Betty Friedan is dead

Rest in piece and God bless you Ms. Friedan...the whole human race owes you big-time.

anyway, rest in peace.

word

i've never heard her be so singularly positive about anyone before. i have been meaning to read 'the feminine mystique' now for awhile--will get around to it ASAP.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to bring this up, but I've always wondered why so many women gave up all the independence they seemed to have during WWII and went back (for a decade or so) to just being wives/mothers. I suppose you had to live then, but I have never been able to wrap my mind around it.

Maybe I shouldn't admit this, but I've never actually read any of her books. I have read The Second Sex though, maybe that counts instead.

On a more basic note, she had the guts to call bullshit on Freud, which was something near heresy at the time unless I misread the state of psychiatry in 1963.

she worked, she raised kids, she fed me and nutured me, and had no qaulms at helping my sister play rugby and me take pottery classes. her deconstruction of gender norms, her genrosity of spirit, and her hard edge at sheer fucking surrival comes entirely from reading Friedan and her sisters, who told her, yr strong as anyone else, just fucking work.

its harder and more complicated then that, but it always is. but is that enough for you momus?

Friedan, deeply opposed to "equating feminism with lesbianism," conceded later that she had been "very square" and uncomfortable about homosexuality.

"I wrote a whole book objecting to the definition of women only in sexual relation to men. I would not exchange that for a definition of women only in sexual relation to women," she said.

Nonetheless she was a seconder for a resolution on protecting lesbian rights at the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977.

I find that a wee bitty overstated. Surely generosity of spirit is something inherent?

I'm in Japan just now and I'm often struck by how good the gender relations are here. Men and women seem really tender and affectionate with each other. Nevertheless, the gender roles are what Westerners might think of as "old-fashioned". It seems to me that women are powerful here as women and not as men.

Now, there really aren't feminist writers here in Japan the way there are in the West. Nobody would cite radical oppositional writers here if you asked them what had shaped they way genders relate. But there is a long tradition of writers who are women, but not oppositional, going back to "The Pillowbook" and beyond.

I was in a video store today and saw a brief clip from a new film onscreen. It was Jody Foster in a plane. There was some kind of emergency, and she was responding by doing amazingly technical things, opening fuseboxes, making the oxygen masks fall down, demonstrating great technical prowess. And it struck me that while this was in some ways a "feminist" scene, showing women as bright and empowered, it was also a sort of misogyny. Because it showed a woman doing things that, in real life, women tend to be worse at than men. Technical things. It was a lie, a lie about women. It said "Women are as good at technical stuff as men. This is where their power lies. In out-manning men."

And I thought, as I left the store, that if that were true, feminist writers of Betty Friedan's generation should have devoted their lives to predicting what was going to confer power in the future, and preparing women for working with computers, for instance. So that when this new invention, this empowering new culture, came along, women would be at the forefront of it all. Of course it's a ridiculous idea, a parallel world. A world in which women are pitted against men at man stuff, and mostly fail. A world in which the whole definition of power (and hence "empowerment") is a male one, and in which any recourse to female values is called "Essentialism".

And the crazy thing is that women can win massively when power is defined differently, defined as something like "social power" rather than technical power or aggression. But for that we need Western culture to change. We need it to become less individualistic, because the idea of the strongly oppositional, fighting individual is at odds with the idea of social power. And we need it to recognize that failing to identify differences between the genders is not a way of avoiding essentialism, just a way of letting male definitions of power pass as universal ones.

Funny how women are naturally good at working with computers but naturally bad with fuseboxes and other 'amazingly technical things'.

Also: WTF?

Now, your move is to scoff at my essentialism in daring to suggest that femininity is all tied up with crinoline, and to scoff at the very idea that something as trivial as crinoline could make anyone "win massively". Right?

And my move then is to say "Why is defining power as (women/men) knowing what to do with crinoline essentialism, when defining power as (women/men) knowing what to do with fuseboxes isn't?" And I also want to say "Isn't there terrible misogyny built into this scoffing at crinolines?"

Because someone said

women can win massively when power is defined differently, defined as something like "social power" rather than technical power or aggression.

And we were all 'oh okay that sounds nice we'll give it a try'

As I understand it, your expectations of what a woman might reasonably cope with have narrower scope than your expectations of what a man might. Nothing to do with crinoline. This is what Freidan's legacy will be, and already has been: people aren't limited by their sex.

I haven't been to Gothic Lolita but I'd like to ask what the social context is of a party specifically designed to allow the women to 'win massively' but only at something so particularly feminine.

xpost

It's pretty sad when killing people is defined as "independence" and making people (what mothers do) is defined as dependence... and dependence is defined as "bad".

Not at all, I just think the things women do are unfairly derided, because in Western cultures aesthetic, social, nurturant and collectivist values are also unfairly derided.

And that phrase is why Friedan has had such a big impact: do you expect nobody to raise an eyebrow at that?

It isn't very equality-minded to say that women have very important things to contribute to society, and the important things are lovely and fluffy as well as important which makes them doubly special, and isn't it a shame that boys like playing with guns.

'equality-minded' is a horrible phrase, sorry.

This is a load of BS.

Women can be just as good at physics or math or electrical engineering as men, they are just as capable of understanding it and excelling at it. There is a shitload of barriers in the way to their sucess in those fields, and not one of them is their raw ability to understand and use the material.

a) When we appear to abolish gender "essentialism", in fact we merely impose the values of the dominant gender on both genders. The dominant gender gets to pose as "neutral".

b) The ideology of equality of opportunity is used as a way to divert attention from existing and lasting differences. Acting on how the world "should be" or "has the opportunity to be" is not acting fairly. To act fairly, we have to take actually existing differences into account, not imaginary lack of differences.

Building airplanes during the war isn't killing people?

To act (or judge) fairly, we'd need to talk about is, not can be.

There is no reason for math or computer science to be a masculine pursuit. I could care less if a programmer (male or female) is wearing lipstick and heels or hiking boots and jeans.

I think we disagree on what those differences are. I don't believe that there are more women than men who are unable to find their ways round fuseboxes because of their biological make-up. I think it's because in a patriarchal society men act with horror at the idea of women being competent in much more than baby-making and we still do live in a patriarchal society to quite an extent. It might seem like the pendulum's swung too far from your perspective, but I don't think it's gone half-way yet in many ways. Never took you for a Daily Mail reader.

x-post lyra I think he means "it looks funny to me when women do these things which are so obviously not their lot in life"

maybe you're just a dimbulb

They were building passenger jets during the war? I think not. Planes to carry medics or first aid supplies, maybe... because people were being killed. Again, I have to ask why this war work is "independence" ("good") and making children is "dependence" ("bad")?

Behind my perspective is this: feminine values are the values of the future. I aspire to them, you aspire to them. Given peace and prosperity, we will all become more feminine. But there needs to be something definable as "feminine" for that to happen.

And who says making children is 'bad'? The problem is that you seem to be suggesting women are capable of little else. Surely you'd agree that being allowed to do nothing but make children is somewhat limiting?

I don't aspire to be feminine. I aspire to do as little harm as possible while I'm on the planet. That the two are overlapping is a cultural construct. You're doing your best to define 'feminine' and your definition is pretty close to that of an unreconstructed sexist. OTOH, judging from things you've said before, I don't think that's you.

Sorry about the Daily Mail remark. Too sarky, although I typed it in a friendly way.

That statement is only not essentialism because it's counter-intuitive, I suppose?

Of course they can change, but why should they, when feminine values are already kinda neat, a pretty good template for human behaviour?

I think, if we all here had to define "feminine values", we'd find a surprising amount of agreement on what those were, once we got past our anxiety about "essentialism", our interest in equality of opportunity, and our fixation on exceptions and anomalies.

because these "kinda neat" ideas also involve denying many human beings their natural right to exist how they like. That we'd agree about what "feminine values" are only proves that a patriarchal culture has done its job. "Getting past our interest in equality of opportunity"...honestly, how can you? "Getting past" the basic rights of human beings to self-determination. I should hope not.

Congratulations on pissing all over the dead woman's obit thread with this hard-wired biological stuff, btw, the American Christian right said to tell you the cheque's in the mail

Sen. John C. Calhoun (1782-1850): "Show me a n*gg*r who can do a problem in Euclid or parse a Greek verb, and I'll admit he's a human being."

http://img436.imageshack.us/img436/5407/main0ca.jpg

Who was the woman who got shut out of any credit for discovering DNA by Watson & Crick?

Rosalind Franklin. But you see Phil D in real life women can't actually do that kind of stuff, brief film-clips featuring Jodie Foster aside.

it is i guess nice to see that his time in japan combined freidan's death has allowed him to see he wz talkin reactionary nonsense back then

Isn't this just the cod-feminist version of Magic Negro Syndrome? As that essay says, "it's racist as hell under the surface". And the Magic Woman stereotype is misogynist as hell under the surface.

nice try though. Good morning!

It's funny how the only attributes you can call "feminine" without getting people jumping on you are negative ones. This idea that women are as ruthless as men was not jumped on as "essentialism". It passed, approved, into the thread, while any suggestion that femininity was about motherhood was attacked, blocked and questioned. And yet is precisely the assertion that women are as brutal as men (rather than the assertion that women are mothers, for instance) that people should be challenging. Women commit only 10% of America's murders, for instance, despite having "an equal opportunity to murder", thanks to America's gun laws.

I know plenty of women exactly like me, too.

this "better" femininity you're describing is just you taking historical inequality as biological truth.

And anyway...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flightplan

"The lead character was originally meant to be a male, played by Sean Penn.

many xposts

v

"The idea that being associated with motherhood is women's biggest problem is women's biggest problem."

Yes - you are! You're positing "magic woman syndrome" for a movie (whose trailer you saw ten seconds' worth of) in which a woman plays an engineer. That's all you've got: the woman was an engineer; therefore, "magic woman syndrome"! How is this not saying "it's a bit ridiculous to portray woman as engineers"? Answer: it isn't.

You're backpedaling now, but your viewpoint was clearer in the above posting: you think it's a flight of fantasy to imagine a woman engineer; an exception, a freak occurance of nature that proves the real rule, the one men are more comfortable believing. There's a wealth of love bestowed on the "average woman" whose lot you seem to think of as the only proper lot for a woman; the one in which she should glory, since nature allotted it to her. That love is evident in every standard cultural trope about women's roles. These quotidian, conservative, often reactionary tropes are what you appear to wish to stand firmly behind.

