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inquiry_from_an_anti_library's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
5.0
Is This An Overview?
The first stage was about women getting power parity with men. Showing that women can do more than just be housewives. But as women entered the workforce, there was a clash between work and family. Between work and any other pursuits. The second stage is about the changing roles of work and family, to find better alternative ways on how to be. The second stage is about reconciling demands of independence with emotional needs.
Women and men need each other for emotional, financial, and other needs. When someone is dependent on someone else, psychological insecurities develop that make any relationship difficult. Those who lack independence, tend to lack confidence in themselves, and take out their frustrations on the one they are dependent on. When a woman performed many household tasks and participated in supporting the man’s ambition, women did not receive the monetary benefits or recognition for their efforts, while the men could not function without the support. When the man was the sole monetary earner, the man was extremely anxious about job prospects, forcing them to stay at terrible jobs. When men and women share the monetary, family, and emotional burdens, they have higher chances of economic survival and live more fulfilling lives.
Caveats?
This is a sensitive topic that shares the complexity of the situation. The second stage came about through new demands on social and economic life that needed a response. As society changes, so must the responses. Each society, each era, need to find their own responses to their different situations.
There are passages with various diverse perspectives that provide evidence for claims. They can provide addition explanations, but can lack a systemic analysis.
stefhyena's review against another edition
1.0
Initially I thought that maybe I was being too hard on this book, that maybe it was just dated (and that is bound to happen). But it's more than that.
It is that it is so caught up in a hazy romance with essentialist (and heterosexist) ideas of what it means to be a woman and a wife and a mother that it ignores many realities of many women. Apparently we all need to confront that we are not complete people without being wives and mothers and that on some level we yearn to do more than half of the child rearing.
It is that women lawyers as an example of the career woman (described in terms that since have eveolved into what we now call neoliberalism) are uncritically presented as "the best and the brightest", women soldiers (in what was in some ways the strongest chapter in the book) are also romanticised.
It is that any perspective of women of colour is either missing, dismissed, side-lined or swiped at. Ditto queer women. Ditto any woman who capitalism isn't really working for.
It is a casual assumption that the reader is American (white middle-class American) without any sort of openness about the narrowness of this view which might redeem it. Absolute and absolutist statements are made as if this is true for everyone buying into unfortunate stereotypes about Americans not realising the rest of the world is real.
It is a romanticising of men as somehow in the centre of all our hopes and dreams and personhood. I would agree with getting rid of binaries as Friedan pays constant and repetitive lip-service to, except in the case of this book it seems to mean- not using powerful critiques and real shifts to destabilise binaries for real but naively trusting that difference no longer matters and embracing a sort of dangerous gut-feeling individualism, where people living in self-contradictory ways (see chapter 6 for example) and talking themselves out of their rights are somehow more balanced, and managing to somehow magically reconcile opposites (familial ideology, individual ideology) just by living the opposite of what they say (I'd call that delusion myself, not balance).
I agree that women should not have to give up kinship and collective possibility and turn themselves into horrid individuals which I think Friedan is trying to say, only she comes across as saying "we can be horrid individuals and still serve men and children" which I think gets both sides of the dilemma wrong. There should be women-friendly families. There should be the potential to nurture and be nurtured, to relate and be secure. SURE. But the assumption that this has to happen within a narrowly heterosexual family unit and never in any other way is a dangerous one. Also the assumption that we unconditionally need men and owe men our love and half our personhood (regardless of their support or not of the women's movement) ...well the kindest word I can think of for that is once again "naive".
The dismissive stuff in the UN section about any woman not from the US (apart from a couple of other brave white first-worlders) about how these women from "other" places blocked any "Real" feminist discussion by having political and economic axes to grind also was possibly the lowest point of the whole book.
I founds some of the stuff on masculinities in the army very, very interesting (especially where the older soldiers were more nuanced and open to change than the younger, less experienced ones. I did wonder how she remembered these often detailed conversations, possibly through having a good memory coupled with very detailed journalisng habits I suppose. Either that or she made her data up.
