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

“I’m not so intensely interested in home economics as I was in bacteriology, but I realize it was better for me to change, and get out with people. I realized I shouldn’t be that serious. I’ll go home and work in a department store until I get married.”

These college girl interviews are genuinely making me sick to my stomach. How many cancer researchers switched to home ec??

“…until women kept on having babies because they knew no other way to create.”

“… 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.“

“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.”