Your "[things] men almost always do better at" is your blind spot: it's only been 100 years of western culture - less, really - that women could even begin to try the historically masculine pursuits without being ostracized, or demonized, or murdered. You seem to think that, since women haven't mastered every historically male pursuit in the fifty or so years since men were forced to acknowledge women's humanity, they aren't really cut out for it. Well: horseshit. Sexist, deeply misogynist horseshit. To argue that it's misogynist to not restrict women to male-determined avenues of endeavor is a nice Fox Newsworthy attempt, but history is against you. Women will do as they like.

Yes, but that's not what you said I was saying. You said I was saying "It's unrealistic to have a woman who knows about engineering". Do you see the difference?

Results 1 - 10 of about 46,800 for "the old bait and switch". (0.20 seconds)

Just like it is perfectly ok for men to be ... well, um, like you are Momus if I may play devils avocado for a moment ;)

*hides under a table*.

Now, of course life in American suburbs in the 1950s led to depression and a sense of emptiness. My personal solution would be "Get out of that boring suburb!" It would also make sense to question material values themselves, to embrace instead "post-material values" (as the hippies would later do). But Frieden's solution -- to bring women into the labor pool -- simply adds to the materialism-creates-inner-void problem. Employment is here being presented as the solution to an existential problem caused by excessive material affluence. The vicious circle is that employment just creates more unfulfilling affluence.

Here's Frieden's key definition of "the feminine mystique", the thing she's keen to deconstruct:

"The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity. It says that the great mistake of Western culture, through most of its history, has been the undervaluation of this femininity. It says this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that man-made science may never be able to understand it. But however special and different, it is in no way inferior to the nature of man; it may even in certain respects be superior. The mistake, says the mystique, the root of women's troubles in the past is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love."

Frieden wants to overturn this "mystique". She does not believe that it is a mistake on women's part to envy men, or try to be like men. Quite the contrary. That's what she wants to advocate. Chapter 5 is dedicated entirely to debunking Freud, and particularly his concept of penis envy. Frieden actually wants to advocate a form of penis envy; "forbidden to join man in the world, can women be people?" she asks, in all seriousness, as if only what men do is "real". In order to advocate penis envy, she needs to debunk Freud's portrayal of it as a neurosis. She writes:

"The old prejudices – women are animals, less than human, unable to think like men, born merely to breed and serve men – were not so easily dispelled by the crusading feminists, by science and education, and by the democratic spirit after all. They merely reappeared in the forties, in Freudian disguise."

There it is: Frieden thinks women being "able to think like men" is what feminism is about. She is deconstructing femininity but not masculinity.

Chapter 2 is entitled "The Happy Housewife Heroine" and looks at 1950s women's magazines and how they portray women. Comparing the "fluffily feminine" composite portrait which appears to Nazi Germany's ideology of "kinder, kuche, kirche", Frieden rather ruins the guilt-by-association theme by finding these values in American magazines as well as Nazi ideology. She describes the popular imagery:

"The proud and public image of the highschool girl going steady, the college girl in love, the suburban housewife with an up-and-coming husband and a station wagon full of children? This image -- created by the women's magazines, by advertisements, television, movies, novels, columns and books by experts on marriage and the family, child psychology, sexual adjustment and by the popularizers of sociology and psychoanalysis -- shapes women's lives today and mirrors their dreams... In the mind's ear, a geiger counter clicks when the image shows too sharp a discrepancy from reality. A geiger counter clicked in my own inner ear when I could not fit the quiet desperation of so many women into the picture of the modern American housewife that I myself was helping to create, writing for the women's magazines."

The geiger counter (ie bullshit detector) metaphor describes very well what I felt as I watched Jody Foster expertly jigging aeronautical systems in "Flightplan". We're now as surrounded by media images of the "Magic Woman" as we were, back in the 50s, by the images of the happy housewife Frieden (correctly) deplores. And Frieden helped create that second stereotype just as she helped create the first one. The question is, has the sense of inner void she blames "the feminine mystique" for creating disappeared with the mystique itself? Well, just go and read people's LiveJournals for an answer to that.

"The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity. It says that the great mistake of Western culture, through most of its history, has been the undervaluation of this femininity. It says this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that man-made science may never be able to understand it. But however special and different, it is in no way inferior to the nature of man; it may even in certain respects be superior. The mistake, says the mystique, the root of women's troubles in the past is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love."

What babies are being thrown out with that bath-water? Isn't it correct that Western culture has under-valued femininity, and isn't it true that Frieden continues this tradition?

that sort of entirely depends on wtf you mean by "femininity," doesn't it? friedan's point was that "femininity" itself was a bullshit construct that fenced in women and circumscribed their choices. so if you're going to make a pro-femininity argument, i think you have to define your terms.

I kinda feel like a jerk asking for this, but what actual evidence do you have for such a sweeping psychoanalysis of millions of people you never lived with? Or is it to supposed to be taken axiomatically that ordinary people's lives lack meaning?

Trayce, I'm sure you're a technical goddess and you and I together could program circles around most men. And Thomas Tallis, you're lovely and wonderful and you've written a beautiful tribute to Betty Friedan on this thread. Bless you.

I would suggest that, like many media people, Frieden over-estimates her own power. What she describes as "the feminine mystique" is anchored not just in the dreams of women, but also in many of the realities of female life. Having a womb, having strong instincts to create and protect life, and so on. The media than frames this stuff, cropping it to fit the ideology of the day. (We have a "Magic Woman" crop just as they had the "Happy Housewife" crop back in the 50s.)

As for the feminine mystique being responsible for the spiritual void women feel, and the solution being entering the workforce we have to ask:

- Did men in the 1950s not also feel a spiritual void? (Think: Existentialism was big back then.)
- Has that void disappeared as women entered the workforce? (Answer: depression rates are rising. Whereas Frieden says that depression is due to women being bored and unfulfilled in suburbs, depression is now attributed to stress in the workplace. Also, note that Mexican immigrants of both sexes go from a 3% clinical depression rate -- the Mexican norm -- to a 17% rate -- the US norm -- as they adjust to American society. The source of depression may be the American lifestyle itself, not life outside the workforce.)

I hope you realize that your issue here is with the basic thesis of Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique". She lays it out in Chapter 1; read it!

The person is political, and the political does arouse passions. For that, neither I nor Betty Friedan would apologize, I'm sure. For me, this stuff is very personal too. I have never entered the workforce because I know that it's precisely there that I would be overwhelmed with a sense of life's meaninglessness. Betty Friedan, despite advocating entering the workforce, never did so herself: she was, like me, a self-employed writer and commentator. After "The Feminine Mystique" sold millions of copies, she was in the position to set up her own organisation, the National Organization for Women, with herself as president. NOW did sterling work for abortion and equality legislation, and for that I very much salute Frieden. However, I don't agree with the thesis of the book she's most famous for.

You said “Now, of course life in American suburbs in the 1950s led to depression and a sense of emptiness. My personal solution would be "Get out of that boring suburb!" It would also make sense to question material values themselves, to embrace instead "post-material values" (as the hippies would later do). But Frieden's solution -- to bring women into the labor pool -- simply adds to the materialism-creates-inner-void problem. Employment is here being presented as the solution to an existential problem caused by excessive material affluence. The vicious circle is that employment just creates more unfulfilling affluence."

I have to think you’re being purposely obtuse for arguments’ sake or your life is so privileged you can’t conceive that anyone may have to work to fulfill material needs, including, but not exclusive to, food and shelter.

Critique away against the excesses and injustices of capitalist society, but until I can decide what I do with your paycheck, I will be happy to make my own money. Maybe that’s feeding into patriarchal society, but hey, I live in a world where money equals power, or, at least to some degree, autonomy.

(Do you really believe that women were better off when they were at the mercy of the (“good”) will of their husbands, fathers, brothers?)

Also, I wonder what qualities you consider to be “feminine” and that we should incorporate into society. “Oh, women care for children, so they must be more x, y, z.” Does x mean compassionate; y, patient; z, tender? If so, I don’t disagree that we should all work to be more compassionate, etc. However, I do take issue that these qualities should be considered “feminine,” instead of human. If you believe so, then maybe I should call you a misandrist instead of a misogynist.

Such qualities have been denigrated, in great part, because they have been associated with women, no doubt. The solution, however, isn’t to say that everyone should adopt “feminine” qualities, but to recognize that these qualities can be expressed by both women and men, despite what society has encouraged us to believe.

Thank you, Betty Friedan, for articulating the basic fact that women are people too.

That simply isn't true. No matter how much training or intelligence I have, I cannot give birth.

xposts. And yes, RIP

That's not how I read her amazing question "forbidden to join man in the world, can women be people?"

You seem to read that as "...so to be a person I must be more like a man".

I don't. I read it as her saying that men have defined "the world", and women have a place in it men decide and women cannot alter. An extreme example: women used to be able to be committed by their husbands on the husbands say-so, because they had no rights, they were chattels in the literal sense.

This surely goes beyond women wanting to weild a spanner and get grease on their overalls or have a heart attack at 50 as a CEO. Surely you can see that Momus?

i like this sentence when it ends there.

Absolutely. I'm not interested in the past of women ("chattals") or their present ("CEO") so much as their future. Everybody's future... as a woman. If we deconstruct femininity (and this thread, just like the ILM thread about leering rock journalists, shows how terrified we all are of calling anything an inherent property of the female gender, although strangely we lack the same terror when it comes to calling things inherent properties of the male gender, at which point we become happy essentialists) without deconstructing masculinity -- as more radical feminists than Friedan advocated -- then we're left with a stark vision of the future in which feminine values become almost taboo. In fact, the future Aldous Huxley predicted in "Brave New World", where the most obscene word imagineable is "mother".

last week, while helping a friend write a story for her college paper, i sat in on a class designed to teach people to work on airplanes. it's a tough course: 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 18 months. not for the fainthearted. there were about 20 people in the class, and about half of them were women.

conclusion: the notion that "women are no good at technical stuff" is not only "a sort of misogyny" but also "a lie, a lie about women."

number of feminists i've met who take valerie solanas seriously: 0

number of feminists i've met who take judith butler seriously: too many to count

Can you be more specific about this "work on airplanes"? I'm sure it was "tough" (and therefore good, by your implication), but was it training for work with systems, or with passengers? (And please note that I don't think air hostessing is less dignified work than aeronautical engineering or piloting. Computers can fly a plane, but they can't yet do hostessing.)

x-post: they were training to be mechanics.

Wrong ILXor! Everyone knows it's Ned who parrots Andrew Sullivan!

It's "fooling around" to discuss someone's ideas when they die? This thread would have died after three "awesomes" and 27 RIPs. Instead -- horrors! -- we're getting to grips with what Betty Friedan did, thought and wrote.

and yeah, please. you've in no way "discussed" Friedan's thesis; you've perverted it.