I used to think rules around academic writing were silly but I missed the rigour and discipline of real research in this book. I would have appreciated some links to other theorists (critically if she liked) and I also would have liked more logic in how she set out the information (less round and round in at times self-contradicting and tediously repetitive circles). Some methodology about how she got the data and what made this meaningful (I mean really it was just memoirs with her making generalisations about "Everybody" based on her impressions from people she had met...or that was how it came across. Even journalists I think do more research than this!
I think the book needed to be a lot shorter, tighter, more clearly and logically argued and then I could better agree or disagree with it (instead of being left with a mess of some stuff that I think may be good points but which is buried in privilege, assumptions and waffle). And at the end of the day (and somewhat tragically) there is a recreation or re-buying back into some sort of feminine mystique in the book.
Guess I don't always love the "feminist" books!
It is that it is so caught up in a hazy romance with essentialist (and heterosexist) ideas of what it means to be a woman and a wife and a mother that it ignores many realities of many women. Apparently we all need to confront that we are not complete people without being wives and mothers and that on some level we yearn to do more than half of the child rearing.
It is that women lawyers as an example of the career woman (described in terms that since have eveolved into what we now call neoliberalism) are uncritically presented as "the best and the brightest", women soldiers (in what was in some ways the strongest chapter in the book) are also romanticised.
It is that any perspective of women of colour is either missing, dismissed, side-lined or swiped at. Ditto queer women. Ditto any woman who capitalism isn't really working for.
It is a casual assumption that the reader is American (white middle-class American) without any sort of openness about the narrowness of this view which might redeem it. Absolute and absolutist statements are made as if this is true for everyone buying into unfortunate stereotypes about Americans not realising the rest of the world is real.
It is a romanticising of men as somehow in the centre of all our hopes and dreams and personhood. I would agree with getting rid of binaries as Friedan pays constant and repetitive lip-service to, except in the case of this book it seems to mean- not using powerful critiques and real shifts to destabilise binaries for real but naively trusting that difference no longer matters and embracing a sort of dangerous gut-feeling individualism, where people living in self-contradictory ways (see chapter 6 for example) and talking themselves out of their rights are somehow more balanced, and managing to somehow magically reconcile opposites (familial ideology, individual ideology) just by living the opposite of what they say (I'd call that delusion myself, not balance).
I agree that women should not have to give up kinship and collective possibility and turn themselves into horrid individuals which I think Friedan is trying to say, only she comes across as saying "we can be horrid individuals and still serve men and children" which I think gets both sides of the dilemma wrong. There should be women-friendly families. There should be the potential to nurture and be nurtured, to relate and be secure. SURE. But the assumption that this has to happen within a narrowly heterosexual family unit and never in any other way is a dangerous one. Also the assumption that we unconditionally need men and owe men our love and half our personhood (regardless of their support or not of the women's movement) ...well the kindest word I can think of for that is once again "naive".
The dismissive stuff in the UN section about any woman not from the US (apart from a couple of other brave white first-worlders) about how these women from "other" places blocked any "Real" feminist discussion by having political and economic axes to grind also was possibly the lowest point of the whole book.
I founds some of the stuff on masculinities in the army very, very interesting (especially where the older soldiers were more nuanced and open to change than the younger, less experienced ones. I did wonder how she remembered these often detailed conversations, possibly through having a good memory coupled with very detailed journalisng habits I suppose. Either that or she made her data up.
I used to think rules around academic writing were silly but I missed the rigour and discipline of real research in this book. I would have appreciated some links to other theorists (critically if she liked) and I also would have liked more logic in how she set out the information (less round and round in at times self-contradicting and tediously repetitive circles). Some methodology about how she got the data and what made this meaningful (I mean really it was just memoirs with her making generalisations about "Everybody" based on her impressions from people she had met...or that was how it came across. Even journalists I think do more research than this!
I think the book needed to be a lot shorter, tighter, more clearly and logically argued and then I could better agree or disagree with it (instead of being left with a mess of some stuff that I think may be good points but which is buried in privilege, assumptions and waffle). And at the end of the day (and somewhat tragically) there is a recreation or re-buying back into some sort of feminine mystique in the book.
Guess I don't always love the "feminist" books!
sandyd's review
4.0
An early (and unfortunately) overlooked look at feminism & motherhood and the family. I wrote about my reaction to it here on my blog.
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