One of my aims when starting this project was to properly analyse how far women's rights have progressed in order to figure out why everyone seems to think we have already achieved equality.
Because I don’t have a wealth of experience as a twenty-year-old, I think that perhaps the best way to explore these issues is to go back to when they were first argued for and dig into those classic feminist texts which adorn my bookshelf.
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is my favourite because it really gives the reader a sense of what the world was like in the 50’s and 60’s. In fact, the 2010 Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Lionel Shriver which sums it up perfectly:
“Friedan gave a voice to millions of women who had been suffering in silence, convinced that they alone were ungrateful or mentally disturbed. She provided women with a sense of solidarity, and reassurance that in finding the life of a housewife dreary, monotonous, and hauntingly empty that they had plenty of company”.
The opening chapter of the feminine mystique is where Friedan’s world really comes to life for me. In it, she addresses “the problem that has no name” and explores why women seem to have given up on “not just existing in and through others”. The women quoted in the chapter talk about feeling “empty” or as though they “don’t exist”. Many feel as though they are just going through the motions and doing “everything women are supposed to do”. Friedan concludes that:
“We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home’”
So if we really are living in an equal society now, this should all seem pretty foreign to me, right?
It doesn’t.
Even today, the “problem that has no name” is obvious amongst women. I know of many who have given up their dreams or careers to become a parent, only to find that it isn’t a fix for anything. Day after day they are bored, they long for that “something more” but don’t have the opportunities to get there.
I personally can’t imagine being completely fulfilled as housewife or mother. I need to exist for myself, not just for others. But don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be a mother, I do, but I never want to be just a mother.
Unfortunately, society doesn’t yet give us much choice- it has to be one or the other. A lack of affordable childcare, inflexible workplaces and the assumption that women should always be the primary caregiver are the precise reasons why the problem with no name still exists today.
All I can hope for are these problems to be solved before I have kids; otherwise I’ll probably end up experiencing Friedan’s world myself...
Hey there,
ReplyDeleteI'm Emily, one of the students from Esther's Honours class - I didn't get the chance to properly meet you in Tuesday's class, but I do love your blog.
I did my own media/lit project on discovering feminism, and I found it really rewarding - I held conversations with my sister, mother and grandmother about what feminism meant to them and I came away with some very positive outlooks.
It seems like you've already found that feminism (or feminisms, as Alex was saying in the seminar the other day) can be full of challenges and contradictions, and that's definitely something that got to me while I was trying to form my own stance on it. But I really like that you've approached the subject with an open mind, and I like even more that you took an opinion on the sex industry even though you didn't set out to in the first place.
I've come across a lot of the texts you've discovered, like The Equality Illusion and The Feminine Mystique - but if you're after any more resources, I have a stack and you can email me on emmie001@gmail.com.
Well done on such a well thought out project, it's great to hear of your travels down the feminism path!