You're dignifying that column, I'm afraid. It's about her personal life and it's vile.

You've also seriously misread Marxism if you think it's about equality of opportunity. It's about equality of result.

And you've misread my take on Friedan if you think economics is my problem with it. I see her argument as existentialist and deconstructive. Existentialist because the appeal of "The Feminine Mystique" is that women feel "a void within". Deconstructive because Frieden then blames a certain construction of femininity (one she admits she has herself helped create by writing for women's magazines, then decided to dismantle as if it were entirely her own creation) for this malaise, and deconstructs it. My criticism of her is that she deconstructed the wrong gender.

Blount, your ad hominem tone is as bad as Horowitz's. Cut the school playground crap.

what are you talking about? this has nothing to do with anything. you have to be being wilfully obtuse, which is gross.

Why should you assume THATS what a woman has to be doing rather than engineering, or flying the plane? Thats how you're coming across!

1). Nobody said, "of course I didn't mean hostessing!" though I expect that's the answer you wanted to elicit. J.D. simply posted that it was an engineering job.

2). You had several arguments with people about the women's capacity and inclination to do technical work like engineering. J.D. took you to task for this BY MENTIONING A CLASS ON WORKING ON AIRPLANES. From the context you yourself produced, one can easily infer what kind of work J.D. meant.

3) You're obviously winning whatever game you're playing because people keep sincerely trying to respond to your posts. But you keep shifting the damn ground of your argument, such as it is, so I can only conclude you're just trying to get a rise out of people. Which sucks.

To say that Friedan deconstructed the wrong gender is kinda silly. It's like saying "Brokeback Mountain" failed to adequately address how and why heterosexual marriages fall apart.

momus: anyone who says women can do "men's work" is lying!
me: um, here is proof that they can
momus: what kind of work? you mean like air hostessing?
me: no
momus: AHA! so you're saying that air hostessing is something to be ashamed of!

No. Women typically enter fields where they can enter and leave for a few years without suffering losses from obsolescence. A woman who is a good editor, librarian, teacher, etc can leave and come back and still be just as good. A woman who wants to be an aeronautical engineer or some technological scientist of sorts can't afford to leave and miss out on new findings and technologies. When you consider the time and effort that can go into raising children it isn't surprising women are cautious of entering those fields. You can make an argument that historically the division of responsibility isn't very fair to women but that doesn't mean that because they don't enter those fields it's because of employer discrimination or other deliberate causes by society.

BTW The proportion of doctorates received by women went up 3% in the 1960s from 11% in 1960 to 14% in 1970. This was still shy of the 17% they received in 1921 and 1932 (the low point in birth rates). Similar doctorate drops during the baby boom occured in economics, law, chemistry, mathematics and other fields and most of them almost recovered to previous levels in the 1960s as the birthrates dropped again. Coincidence? Were men acting really chauvanistic and sexist during the war? Or was it demographics and birthrates that correlated with whether women were entering the workforce and getting doctorates? I REPORT, YOU DECIDE.

as i've noted many times before, your language shows an admirable conciseness and clarity--your points are well-made. i think you are a good writer. this is quite refreshing, i have to say, especially after reading 100 pages of giorgio fucking agamben. (who i'd characterize as "frequently lapsing into opacity" if 80% of his argument weren't founded on basic grammatical and logical confusion.) unfortunately your overall mode of argument doesn't differ from agamben and other "critical theorists" in being fundamentally evasive and probably intellectually dishonest.

(a) cunga has a good point in his (her?) first graph. as for second, it's intriguing--where are those figures from?

(b) i agree with momus that there's nothing wrong with having this debate on a "RIP" thread. (though i do wonder why he's so adamant about all this despite having just skimmed ms. friedan's signal book this afternoon.)

I reject the charge of intellectual dishonesty. I am not just trying to get reactions here. I am amazed that people can't see that there's misogyny in the position Frieden spells out in her most famous book.

I'm genuinely interested in the fact that people fail to see how the ideology of equality of opportunity conceals a failure to deal with difference. In a society which claims to be pluralistic and respect diversity, in fact we respect it less and less. We try to erase it. We erase "the female difference", ironically, in the name of feminism. Feminism of the Friedan school, anyway. (Again, I want to distinguish what she says in "The Feminine Mystique" from her work on abortion law and equal rights legislation, which I support.)

Daddino OTM
-- Thomas Tallis (tallis4...), February 5th, 2006.

But isn't this a somewhat similar statement to Betty Friedan's "forbidden to join man in the world, can women be people?"

Both statements contain a weirdly narrow definition of "human" or "people" which doesn't include all humans and people. Humanity becomes conditional on certain behaviours the speaker wants to see in the people being described. And both statements contain a deep anxiety about otherness, difference.

Frieden also has a weirdly partial, conditional definition of "the world" in her book. Here's the passage from Chapter 2 where she talks about women not being people:

"But forbidden to join man in the world, can women be people? Forbidden independence, they finally are swallowed in an image of such passive dependence that they want men to make the decisions, even in the home. The frantic illusion that togetherness can impart a spiritual content to the dullness of domestic routine, the need for a religious movement to make up for the lack of identity, betrays the measure of women's loss and the emptiness of the image. Could making men share the housework compensate women for their loss of the world? Could vacuuming the living-room floor together give the housewife some mysterious new purpose in life?"

Just as being "people" is, for Frieden, is conditional on being active, being independent and making decisions, so "the world" is, for her, something that can be elsewhere, even when we're in what we think is the world.

In fact, her book resembles the techniques of advertising. "You don't have it, and you want it! It's elsewhere! You feel so empty, don't you? But now it's here! We have it, you can buy it!" This is bad enough when it's cigarettes, but Frieden is doing it with basic notions like "being people" and "the world". It's powerful stuff (and I'm sure this is why "The Feminine Mystique" sold three million copies), because it speaks to anybody who has a sense of alienation and unfulfillment. Nevertheless, at the end of the day it's a rhetorical trick, just as advertising is. Our inner void can no more be filled by employment than it can by a cigarette of a bar of chocolate. And I want very strongly to contradict Frieden's rhetoric: every human being is "being human", and every part of the world is "in the world".

Actually, you don't have to be a shrink to see that the product Frieden has in mind, the panacea, is the penis.

Are you arguing that 'being active, being independent and making decisions' isn't a necessary part of having a fulfilling life? Yes, one can just exist, doing nothing – but it's hardly something to embrace if one doesn't want to. You seem to think it's wrong to militate against a life of boredom.

It sets off alarm bells in my head when people start saying you aren't human unless you're (x,y,z). As for active, independent and decisive, they sound good, but you're still human if you're idle (hell, Bertrand Russell wasn't wrong when he wrote In Praise Of Idleness), it's much more realistic to talk about interdependence than independence (Benjamin Barber has made this a key theme, and remember that "no woman is an island"), and as for decisiveness... well, better a Prince Hamlet than a George Bush.

it would be easy to commend passivity (The Idler magazine, or Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness")

the people she wanted them to be more like were... the men of the 1950s?

So now your problem with her (after reading 3 chapters) is that she wasn't revlutionary enough? She wanted women to have the same opportunities as men. If you think opportunity of outcome is fairer, when I'd argue it's impossible for an outside agent to decide what outcome suits me or anyone else, then sure, we can differ. But upthread you were talking about how joining 'the workforce' would limit you. Well, it limits me too but I'd rather be productive than not. That's a personal opinion but it goes to show that not everyone shares your view. And I'm speaking as someone who has had stuff published in the Idler.

I don't think you understand in what ways she was 'dismissing' Kinsey and Freud. It wasn't exactly a case of 'oh Freud what does he know'. It's something for another thread though.

x-post

Of course not! I'm saying calling people non-people for any reasons is scary rhetoric.

(This part doesn't relate to your question):

I'm interested in the way accounts of Friedan's writing construct images of how society works. Take this passage, from the National Women's Hall of Fame website:

"Friedan's l963 book, The Feminine Mystique, detailed the frustrating lives of countless American women who were expected to find fulfillment primarily through the achievements of husbands and children. The book made an enormous impact, triggering a period of change that continues today. Friedan has been central to this evolution for women."

That passage begs a lot of questions.

1. It presents us with an image of society in which fulfillment is absolutely not to be found through other people... in other words, through social bonds. Independence is better than dependence or interdependence -- and independence is assumed to be achievable. This is immediately a recognizably American scenario; no Asian collectivism here, and no communism either. Individuals, individuals, individuals!

2. It presents women as dolts who are being told by someone else what to do and how to live. And Friedan's book breaks this pattern by... well, by telling women what to do and how to live!

3. "The frustrating lives of countless women" conjures up the image of a nation of women on valium. But John Waters, Andy Warhol, Bill Burroughs and others might have a different take: they often parodied this view of bored women popping valium and sitting around painting their nails. Burroughs once said in an interview that American housewives were much bigger drug-takers than the Beats ever were. This was not a condemnation, possibly because gay men love their mothers more than Friedan loved her sisters, and rather revelled in the decadence of being a "kept woman". Andy Warhol's Women in Revolt rather sends up the Friedan worldview.

2. She isn't telling women what to do and how to live, but suggesting ways in which women can make their own decisions. (I understand you don't think they're capable of decision-making, what with being feminine and everything.)

3. John Waters, Andy Warhol, Bill Burroughs et al weren't qualified to judge the lives of people in totally different circumstances to their own. And that drug-taking thing is a bit of a red herring: are we comparing valium with heroin? acid? cannabis? speed? And I'm not going to derail the thread by going into detail about why your enormous generalisation about gay men is ridiculous, except to say that it doesn't add anything to your argument.

xpost

2. She's doing what advertisers do: creating that product-shaped space then waving the (phallic) product under her readers' noses.

3. Are you saying the transgendered actors in "Women in Revolt" aren't qualified to talk about "real" women? And yet femininity is a "construct", isn't it? Who better than a tranny to know that?

2. If that's the case, which I deny, then it's better than inventing arguments against something you've barely read or misread in the first place. At least she understood what she was arguing about.

3. Who are 'real' women? She was writing about a specific section of the population at the time, and it wasn't transgendered bohemians.

You don't have a take on Friedan, Momus. You starting opining based on fuck-all, then after numerous chidings began reading the book - quite clearly with an eye only toward how you might score points on an internet thread, not toward, y'know, reading & absorbing, seeing how the ideas might resonate: the "slow living" in which you're interested apparently bores you here. So her obit thread had to suffer your "I just read three chapters" reading. "Take" isn't a particularly elevated term, but to describe your how-can-I-here-defend-my-"it's-empowering-to-be-marginalized" schtick as a "take" does unnecessary violence to it; what you have is only a myopic reading interested only in finding ways to shore up your absurd, deeply misogynist "disempower men! but by all means let's admit that women are dummies!" position.

