History of Gender and Sexuality - a Wave of Feminism

                                                                                             Aldrich 1

Leah Aldrich

History of Gender and Sexuality

4/12/12

                                        A Wave of Feminism

        The wave of feminism through the 1940’s to the 1960’s portrayed many women with strong views to influence others, yet their ways of thinking differed greatly. Some of these women were more passive while others considerably outspoken. Four women, Betty Friedan, Simone De Beauvoir, Valerie Solanas, and Gurley Brown, all strong feminists, had changed the way many women were looked upon.

        Betty Friedan, a feminist and the author of The Feminine Mystique, takes a deeper look into how women have conformed to what is expected out of them. Instead of being an independent person, the mentality of finding themselves and being in control of their own life is slowly fading and women are forgetting about their once sought dreams. Higher education was becoming more unpopular for these girls and they started getting married at younger ages where as before there was still a fight for equality within the society. “The proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropping from 47 percent in 1930 to 35 percent in 1958. A century earlier, women had fought for higher education, now girls went to college to get a husband. By the mid-fifties, 60 percent dropped out of college to marry, dormitories for ‘married students,” but the students were almost always the husbands.” (Friedan). This truly affects how woman will be viewed. Instead of once strong and determined there has been a gap where most are willing to settle for less than what they deserve. Friedan also discusses the slow shift in the narrow mindedness that women have acquired through time. There was this mentality that women must be housewives and portray a perfect well groomed and manicured lifestyle to others. “If I have only one life, let me live it as a blond,” “a larger-than-life-sized picture of a pretty, vacuous woman proclaimed from newspaper, magazine, and drugstore ad. And across America, three out of every ten women dyed their hair blonde. They ate a chalk called Metrecal, instead of food, to shrink to the size of the thin young models. Department-store buyers retorted that American women, since 1939, had become three and four sizes smaller.” (Friedan). Everything seemed to be so materialistic for these women that any real issues were just pushed to the side and usually put on the men to deal with. This included politics, economics, education, and much more. Women had the job to take care of the children, make sure the house was in order, all while putting on a pretty face for people to see. The feminist movement wasn’t moving very fast in the late 50’s as this mentality of living had destroyed what hope there was with change. Frieden studied these women and realized that although life seemed good, women deep down were struggling. They were struggling emotionally, feeling empty, and wondering if this was all life had to bring. “I do not accept the answer that there is no problem because American women have luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of; part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold. The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill. It persists in women whose husbands are struggling interns and law clerks, or prosperous doctors and lawyers; in wives of workers and executives who make 5,000 or 50,000. It is caused by lack of material advantages; it may not even be felt by a women preoccupied with desperate problems of hunger poverty or illness. And women who think it will be solved by more money, a bigger house, a second car, moving to a better suburb, often discover it gets worse.” (Friedan).

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