Status Updates From The Feminine Mystique

“Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women…”

“[Freudian doctrine] provided a convenient escape from the atom bomb, McCarthy, all the disconcerting problems that might spoil the taste of steaks, and cars and color television and backyard swimming pools. It gave us permission to suppress the troubling questions of the larger world and pursue our own personal pleasures.“

“I had a woman patient on the couch for nearly two years before I could face her real problem—that it was not enough for her to be just a housewife and mother. [..] I could not dismiss the powerful yearning of this housewife’s dream as penis envy. It was the expression of her own need for mature self-fulfillment.”

“It would be ridiculous to suggest that the way Freudian theories were used to brainwash two generations of educated American women was part of a psychoanalytic conspiracy. It was done by well-meaning popularizers and inadvertent distorters; [..] It was done by those who suffered and those who cured and those who turned suffering to profit [..].”

“You cannot explain away woman’s envy of man, or her contempt for herself, as mere refusal to accept her sexual deformity, unless you think that a woman, by nature, is a being inferior to man. Then, of course, her wish to be equal is neurotic.”

“In the 1940s, American social scientists and psychoanalysts had already begun to reinterpret Freudian concepts in the light of their growing cultural awareness. But, curiously, this did not prevent their literal application of Freud’s theory of femininity to American women.”

“Certainly the fact that his culture denied sex focused Freud’s interest on it. He then developed his theory by describing all the stages of growth as sexual, fitting all the phenomena he observed into sexual rubrics.”

“Even those discoveries that create new rubrics are relative to the vantage point of their creator.”

“Fred [..] was a most perceptive and accurate observer […]. But in describing and interpreting those problems, he was a prisoner of his own culture. As he was creating a new framework for our culture, he could not escape the framework of his own. Even his genius could not give him, then, the knowledge of cultural processes which men who are not geniuses grow up with today.“

“The feminine mystique derived its power from Freudian thought; for it was an idea born of Freud, which led women, and those who studied them, to misinterpret their mothers’ frustration, and their fathers’ [..] resentments and inadequacies, and their own emotions [..]. It is a Freudian idea, hardened into apparent fact, that has trapped so many American women today.”

“How did Chinese women, after having their feet bound for many generations, finally discover they could run? The first women whose feet were unbound must have felt such pain [..]. [What if they were convinced bound feet were more feminine, more lovable, more maternal?] Would many little Chinese girls, then, grow up wanting to have their feet securely bound, never tempted to walk or run?”

“As for the children, their attitude changed rapidly from one of affectionate toleration [..] to one of wide-eyed wonder. Released from the smother of mother love, for she was too busy to be more than casually concerned with them, they discovered that they liked her.”

"کدام نیرو در فرهنگ ما آن‌قدر قدرت دارد که زن را وا می‌دارد خانه‌دار بودن خود را چنان مهم بداند که فرصت‌های دیگر برایش تقریبا بی‌معنا شود؟"

"زنی که تنها تحصیلات ابتدایی دارد احتمال بیشتری دارد که هیچ‌گاه اوج جنسی را تجربه نکند در حالی که زنی که کالج را به پایان رسانده احتمال رسیدن به اوج جنسی برایش بیشتر است"
از استادامون تعریف میکردن زنی از قشر پایین در سن حدود ۵۰ سالگی بهش مراجعه کرده بود که برای اولین بار موقع رابطه بعد از چندین بار بارداری و زندگی مشترک به ارگاسم رسیده بود و فکر می‌کرد مشکل داره و تشنج کرده🙃