You should be ashamed of your conduct here, but I know you have a big dull take on why shame is only good when cute other cultures indulge in it - or seem to, since it's such a bother to learn other languages

good morning btw

So her obit thread had to suffer your "I just read three chapters" reading.

That's three more chapters than I'd read of Betty Friedan yesterday morning. I suspect it's also three more chapters than many people saluting Friedan on this thread have read too. It's been educational for me, and I suspect it has for anyone reading as well. Agreeing is not the best way to educate yourself. Being right is not even the important thing either. Engaging in some way with the ideas and the rhetoric is key , and I think that has been done here.

I think Friedan is important, otherwise I'd be on the "Wild bosoms roam free tonight" thread. It would please me, though, if someone would give a teensy bit of assent to the idea that there is misogyny in Friedan's portrayal of "traditional" femininity, and also that she's wrong about entering the labor force being the end of depression. In fact, it was the beginning of stress-depression, just as her emphasis on the individual was the beginning of all sorts of anger-management issues and pointless personal assertion for its own sake.

I think I almost prefer Andrea Dworkin (and I certainly prefer Mary Daly), because at least Dworkin launched into the male psyche, challenging power structures that Friedan never wanted to touch.

"Australia is starting to come across like an alternative South Africa where the white people won :("

To which someone replied:

"Oh yes indeed mate. There are no more 'racist' policies but since everything is business and 'value for money', only white people can get on top of things. 'Economic racism' is the word."

That actually plugs in well to the situation of women in the workforce. There are no overtly sexist policies any more, but there's "economic sexism".

but I'm not gonna play yr bait-n-switch game today (for example: you did, in fact, propose that it was rather unrealistic to have a woman on a plane who knows something about engineering; you spent about fifteen posts trying to back away from what you did, in fact, say): I have work to do. Enjoy urinating on a brave woman's grave!

"For all its acclaim and its status as the book that ignited the women's movement, praise for Friedan's Feminine Mystique has never been unqualified. Indeed many feminists have criticized its myopic representation of women. There is hardly a word in The Feminine Mystique that would indicate that American women in the 1950s were dealing with problems other than the trap of suburban domesticity which, after all, was a consequence of economic prosperity."

Boucher then goes on to show how Friedan was a much more radical thinker in her early days, with a Marxist view of social problems across the whole social spectrum rather than the concern for middle class housewives in suburbia she developed later (the "problems of paradise"). Bell Hooks wrote:

"Friedan did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife."

Says Boucher: "The faults of liberal feminism center on its seemingly bland acceptance of American capitalism as a system structured on economic freedom which merely needs some tinkering (such as the elimination of "unfair practices" such as racism and sexism) to make it entirely workable and just."

Fancy Friedan only addressing one area of concern in one book! How myopic of her not to take on the entire establishment in one go!

She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife.

Of course not, it wasn't up to her or anyone else. Her argument was that it's up to the person herself.

Not 'entirely workable and just' - Friedan never says that would be the result. Just that several million people might have the opportunity to fulfil a bit more of their potential.

You seem remarkably sanguine about setting aside system-wide practicality and justice. Why would entering an unworkable, unjust system help anyone fulfil their potential? Potential to do what, exactly? Sell one's time by the hour downtown instead of letting hubby do that while one sits with the girls at the kaffeklatsch discussing the Book of the Month ("The Feminine Mystique", natch)?

xpost I addressed exactly that point upthread but if you can't be bothered reading it, I'll restate that I don't like The System, man, but I think a small change within the structure is better than no change at all. And some women, believe it or not, are capitalists. People can decide for themselves whether they subscribe to the system. Friedan argued that this choice wasn't available. You are extremely privileged to have had the opportunity to opt out of whatever you're opting out of. Not everyone has the chance.

one sits with the girls at the kaffeklatsch discussing the Book of the Month

Is that what you think the-women-of-the-50s did and were unreasonably rebelling against?

What they won't tell you (but which David Horowitz did in a column six years ago):

Betty Friedan presented herself in The Feminine Mystique—the 1963 book that launched modern feminism—as a suburban housewife who had never given a thought to "the woman question," until she attended a Smith College reunion which revealed the dissatisfaction of her well-educated female classmates, unable to balance traditional roles with modern careers.

But, as Smith College professor Daniel Horowitz (no relation) revealed in his book Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminist Mystique, Betty was not very candid about the facts of her own life and the sources of her radical perspective. She was hardly a suburban housewife when she wrote those words, but a twenty-five year veteran of professional journalism in the Communist Left, where she had been thoroughly indoctrinated in the politics of "the woman question" and specifically the idea that women were "oppressed."

As Horowitz's biography makes clear, Friedan, from her college days and until her mid-thirties, was a Stalinist marxist (or a camp follower thereof), the political intimate of leaders of America's Cold War fifth column, and for a time even the lover of a young communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects with J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Not at all a neophyte when it came to the "woman question" (the phrase itself is a marxist construction), she was certainly familiar with the writings of Engels, Lenin, and Stalin on the subject and had written about it herself as a journalist for the official publication of the communist-controlled United Electrical Workers union.

Friedan's secret was shared by hundreds of her comrades on the Left – though not, of course, by the unsuspecting American public – who went along with her charade presumably as a way to support her political agenda.

The actual facts of Friedan's life—that she was a professional marxist ideologue, that her husband supported her full-time writing and research, that she had a maid and lived in a Hudson river mansion, attending very little to household duties—were inconvenient to the persona and the theory she was determined to promote.

Historically, men and women have both had spheres of influence and power. Not equal ones, and not the same ones, but spheres of influence and power nonetheless. For women, these have sometimes been spheres that have been granted to them, and they've sometimes been spheres that women themselves have carved out, finding their agency where they can get it. For instance, outside of the west in particular, you'll find a kind of family sphere in which women weild a significant kind of power. On the other hand, pretty much across the world, you'll find men inhabiting another sphere of power, which is much more forceful and concrete -- political and economic power, public power, professional power.

Where Momus started, maybe innocently, is with something true: in a lot of our talk about equality, we privilege the male spheres of power. We do this in part because we live in a male-dominated society, and in part because those male spheres are much more concrete: a vote is a tangible thing, and the ability to earn money is a tangible thing. (We'll come back to this in a second.) What Momus started off pointing out is basically a Female Chauvinist Pigs kind of argument -- that we should be wary of convincing ourselves that traditionally male spheres of power are the important or "better" ones. Feminists have dealt with the opposite, too -- they've had to be clear that they're looking for opportunity to enter those previously male spheres, not denigrating women who elect to concern themselves with other ones. The issue is not which sort of agency to seize, but the freedom to seize the sort of agency one chooses. And interestingly enough, that's not only at issue for women: the more women move into traditionally male spheres of power (the workplace, or politics), it becomes a question how much men can or will care to step into roles and spheres we perceive as female.

That said, though, let's come back to the concreteness of (traditionally male) political and economic power. Think less about Friedan here and more about Virginia Woolf and A Room of One's Own. Thing is, these forms of political and economic power are a prerequisite for making choices about your own agency. You can have power in a thousand other spheres -- hell, you could dominate men entirely -- but without that concrete economic power in particular, you're still dependent. This is what's important about women being, say, engineers: it's not that being an engineer is morally "better" than various traditionally feminine spheres, it's that the capacity to be an engineer is what allows women the freedom (and independence) to make choices about which sphere they want to inhabit.

And Momus, if it makes you feel any better, consider that we're early in the feminist process. It seems to me that as more and more women grow up without any doubt that they have choice in this matter, you'll see some of them electing freely to occupy traditional feminine spheres of influence. We already see this, to a certain extent, with regard to motherhood -- for some, post-Friedan, there's a healthy notion that it's not the only avenue to fulfillment, but simply the one they've chosen (and possibly all the richer for it). It's a whole other interesting issue how men will fit into that. Men still privilege male roles and spheres of power; for us there isn't as much of a critical/concrete barrier like earning a living to bust through. (Childbirth is the one barrier, and no constitutional amendment is gonna change that.) We haven't made any effort to move, psychologically, in the opposite direction, though I think many of us have, as a reaction to women's movement.

So hey, Momus, if you feel strongly enough about it, go ahead and set yourself up as the male equivalent of Friedan. Write a book about how we needn't define ourselves solely in terms of our economic and professional success, how that's not the only route to fulfillment. It could be useful, really. But it won't be quite the same as Friedan, because there's that critical, nagging thing: having economic power is crucial to letting people make those choices, and -- on balance -- we were the ones holding that all along.

or from, say, booker t. washington.

Everyone is leaping to the conclusion that acknowledging small pockets of feminine agency means relegating women to them forever. Whereas every word I just typed was about the importance of women being able to compete for a foothold in whatever sphere of power they choose -- and about the importance of economic and social independence as a prerequisite for being able to make that decision in the first place.

Imagine for a second that there could be a society in which male and female roles were genuinely separate-but-equal -- one in which women's spheres of influence were genuinely as significant at those of men. My whole point is that so long as men get the professional sphere, this still wouldn't be right. It wouldn't be right because men would be the only ones who were actually autonomous and free -- because they'd be the ones with the most access to earning material necessities. Women, no matter how much power they held in other (interpersonal?) realms, would remain dependent. That's what I'm saying is the problem with separate spheres, and that's why I'm referencing something post-Victorian like A Room of One's Own, which is all about that material basis of inequality: "What do women need in order to write great novels? They need income and ownership -- economic autonomy." This is a total materialist approach, but I don't think you can get around it, no more than you can get around the fact that men can't bear children.

The other half of what I'm saying is also against separate spheres. The idea there is that there are spheres of power that have traditionally been masculine or feminine, but they needn't be. Part of the role of feminism has been to allow women to choose their own spheres of power as it suits them -- something that, given economic autonomy, they're much more free to do. I think the ideal is that the spheres will become less gendered, less "separate" -- that women and men both will have the material autonomy to choose those roles as it suits them.

xpost

Momus's problem isn't that he overestimates traditional avenues of feminine power -- it's that he underestimates them. He seems to think they need to be argued for, or that we might forget them, or defame them. I dunno that I worry about this. I think those roles are powerful enough to fend for themselves, really -- that people (men and women both) can be given total freedom to choose where to put their energy, and that some of them will still choose to fill traditionally "feminine" roles. Because they can be, like Momus says, "neat" -- especially if you're choosing them, not being trapped in them.

The only place I depart from your excellent analysis is in my attitude to this word "dependence". As I see it, in society we all depend on each other. There is no shame in dependence. Independence is a fairly meaningless term when applied to our lives in society. Presenting independence as a virtue implies that connection is a vice.

