advice to young women was spot-on, but again you omitted some very important things for young women to consider. The main thing is that marriage is highly overrated, more work and sacrifice for the woman almost always, and not so much fun at all. While men are very openly wary of marrying (as they should be), it seems the opposite for women. As for seeking shelter in marriage, I am a divorced mother who works full-time, cares for a handicapped son and teenage daughter. The understanding and support I receive from doctors, teachers, and relatives regarding just how difficult all of this is, is just about nil. I don't miss being married or my ex, just that when people felt I hadn't been ditched by my husband they seemed to like me better. There really is not much you can do to change some people's attitudes, just pull together with those of like mind and help each other, I think, not judge each other. I don't think that ever helps.
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Thank you!
I have read The Feminine Mystique, but I was born in '69, so sometimes it was hard to imagine that things could ever really have been that bad. Thank you fo a very thoughtful examination of the different strands in Ms. Friedan's legacy, and in our culture.
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Time to enter the 21st century
This article is meandering, wordy, self-referential, and lacking in cohesive tension. Paragraphs begin with I, To, But, That, Since, etc. indicating a weak structure more appropriate to an email. An Editor in Chief ought to do better.
Moreover, one is left wondering why feminists cannot grow up and make a _decision_. The word precisely means "to cut off". You decide a path and cut off another. A man does as much in choosing to work and marry, or launch a business and forego a family. A woman may now choose a career, a family, a work-at-home hubby, or a family and home-based employment, among others. Options abound.
So enough with the hand-wringing, I say. The Bushies just gave us a budget that demolishes healthcare for the poor, enshrines an endless war a la 1984, and puts the pentagon outside any boundaries. Democrats are on the verge of a comeback to reclaim our government. Internet giant Google may have taken its first tumble. Politics and technology are the meat and potatos of the good Salon. Yet here we are stuck in a 70s-era gender war. What's going on Joan?
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Nostalgia Mystique
If Linda Hirshman’s admonitions seem off-base or beside-the-point, it’s because they are.
* In 1958 there were 175 million people living in the United States.
* Today there are 300 million people living in the United States.
If the 1950s were characterized as a time of social uniformity, the present can be characterized only as a time of extreme and increasing social heterogeneity.
Hirshman seems to long for a stable era when sweeping statements about “society” or “women” had a chance of actually meaning something.
The extent to which Hirshman is out-of-touch with the present is made obvious by her admonition that feminists “judge” stay-at-home moms. This seems strangely similar to the stance adopted by the Religious Right: if only “society” were more judgmental about teen pregnancy and abortion, then people would be forced to make the “correct” decisions.
The Religious Right of course regards the United States as an essentially knowable quantity, a “community” in which the “judgments” of others count for a great deal.
But I don’t think anyone knows much about a vastly diverse population of 300 million. No one –ism, or religion, or worldview, can address, much less influence, the experience of so many different kinds of people from so many different parts of the world.
Hirshman and her ilk should quit yearning for an era when it was possible to pronounce upon the behavior of “American women.” We actually live in a tremendously exciting time. More than eleven-percent of the U.S. population was born outside the country.
We would all be better served if public intellectuals would set aside the proscriptive and focus their talents on the descriptive.
Before telling people how to run their lives, you should make a serious attempt at understanding who they are.
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The true sadness of Friedan's death
Betty Friedan's passing is sad and even more sad is how little attention or comment it has attracted in the world at large outside of the usual Internet susupects. I spent this past weekend attending two child-related parties and an adults only bruch in a very progressive neighborhood where I can promise all reading this that the vast majority of men and women present would self-identify as feminists. Yet I was the only one to even mention Friedan's death. And no one wanted to discuss it. I guarantee you a James Frey mention would have engendered more interest.
I was angered but realized there was a reason for the lack of interest. Feminism has become irrelevent to the lives of most women and will be until it once again challenges the prevailing economic structures that govern most of our lives. The problem with allowing women to "choose" to take time out of the workplace isn't "the choice" itself, it is that it is highly unlikely that the economic structure of this country will allow them to "choose" back in. Taking time off -- or even working part-time -- for as little as a year sets many women back economically back for life. And as most women with children identify as mothers first and workers second, the feminist movement will will remain an irritating, hectoring side note to their lives until it begins to address this issue by devoting the majority of its resources to those who want to or need to put their families first. Women attacking women over their decisions just makes the powers that be happy since it allows them to maintain current conditions which are disadventageous to just about everyone but the shareholders.
Linda Hirshman et. al. might have provoked much thought in the feminist world that exists on-line but I can guarantee you she engendered much yawns -- if her arguments were thought about about at all -- in the world at large where most women are not making decisions based on feminist corectness but on economic and personal situations. I'm sorry Betty Friedan was no longer well enough to take Hirshman on by the time the article appeared. Maybe then Hirshman's article would have accomplished something other than the usual female cat-fights that result in nothing.