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

“… the yearning is for a return to the Garden of Eden: a garden where women need only to forget the ‘divine discontent’ born of education to return to a world in which male achievement becomes merely a poor substitute for child-bearing.”

“The basic theme of the initiatory cult, however, is that women, by virtue of their ability to make children, hold the secret to life. Man’s role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary. By a great effort man has hit upon a method of compensating himself for his basic inferiority.” -Margaret Mead

All this and she then enforced 1950s gender roles btw. What kind of backwards thinking is going on

“(If reproduction were the chief and only fact of human life, would all men today suffer from ‘uterus envy’?)”

This whole application of primitive cultures to “advanced civilizations” (I.e., ours) has always thrown me bc, exactly as Friedan points out, they are completely incomparable! Not to mention the complete inability of those studying them to ignore their own biases going into it.

“At the present historical moment, the best adjusted girl is [..] one who is intelligent enough to do well in school but not so brilliant as to get all A’s… capable but not in areas relatively new to women; able to [..] earn a living, but not so good a living as to compete with men; capable of doing some job well [..] but not so identified with a profession as to need it for her happiness.”

“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.“

“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.”