Let's look at your statement about the "separate spheres":

It wouldn't be right because men would be the only ones who were actually autonomous and free -- because they'd be the ones with the most access to earning material necessities.

I don't really understand why being in the workforce makes you free and being out of it doesn't? And how does taking orders from the boss make you autonomous? This is simply another form of dependence: dependence on the market. If one has to depend on something, why make it the market, which is ruthless and cares nothing for you as a person?

Of course, someone must go to market. Material necessity dictates it. In Japan, the traditional family arrangement (somewhat broken down recently, but still a common scenario) is that the man, like some sort of worker bee, goes out every day to earn money. He doesn't control the money he earns, though. He hands it all over to the woman, the queen bee, as it were, who makes all the spending decisions for the household.

Who's "dependent" on whom in that scenario? Who's "autonomous"? Where does power lie? The questions don't make much sense. They have an interdependence, they both fulfill certain obligations in regard to material necessity, and they both have a balance of rights and responsibilities. Framing these questions in S&M-like terms of power and domination is where the West goes wrong. American individualism and power-hunger frames the whole issue in ways which cannot benefit women.

This is where I come full circle, because it's observing gender relations in Japan (generally, I think, better than those I've seen in the West, which doesn't mean that women are paid the same rates for their work as men when they enter the labour force) and thinking "But Japan had no Betty Friedan!" that made me question Freidan's thesis, her presuppositions about emptiness, power, autonomy, whether women are people, where exactly "the real world" is.

Of course Japan is a very different culture, and can't really be used as an experimental control for the US, but it does provide a parallel world, a reminder that things don't have to be framed the way they are in the US, narratives of the meaning of gender don't have to unfold the way they do in the US, and life for women isn't necessarily worse for that.

Mm.

See now, this is why I dont bother. I am fucking sick of being insulted because I dont pass muster somehow by these implications my (or anyone's) opinions are invalid.

Fuck all y'all. I give up.

now, is it still the case that you don't speak Japanese? just curious.

btw M this bit disqualifies you from ever objecting from American Republicans, because you are one

Oh no, wait, that makes sense: "individualism for me but not for thee."

As for power, my theme has been consistent throughout this thread. We need to redefine power. To recap:

A world in which the whole definition of power (and hence "empowerment") is a male one, and in which any recourse to female values is called "Essentialism".

The crazy thing is that women can win massively when power is defined differently, defined as something like "social power" rather than technical power or aggression.

Failing to identify differences between the genders is not a way of avoiding essentialism, just a way of letting male definitions of power pass as universal ones.

You know, this is why it's so refreshing when Nabisco comes on the thread. Your tone is silly.

OK no more from me, as I'm just being ignored anyway. Must be these tits.

x-post Momus did you miss the part where Nabisco refuted the bedrock of your argument?

Momus, this may be the most ridiculously abstracted intellectual argument I have ever come across, and I say that as a person who's normally fond of the abstract and intellectual. Independence is not meaningless when independence means the difference between eating and not eating. So let me restate how this works, below.

In Japan, the traditional family arrangement (somewhat broken down recently, but still a common scenario) is that the man, like some sort of worker bee, goes out every day to earn money. He doesn't control the money he earns, though. He hands it all over to the woman, the queen bee, as it were, who makes all the spending decisions for the household.

This is precisely the sort of thing I'm talking about. The man in this arrangement is given a certain sphere -- a public sphere of earning money and career success. The woman in this arrangement is given a certain sphere -- a private, familial sphere of arranging the household. You're right to point out that both of these spheres are valid, legitimate, and potentially fulfilling. Here's the thing: the man's sphere of power is a given. The man, alone, can still work and eat. His sphere of agency does not absolutely require a woman for him to exercise it -- it may be diminished, but it exists. In this arrangement, though, the woman depends upon the man to grant her a sphere of agency; without him, she doesn't just lack a household sphere, but she lacks basic necessities. This holds true whether the man in question is husband or father.

There is nothing wrong with dependence. The question is whether people of one sex must be dependent, or whether -- maybe -- people of either sex choose their dependence, willingly, and with a measure of trust involved. This was the bedrock of Friedan's era of feminism, and I think you're doing a lot to leap past the practicalities of that. You leap past how absolutely essential it was for women to get to a point where they could have faith in their opportunity and ability to exist autonomously. Because otherwise, a depressingly large number of them would (and did) wind up in dependent relationships that weren't fulfilling to them -- marriages that were unhealthy and unsatisfying and even dangerous. Marriages they entered, often against their inclinations, because they were pushed away from all any other opportunities to look for fulfillment -- and marriages they felt impossible to leave or decline, because they weren't given the economic tools to get by any other way.

I was dead serious when I said you're welcome to take a similar approach with men. There's no reason men don't deserve the same ability to choose their roles -- to realize that career success is not the only avenue to fulfillment, to realize that there are dependent roles that can be just as satisfying, and to seize the ability to exercise their agency in spheres like the private and familial ones. The ideal here is that no one be relegated to either of those slots -- that people move in and out of the ones they choose with the knowledge that they have other options.

xpost yes, she did, Momus, because otherwise she would have had to live on the street.

Well likewise then to play by your "rules" in inverted commas I should have used a better word than race, as I could equally have said "What if women dont want to "win" but just be allowed to have all the same choices as men do?". This clearly doesn't mean "they want to be men", it means they get to achieve, do and be things they had previously had no access to. Like oh, I dont know, the vote, citizenship, being paid equally for the same work a man does. Just little things.

Apropos of nothing by this point may I also suggest that " It's difficult to argue for collectivist ideas in a language (English) so thoroughly steeped in competitive metaphors." is denigrating the very language and culture you're trying to argue from. Wassamatta Momus - you embarrassed to be Britis? For shame! You should be proud of it! Just like women should wave they aprons in the air like we just dont care!

Also Nabisco very OTM, especially with The man, alone, can still work and eat. His sphere of agency does not absolutely require a woman for him to exercise it -- it may be diminished, but it exists. In this arrangement, though, the woman depends upon the man to grant her a sphere of agency; without him, she doesn't just lack a household sphere, but she lacks basic necessities. This holds true whether the man in question is husband or father.

What, did language think you into the corner of Orphic trickster rather than engineer?

One thing we're all pretending to agree on here is that women should have as much "power" as men. But we haven't talked about what power consists of. Momus, you seem to be defining that power -- very, very ironically -- in a male way; you seem to be defining it as power or influence over society, or over circumstances. (So are some of the people who are arguing with you.) This is what the Japanese housewife who takes the paycheck has: power over material events.

You even use "power" and "empowerment" interchangeably, but they're very different things -- and that kind of material power was not the only thing Friedan and her ilk were asking for. Insofar as they -- and Woolf -- were asking for material power, they were asking for it as the necessary prerequisite for empowerment of themselves as individuals. The Japanese housewife who takes the paycheck has "power," but she's not empowered to do one very important thing -- to choose whether to be the one taking the paycheck or earning it, the one arranging the home or doing the engineering.

And I know what you'll want to respond to that with: that means her husband isn't fully "empowered" either! And you'll be right, BettyMomus. Trayce says women should have the same choices men do (hear, hear); no reason men shouldn't have the same choices women do. It just so happens that women asked first, because they're the ones, in these traditional roles, who got the least choice over what to do with themselves.

xpost

Momus I think you should be very, very careful about running your glib argument over into "choice is overrated." You should be very fucking careful, and you should be very, very serious. Because that argument ends in slavery, only with better food and slightly fewer whippings. And I will not let you go down that road, no matter how much sophistry and abstraction you want to use to make it sound innocuous. (Besides which, on a lighter note, a lot of your arguments here are really amusing coming from a person's who's been divorced!)

Actually, the response you predicted (that the husband isn't fully empowered either) is not my first response to that statement. My first response is: neither of them are choosing their roles, they're following a social tradition, a division of labour. This is where we come face to face with the limits to personal choice. People who think they have choice and are acting freely almost always turn out to be using that choice to follow the dictates of their own society, its customs, its fashions, its ways of thinking.

Argh, OK, what horseshoe said.

Again, I want you to explain how Nick Currie becoming Momus rather than an engineer shows you to be only following the dictates of society, its customs, etc.

Blount, if you want civil responses make civil points.

I was, because my first points were about Japan. Japan is a collectivist society.

(Albert Murray: "Isn't it interesting that four hundred years of black pain and suffering have only produced one Bessie Smith?")

xpost & your interdependence insists that persons who've afforded themselves positions of privilege and power will set the terms on which that interdepedence relies, rendering it not really interdependence at all

Also, cultural arguments cannot be "refuted". People can simply exchange their views and find overlaps... or not.

don't hold your breath horsehoe, we've all been down this road before: vide this thread for example

It's hardly surprising we should have problems with a book written in 1963. The media landscape of the "happy housewife" Friedan describes in Chapter 2 of her book is almost unrecognisable. Sure, it was a cropped frame in 1963, but it's been replaced by other cropped frames since then: the superwoman who juggles family and career, the "Magic Woman" who saves the plane in "Flightplan", and so on. Given the new context, we have to re-examine what Frieden said. I like to think this is what this thread is doing, rather than point-scoring.

your interdependence insists that persons who've afforded themselves positions of privilege and power will set the terms on which that interdepedence relies, rendering it not really interdependence at all

I insisted that, did I? Where?

xpost - No, Momus, it wasn't in vain - just wrong!

That's not how I see it. Gender has a biological and a cultural side. For a biological difference to make a cultural difference, it has to be "a difference that makes a difference". In other words, the culture has to make it a structuring difference. One handy way to find out if something is a structuring difference in a culture is to ask a child. If children treat it as important (the difference between boys and girls, the difference between black and white people), it's a "difference that makes a difference". (Not talking about "ought" here, talking about "is". Justice must be based on "is" judgements, not "ought" judgements.)

!!! tautology 101 !!!

ahem.

You weren't that clear about this upthread; do you actually think that men's biology makes them better suited for technical fields than women?

It's a truth Blount has yet to discover!

xpost

Well goody for him that he grew up more sensible than me.

There's quite a lot of evidence that women have different spatial perception skills than men. You might also like to read a woman engineer's view that gender does matter in engineering.

but I just want to note that scientific studies on gender difference are not neutral. Anne Fausto-Sterling has done fascinating work on this:
http://www.symposion.com/ijt/gilbert/sterling.htm

Momus, who's saying that? Cressida just said that tests have shown men to be better at one thing and women to be better at "pretty much everything else."

"But scientists note that women outperform men at other tasks."

