Nautica Western’s Reviews > The Feminine Mystique > Status Update

“Is it so hard to understand that emancipation, the right to full humanity, was important enough to generations of women, still alive or only recently dead, that some fought with their fists, and went to jail, and even died for it?”

“They had to prove women were human. They had to shatter, violently if necessary, the decorative Dresden figurine […]. They had to prove that woman was not a passive, empty mirror, not a frilly, useless decoration, not a mindless animal, not a thing to be disposed of by others […] before they could even begin to fight for the rights [..] to become the human equals of men.”

Keeping women in their caterpillar state, not allowing them to become moths/butterflies… I’m gonna jump

“It is my thesis that as Victorian culture did not permit women to accept or gratify their basic sexual needs, our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role.”

“What if those who choose the path of ‘feminine adjustment’—evading this terror by marrying at eighteen, losing themselves in having babies and the details of housekeeping—are simply refusing to grow up, to face the question of their own identity?”

These excerpts from college and high school aged girls are genuinely heartbreaking to read

This is reminding me of the “backslide” trend I think I first saw in a book about Black history. Like the Redemption era after the Reconstruction, there is always a call and response between progress and regression. Women achieved suffrage, career and educational opportunities, and a chance at individuality—immediately, society responded with the “Occupation: housewife” movement

“Love and children and home are good, but they are not the whole world [..]. Why should women accept this picture of a half-life, instead of share in the whole of human destiny?”

“Women are human beings, not stuffed dolls, not animals.”

The increasing text size in women’s magazines being interpreted as an example of infantilizing women: it IS that serious, actually.