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

“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?”

“The women who formally launched the women’s rights movement [..] met each other when they were refused seats at an anti-slavery convention in London. Shut off behind a curtain in the gallery, Elizabeth Stanton [..] and Lucretia Mott [..] decided that it was not only the slaves who needed to be liberated.”

“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.”