That's where I got the "pretty much everything else" from. These tests are pretty famous, I thought it was well known that spatial relations skills were the only thing men were consistently better at.

"But men and women don't always fit neatly into their respective groups. A University of Cambridge study found that 17% of men have a 'female' empathising brain and 17% of women have a 'male' systemising brain"

Even if all men had male brains, and all women had female ones, it would just make men slightly better, a woman engineer may be in the minority but she wouldn't be unusual. 17% is a significant amount, enough for nearly one in 5 spatial relations related jobs to be taken by women even if the male brains were the only ones good enough for the job and all those jobs required only spatial relations skills and no other areas, neither of which are the case. 1 in 5 isn't low enough to be noticabley unusual.

xpost - I did know of this physical difference, but it is now proof that women are less suited to many jobs. Engineering involves more than spatial relations skills.

I'm off to bed, sorry if I don't answer.

Nabisco said at one point: Momus is doing here what he always does: he had the germ of a good point to be made, and then became so invested in protecting that germ that he overstated himself and ruined the whole thing.

So if ilxors are so familiar with Momus's infuriating ways and "what he always does", why can't folks just engage with that "germ of a good point"? I mean, it's not as if some feminists haven't raised similar concerns as Momus has.

For what it's worth, I agree with Momus's concern that those characteristics conventionally deemed "feminine" are at risk of being undervalued, and that the "masculine" has not been sufficiently deconstructed, but I do not think these traits are as tied to the biological sexes as he seems to think they are.

because otherwise j blount wouldn\'t get the chance to type \"rape her once for me pal\".

which joke or not is about 100 times worse than anything momus posted on this thread. i think betty friedan might agree.

(it was definately worth it to score your little point, eh blount? enjoy giving rape victims flashbacks and insulting them, pal? you get an erection when you typed that one?)

Agreed. No amount of Momus psychobabble deserves that much moral melodrama towards him.

The ability to rotate objects in 3-D in your head might, or might not, be related to success in engineering. Certainly it helps, if you want to build a model of an molecule in your head in order to understand covalent bindings in organic chem, or to think through some things in geometry. However, you know, there are these cool things called pencil & paper. Someone who can't easily rotate objects around in their head can just make a bunch of sketches of the object rotating. So I don't believe that it's essential, although it is probably an indicator of engineering ability. Or, our culture might just think that it's an indicator. No one knows at this point.

(i still think you\'re a creepy dick, though. hugs.)

My first response is: neither of them are choosing their roles, they're following a social tradition, a division of labour. This is where we come face to face with the limits to personal choice.

This is the worst sort of hopelessness. Our social traditions divide labor based on sex, yes. This turns out to be highly unsatisfying to a great many people. It's also a very poor division of labor, because it's inefficient; whatever "hardwired" differences you want to imagine, it remains true that there are many, many women who will make better engineers than the average man -- and many, many men who may make (for instance) better parents and family-organizers than engineers. (This is really basic: men may have biological advantages in spriting, too, but that doesn't mean FloJo can't outrun 99% of the men in this country!) No matter what the limits of choice, there's absolutely no good reason not to try and arrange the world such that people can choose their spheres of agency based on their inclinations and talents.

To follow the slavery metaphor: even after emancipation, there were plenty of social and economic forces that kept black people doing the same things they had before -- sharecropping cotton and doing menial servant jobs. Plenty of them had very little more "choice" in the matter than they did before. This doesn't mean emancipation was a bad idea, just that it was one of several things that needed to happen to move toward equal -- and equally free -- participation in society.

You're right that feminists of Friedan's era often ran the risk of over-prizing exactly the male roles that had been denied to them. I'd guess this is a perfectly ordinary case of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence -- a desire to seize exactly what's being denied to you, and a desire to demonstrate that women were capable of more than anyone had ever believed of them. Yes, yes: one result of this is that some women now feel burdened to prove themselves in traditionally male spheres. I don't think there are too many people who wouldn't acknowledge this, many feminists chief among them. But I don't think those side effects and occasional overstatements diminish the importance of what women like Friedan did and said. Because the thrust of the matter is still clear, and it's still choice. The point is that women can't feel "fully human" when their existence and their choices are wholly contingent upon men -- when they're treated as adjunct support staff to the doings of men. There is nothing wrong with individuals choosing roles in life that involve interdepedence, but there is something terribly wrong when an entire sex is forced into that role by accident of chromosomes.

flojo's probably not the best example to use there btw nabisco. she dead.

To save your skin after your vile 'joke' about rape you pull that out of... well, the furthest depths of your own hate-fuelled imagination. A place quite a few of us would probably pay quite a lot of money not to visit.

I got hold of de Beauvoir and A Room Of One's Own before I was even aware of any mass-market "women's movement" writers like Friedan so tend toward prioritising *intellectual* balance/equality between the sexes in the private sphere as the best means of lifting bars to parity in the public spheres. Um, individuals working toward the common good, anyone?

Feminists who feel Friedan was too preoccupied with male opinion include Germaine Greer and a whole host of others (see today's Guardian); please remember that there is a general trend for young women to believe in the practical outcomes of feminist policy without self-identifying as feminist, a complacency of thought which bugs those of us who are slightly older.

dunno why I bother, Momus could g'head and start a "was emancipation really good for the slaves" thread and there'd be somebody to say "well, he has a point, and besides why are you being rude to him"

and yes yes I'm sure if you get to know him he's a perfectly nice fellow

yes suzy we know, you'll ad-hom for Momus

fitting, really

"Betty was not one to realise that she was being lifted on an existing wave; she thought she was the wave, that she had actually created the Zeitgeist that was ready and hungry for her book."

Greer "didn't share their belief that you could be a loyal member of the Republican party and a feminist. We now know that Betty didn't think you could either, but she could have fooled me and she certainly fooled everybody else."

"Betty believed that freeing women would not be the end of civilisation as we know it; I hope that freeing women will be the end of civilisation as we know it."

"The Female Eunuch" put sex and the deconstruction of patriarcy back onto the agenda; Friedan had left them off. Greer says it was written as a reaction to Friedan's book.

1) There are traditional male and female role models.
2) Women have historically been the oppressed gender.
3) In the West, postwar progressive discourse (such as Friedan's) stresses that to empower themselves, women should invest in traditional male role models.
4) Momus says that instead, more status should be accorded to female role models. Air hostesses should be seen as just as important as engineers, etc.
5) In this way, women will be establishing an alternative to the patriarchy, rather than subsuming themselves into it.

You don't have to be a rabid rightwing death beast to see that there's some element of sense to that position. On the contrary, it's hard not to feel the shaping hand of capitalism in discourses like Firedan's.

But there are also some problems with Momus's position. He doesn't talk about how these male and female role models came to be. He briefly tips his hat to biological determinism, but presumably actually believes that they are for the large part socially constructed. That begs the question of how they are socially constructed. He thinks that the origin of female oppression is the patriarchy (which in turn is why women shouldn't buy into it by aping men). But if that's the case, then it's also the patriarchal power structure which has shaped male/female roles. You can't take the world of the feminine as something that women can retreat into, celebrate, feel empowered by, etc. etc. without accepting that it, too, is a creature of the patriarchy. And that there are reasons, within the patriarchal system, why certain things - maternal instinct, emphasis on being beautiful, passivity, family, collectivity etc etc are regarded as feminine. Those feminine attributes, neat and cute as they are, don't just exist in a void. They're as much a part of the patricarchal system, and in fact enable it, just as much as the masculine "opposites" of individualism, aggression etc.

The question is, has femininity been formed badly? Does it integrate some terrible traumatic victimhood forever? Is it compounded of resentment and envy? Is it broken? Or is it strong, resilient, surprisingly unembittered after centuries in the background? Is it perhaps in better shape than masculinity? Betty Friedan sent out questionnaires in the early 60s and decided that femininity -- but not masculinity -- was broken. Was she right? Can we fix one gender without fixing the other? Can we promote one in front of the other? Could we take the "second sex" and make it the first?

What if femininity were not only not broken, but turned out to be mankind's best invention? A good model for all human behaviour? Could men learn to be women too? Some say that this is already happening, as men get softened up by consumer societies and even concentrations of oestrogen in the water supply. Personally, the best future I can see is a feminine one, in other words a future where we all become more like women, where feminine values become the aspirational ones. It actually doesn't matter to me where these values come from, as long as they reduce wars, reduce murder to woman rates (10% of all murders), increase interdependence, decrease violent crime, increase considerateness, co-operativeness and so on. Maybe one day we could all be each other's wives, sisters and mothers.

as heartily as I disagree with your position on the issue at hand, I have to concede that this gave me big roffles

your last paragraph in the xpost though seems to ignore that a good part of femininity-qua-invention involves being marginalized without one's consent, beaten, raped, not taken seriously, and objectified: hardly desireable things

Upthread you posit that air hostesses don't have the same status as engineers in the aeronautical world because it's the female role in that world. But simply to put the two on equal footing would be to evade the reason why one is male and the other female. Because that's exactly what I mean about role models being shaped by the patriarchy. Becoming an engineer takes a huge amount of time and intellectual investment, and provides a flexible, profitable, and potentially interesting life trajectory. Becoming an air hostess requires being able to pull trays out of a trolley. The problem is not that one has a lower status than the other, but that the one that offers the person more fruitful possibilities as an agent in society is associated with the male world.

I completely disagree with this. Computers can fly a plane, and robots can build one. But neither a computer nor a robot can do what a hostess does when she deals with the 101 things that arise on a flight. Humans are the most complex thing in the known universe, and being able to deal with them is the most complex job there is.

Consider the case of Ada Lovelace, whose doctors warned her against abstract, computative thought because it was common medical wisdom at the time that such activity would destroy a woman's womb.

One of the reasons I think "the future is female" is that we'll increasingly see machines doing the things men were the only ones able to do in the past. We humans will have to re-centre ourselves on things that only we can do. Work will be less about interacting with raw matter, more about interacting with people. That will re-orient our societies towards what are called "services", but are in fact human relationship jobs requiring good people skills. Exactly the kind of things women, with their higher empathy levels and better social and verbal skills, are good at.

But because we're talking about a patriarchy, it's going to be the case that the male role is predominant in the shaping of the masculine and the feminine, isn't it? And that male and female roles will therefore reflect more of the male interest than the female one.

This is where patriarchy really missed a trick. By thinking of motherhood as something trivial, it completely misses on the chance to get humans in their formative years. Freud says that almost all the important experiences of our lives happen in the first five years, when we're with our mothers. But it seems to patriarchy was too busy sinking oil wells to read Freud.

(I don't buy Friedan's anti-Freudianism at all. Freud is still social dynamite.)

Optimistic. Traditional male roles have been about "people skills" - just different ones to women. Men have been demonstrably better at negotiating their pay. They've been better at reading and playing the financial markets, they've been better at managing people, etc., etc. I'm unconvinced that women's higher empathy levels are going to translate into doing better in the job market.

I do think there is some truth in this. Women have been granted this 'lesser' sphere, which actually in our psychologising age turns out to be very important.

Gender is still massively important, and surprisingly constant throughout history and across cultures as a primary structuring device. And I'm much more determinist than you are about how far we can deviate from it at will.

Sure, on this thread I've been talking to some people whose gender I don't know. But this is a weird and very reduced sort of social interaction, and I don't think being gender-blind improved our communications here in any way. I want to know people's genders, and I also want to know what they look like, because embodiment and situation are tremendously important. They explain a huge amount about why people say the things they say. I actually really want to see pictures of people like Blount, Tallis, Henry (not on this thread, probably just as well!) because I can't really understand their tone without knowing more about their situation (in a gender, in a body, in a face, in a typology). You and Trayce I do know from the picture threads, Tuomas.

x-post

I saw one today. It had a pink label. Pink in Japan is the colour of porn... and blossom. Nobody was in it. I don't know what I think about the carriages. They're used only during rush hours, and they give those women who want it some personal space, to avoid molestation. Trains get very crowded here at rush hour, and in the crush everybody touches everybody else. Genitals crush against genitals. Everybody acts like nothing is happening. It wouldn't happen like this in the West, but concepts of personal space are rather different here, as are ideas about the body, and ideas about individuality. Also, Japan has fewer than 1% of non-Japanese. There's a sense in which the Japanese are all one family, and contact with strangers, if it becomes sexual, is like contact with a family member: a kind of incest. In that sense, maybe the carriages are a way to escape incest.

The division into two categories ("men" and "women") has been pretty constant, but there isn't a singular thing called "gender" - the forms and interpretations given to it has varied hugely between different eras and cultures, and there's always been "third sexers" and other exceptions. Also, there's nothing that would say polar divisions need to exist in the future, unless you believe that biology really does define gender.

One can't universalize from his own experience, but I often think my own life proves that deviation is possible. I grew up in a working-class family and a working-class environment, my father was an electrician and my mom is a kindergarten nanny. In a rigid model, everything in my childhood or teenage would suggest I should have adopted a traditionally masculine gender position, yet look at me now. And I didn't need to go through some painful process of reconstructing my identity or anything, things have changed gradually.

As long as we're talking about robots and computers, it's important to note that up until 70 years or so ago, calculation itself and the capacity of dealing with numbers in the abstract was considered a uniquely human, and specifically male, capacity.

Is my memory wrong, or weren't there entire rooms of primarily women doing calculations for gunnery/ballistics tables during WWII(on both sides of the Atlantic)? That was one of the first apparent needs for electronic computers, wasn't it? An accurate, fast gizmo wot could generate sums and trajectories for artillery?

I think this bit from IEEE says as much.

"Crunching numbers" by set procedures could be considered a lesser (though obviously necessary) function. That function casts women 'computers' used for this purpose in a repetitive mechanical role, rather devoid of autonomy.

Higher-level theoretical maths was the realm of men, including programming those procedures.

Oh certainly, but I think the computational effort(and subsequent ENIAC work) is a part that doesn't get as easily recalled. Hell, the only reason I remembered it is b/c James Burke has mentioned it repeatedly over the years and I'm a geek for WWII technology.

Okay. I don't agree with this, but I understand it. I think the mistake in this way of thinking is to take institutional "structuring devices" as natural. They didn't spring out of the earth. And many of them have changed.

Incidentally The Second Sex is the best analysis of how those institutional structuring devices reproduce themselves as natural that I've ever read. I think anything in Judith Butler that makes sense is basically a retread of de Beauvoir. (there's a thread of identity between the smartest feminist arguments over the past, oh, 200 years that's both reassuring and slightly depressing. it's like, yay we're really onto something, but also, I can't believe this stuff still needs to be argued.

The other problem Momus is running into here is more minor. He's offering a valid critique of Friedan, a critique feminism has been over plenty. He's so exclusively focused on scoring that point, though, that he's (maybe inadvertently) pissing off people who are defending the rest of Friedan's contributions. We haven't really talked about that. At this point, I really don't know whether Momus is claiming these are flaws in Friedan's thinking that invalidate her entire project, or whether they're just flaws we should be keeping in mind and improving upon. And personally, I'm not sure these flaws diminish the whole quite so much. Feminism is a very large project, and some misplaced emphasis in the early steps doesn't actually turn me so far against appreciating that the steps were taken.

I think Momus has very stereotyped views of male and female qualities.

As a male (should i say a gentle-man), I almost find the last sentence offensively sexist.

There was some kind of emergency, and she was responding by doing amazingly technical things, opening fuseboxes, making the oxygen masks fall down, demonstrating great technical prowess. And it struck me that while this was in some ways a "feminist" scene, showing women as bright and empowered, it was also a sort of misogyny. Because it showed a woman doing things that, in real life, women tend to be worse at than men. Technical things. It was a lie, a lie about women. It said "Women are as good at technical stuff as men. This is where their power lies. In out-manning men."

Because, well, I am a woman (last I checked, at least), and I know that I'm better at hacking up electronic circuitry than 90% of the men that I've met.

I think the problem in Lyra's and Nabisco's points here is the individualism element. You both want there to be less emphasis on categories like "women". You could call these categories the sociological-linguistic equivalent of a bell curve, with the definition set by the characteristics of the bulge in the centre, not the minorities at either end, into which you yourselves fall.

Now, was Friedan really being "empirical" when she wrote "The Feminine Mystique" based on questionnaires sent to bourgeois women in the suburbs supported by their husbands, and found them to feel, in their leisured affluence, a certain void? Her feminist critics say no. She concentrated on a small and privileged set of women, and recommended that they overcome their weltschmertz by getting jobs. What she ignored was that working class women were already massively in the workforce, working for long hours and low pay, and had been for centuries. And that it wasn't so great. The only reason these working class women didn't feel "a void in their soul" is that they didn't have time to cultivate a soul in the first place.

The question Friedan's selectivity, as well as Nabisco and Lyra's individualism here, begs is this: can one person be free unless everybody is? It's precisely this problem which led the gay liberation movement to encourage gay men to come out in public. It's not enough to be different in private. Your difference must be acknowledged and accepted by other people, provided for by the law. There must be a public space available for you. And yes, there must be a clear profile, a stereotype even (because stereotypes are what save us as well as what destroy us; the point is to create positive stereotypes around one's identity rather than negative ones), for people to grasp. Being free in the privacy of your own home is not enough. (Think of gay men and blackmail to know why.) Being free when others in your category are not is unjust. Falling outside the stereotype of your minority will lead you into daily frustration as you overcome people's wrong assumptions about you. Yes, you can blame the people making those assumptions. But you may be less willing to acknowledge that you're blaming the people in your category for not being more like you.

And I think this is clearly the case with Friedan's analysis of women. There's a certain contempt for the category of women in her view, which makes her deconstruct the whole category (without deconstructing the male category). This benefits the exceptions, but actually harms the majority. And the device of saying there's a feminine "mystique" is exactly the same as the device of saying that social things are "constructs". It's the 60s version of that 80s technique. The mistake people make with both "mystique" and "construct" is to assume that because something is ideology, it's not also real. It's the same with "stereotype". The fact that mystiques, constructs and stereotypes are humanly made doesn't mean that they aren't also completely necessary, and don't also contain huge investment on the part of the people they describe. It can indeed be hubris, and a kind of hatred, to try to deconstruct them, especially "on behalf of" people unlike oneself: the very people they rather accurately represent. There's a link here with the specious arguments of equality of opportunity ideology, which often focuses on exceptions and makes them stand, with grotesque injustice and inaccuracy, for the general mass of people in the very categories the exceptions didn't fit and have escaped. Rich rap stars and Condi Rice tell us little about the black and female experience in America, for example. We need to know less about opportunities and more about actualities.

As for the second part of Nabisco's comment, no, I'm not discounting the whole of Friedan's achievement. I've already said I don't believe cultural arguments can be "refuted", and I've saluted what she achieved with equal rights and abortion legislation.

wow, where to begin

Ok, here we go again... the gay liberation movement is not primarily about being different only in private.

I don't believe that Stonewall (stonewall riots on wikipedia) was about that at its root, it was telling those in authority (the police who kept raiding the bar) that they could not get away with beating gay men simply because they were gay. They had no freedom to even be different even in private (stretching the meaning of private here a little to include a bar that was 'theirs') without some very extreme harrasement- arrests, beating, public humiliation, and so on, that was at the least tolerated by society at the time.

I didn't say it was! But being free en masse and in public is an important part of any identity politics movement.

Focusing on shoulds, aspirations, opportunities and exceptions distracts us from lived experience, and can be a form of concealed contempt for the majority. Friedan does not avoid this contempt, and the way she conceals it is with the description of many elements of lived female experience as a "mystique", a kind of vapor.

Momus, the problem with that statement is that it risks sounding like an endorsement of the status quo. I have less of a problem when you phrase this in terms of "equality of results".

Furthermore, there IS a sense in which opportunities matter (as does utopia). Otherwise, we would we never be able to do what you call for upthread, namely, to talk about what "everyone becoming a woman" means.

Deciding which actualities to celebrate and which to change is important (and difficult), but to do that we need to look at the actualities, not the exceptions and opportunities.

And I think you get into a tangle (possibly a tangle I don't avoid either) when you argue that we need the opportunity to become feminine, because femininity here is also a creation of the status quo. So in a sense you're saying "We need the opportunity to become what people became when they had no opportunities." But it's not totally contradictory, because it's possible that a bad situation produced something which was nevertheless of value.

But aren't exceptions themselves actualities, simply less numerous, and deviating from the norm?

The Calhoun quote again. Also, uh, excuse me, just before you were sticking up for the idea of associating femininity with crinolines, something whose fashion reached its peak (among those who could afford such extravagance) a century and a half ago and are mainly worn with wedding dresses and other really formal outfits -- and hardly always even then? Aren't crinolines a real exceptional exception to the way women in America live their lives?

Now, was Friedan really being "empirical" when she wrote "The Feminine Mystique" based on questionnaires sent to bourgeois women in the suburbs supported by their husbands, and found them to feel, in their leisured affluence, a certain void? She concentrated on a small and privileged set of women, and recommended that they overcome their weltschmertz by getting jobs.

In 1960, there were about 190 million Americans. Let's say half of them were women, 95 million; according to James Patterson's Grand Expectations, 35% of them were working in 1960, and according to this CDC document from that year (page 144), there were 13 million unmarried women that year -- let's generously round that to 15% of the total. I'd guess that a working woman in 1960 is somewhat more likely to be unmarried than a non-working woman is, but let's assume for the sake of argument the 15% figure holds for those who work and don't work alike. So the number of non-working married women in 1960 would be roughly 85% of 65% of 90 million, or a little under 50 million. Going by the figures in this U.S. Census document (check table A-1 on page 27), the bourgeois in that subset must at least number several tens of millions -- definitely priviliged, maybe not the majority, but hardly "small" and certainly not some curiosity cabinet specimen whose experiences are incommensurate with the rest.

You know, I kind of guessed that you might do that. I was going to put a disclaimer saying "the phrase "bell curve" is not a reference to, or endorsement of, the book of the same name", but you know, why bother? When guilt by association stretches that far, every word is potentially damning.

But I'm really hesitant to argue this whole deal with you, because you keep inflating yourself into this realm of philosophical abstraction, despite the fact that every provocative philosophical point you raise is totally trumped -- for me -- by really basic, practical concerns. And because a lot of the Friedan project we started off talking about has to do with those basic, practical concerns -- concrete lack of power to earn, concrete discontentment, concrete suffering. I can entertain your abstractions up to a point, but as soon as they point to a place where people can't eat, or people are miserable, I kind of stop caring how rhetorically functional they are, you know?

But equality of opportunity is the ultimate abstraction! Can I just hear you condemn that, please, just once, Nabisco? Because a system organized around it sure as hell leaves a lot of people unable to eat, pay for healthcare, and all that other practical stuff. (But yeah, at least they could have been president.)

This argument would work in exactly the same way for men as for women. That men are invested in their constructs, that it can be a hubris and a kind of hatred to deconstruct them etc. In that regard, you're just a mirror image of Friedan. You want to deconstruct men, not women. Your argument might be that we live in a partriarchy, that masculinity has proved more harmful than femininity, etc. But the patriarchy itself isn't masculinity. It's the combination of masculinity and femininity. The passiveness of women, their banishment to the private domain enabled the aggressiveness of men, their control of the public domain. As I said somewhere upthread, the feminine ideal you want to preserve can't exist in a vacuum, and its very elements have in any case been shaped by the patriarchy.

now, "dealing in actualities" for people who've been shut out of something may somehow be different from "let them eat cake" - however, scientists will still be searching for what that difference is when we are all in the cold hard ground

wherefore we embrace possibility against those who tell us to deal with the lot fate (by which they mean "the patriarchy") gave us

Momus still has his good verbal skills, but he's badly out of shape on logical thought and argument construction.

The former intellectual heavyweight champion is being repeatedly hammered by nabisco, jz, Tuomas and others. I don't think I've ever seen such telling blows before.

Can he still make a comeback at this last stage?

The passiveness of women, their banishment to the private domain enabled the aggressiveness of men, their control of the public domain.

Aristophanes' play Lysistrata to thread!

And yet we're told by many highly informed commentators, like Richard Sennett, that the public domain is in terrible shape, and in decline. If that's the domain of men...

Are you saying this because you're white and I'm black?

At any rate, it's not an either/or situation; you can't credibly argue that environment is ALWAYS the determining factor in a person's intelligence because of Down's Syndrome and other forms of mental retardation caused by gene mutations/abnormalities, much like you can't credibly argue that genetic factors are ALWAYS the determining factor in a person's intelligence due to the number of "success stories" where people who were clearly headed down destructive paths were put into different environments and excelled beyond even their own expectations (in fact, I have a very good friend who was basically on the verge of failing out of high school who was accepted into an outreach program at Exeter; she went on to completely kick ass there and at Harvard and Columbia and is currently running three social work programs in the NYC area).

The big problem I am having with your arguments (and I suspect others are, too) is that they all boil down to trying to put other people into neat little behavioral boxes in the name of an aesthetic ideal. This may be fine for you but it's not for me (in terms of you trying to put me into a box).

1. Do you really think equality of opportunity sets the whole world to rights?

2. Do you really think it's fine to make statements about individuals and "everybody" but not particular groups at intermediate levels? Why? And if you're so unsure of those middle levels, why are you so sure of the other two?

"It was Betty Friedan who pointed out to American men and women that there was really no reason a woman couldn't be anything she wanted to be. It was rather radical, in 1963, to suggest that a woman could be perfectly happy with neither a husband nor a child to her name. Suffrage gave woman the vote; Betty Friedan gave them hope, and the power to dream, and in so doing she brought us all a step closer to liberation. For if we tolerate a world in which our mothers — and our sisters; and our daughters, and our wives; our closest friends and dearest companions — are not free to follow their dreams and to chase down their passions, in short to seek out their true selves, then that world is a paltry thing, and our own lives within it are greatly diminished."

No it doesn't!

haha momus if you only had any idea how LOLicious this is

George W. Bush

In America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character, on integrity and tolerance toward others and the rule of conscience in our own lives."

GWB

GWB

logic trumps all!

"there is no justice without freedom... there can be no human rights without human liberty... in America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character... every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny..." GWB

etc

"You know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." Margaret Thatcher

just for ppl keeping score

"This sounds like BUSH or THATCHER!!" = not ad-hom, but
"Your lifestyle is in direct contradiction to your professed values" = ad-hom

?

always happy to help

Thomas, you're really not making any progress here. "Conservative" is an ideological label. It is not a reference to someone's personal life. It's a reference to statements they make, statements agreed by most to contain conservative ideology. Statements like "There is no such thing as society" and "Members of groups should learn to be individuals."

--

"There is nothing about being 'female' that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as 'us' in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called 'us', and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity? Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women's dominations of each other... The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity."

it's, uh - not to use words you'll take issue with here - "true," too

Do you see those words "shared" and "collectively"? They mean that, far from escaping the level of groups and categories and becoming individuals, as Thatcher and Tallis would like, or saying they're meaningless, like Haraway, we should stay in them. And it's totally scary to me that I'm the only person arguing that on this thread, and that everybody thinks it's a right wing position!

The Cyborg Manifesto as a whole is a challenge to dialectic binaries, using strategies such as irony and affinity, rather than authenticity and identity. Just for background. I actually think you might enjoy the read, should you get around to it.

Also, it seems to me that you underestimate the extent to which the discourse of self-realization, autonomy, and individual rights that liberal feminists trumpeted, much as it may sound reminiscent of "land of opportunity" speeches, was helpful in dislodging women from their traditionally assigned roles....in order to thereafter (one still hopes) facilitate the formation of new groups. Now, has the baby been thrown out with the bathwater? I'm not sure myself.

I mean that there is a collectivist vision of the women's movement, and an individualist one. It seems to me that Betty Friedan is saying that women are "trapped" in a collectivity and should escape into individuality and the world of men, which is presented as some kind of neutrality. But it isn't neutral.

Also, it seems to me that you underestimate the extent to which the discourse of self-realization, autonomy, and individual rights that liberal feminists trumpeted, much as it may sound reminiscent of "land of opportunity" speeches, was helpful in dislodging women from their traditionally assigned roles

I do think we've only come half way, because what we despise in those "traditionally assigned roles" are essential and very positive qualities like creating life, reproducing social value, taking care of other people. (Strangely enough, these are rather socialist values.) We reject these things because we are still deeply misogynistic. One day perhaps they will return as dominant values, because unless there is some major cataclysm (and it's not at all certain there won't be), the tendency of post-industrial and consumer societies is towards feminine values.

That's funny, because to ME it seems that Betty Friedan is saying that women are "trapped" in a collectivity and should escape into individuality that may include what has been traditionally thought of as "the world of men", which is presented as an option.

no Momus, she's only saying that the collectivity in which they're socially construed wasn't offered to them as an option, and that that's a problem

you already knew that, though

xpost

Speak for yourself, pal. The fact that you ellide disenfranchisement, status as property, and objectification in every sense into "positive qualities" quite frankly gets my goat. Life-giving, caring, etc are NOT what we despise in traditional female roles. It's like you're saying that anyone who aligns themself with a feminist sense of autonomy hates babies. WTF?

Freedom of choice, you mean, Dan? Doesn't that belong next to individualism, enterprise and opportunity in The Ronald Reagan Book of Bedtime Stories For Enterprising Children?

Wait, wait, we're talking about 1963. Women are not disenfranchised, nor property.

Reagan & Bush also enjoyed/enjoy water and food, I hear, you might wanna cut those out of your diet

Homerpallooza Teen1: "I don't even know any more."

Martin Luther King
Simone de Beauvoir
Albert Camus
Antonin Artaud
Virginia Woolf
etc

Thatcherites all, eh Momus?

Jesus, you might as well slap a secretary on the ass and and tell her to shut her trap because the men are talking. While you're at it.

Talking about choices, what about the choice to deconstruct the male gender rather than the female one? Where's that in Betty's bouquet of choices for women?

Friedan, among many flaws we've already gone over, says to women: "If these roles are making us miserable, stifling us and causing us genuine hurt and unhappiness, we need to break free of them." Momus says, what: "But roles, in the abstract, are defensible! And collectivist! Notice me not address the question of whether your particular roles make you want to kill yourselves or not."

We've been over this. Is femininity broken? What if what is breaking it is masculinity? Do we assist masculinity in that, or try to break it instead? Greer: "Betty believed that freeing women would not be the end of civilisation as we know it; I hope that freeing women will be the end of civilisation as we know it."

It's almost sad to see how you've spoiled what was a perfectly legitimate point. Friedan really did wind up suggesting that even women who embraced their traditional role were being a bit conned, brainwashed, held back whether they realized it or not. And that may have elevated the patriarchy's public power over the ones afforded to women. This can be a problem, but not always. For one thing, it still needs to be examined: even if people are happy with their given roles, it's a worthwhile project for them to think very hard about it and decide that for themselves. More importantly, there's a crucial element of solidarity in this kind of feminism. There's a notion that if these roles repress enough women, then they're worth questioning from all women.

xpost yeah Thomas I really regret adding additional points for him to latch onto! So let's restate:

Momus, if you're going to quote or respond to me at all, please let it be to answer the central question. Accepting that societal roles can, in the abstract, be positive and functional things, please explain to me how we judge whether a particular given role is positive or functional. Please explain how it can be positive even if it makes lots of the people assigned to it miserable, wastes their talents, and denies them much control to do anything about those facts.

So you're not very sure that women exist, and you don't think the personal is political? Fucking hell.

Momus, if you're going to quote or respond to me at all, please let it be to answer the central question. Accepting that societal roles can, in the abstract, be positive and functional things, please explain to me how we judge whether a particular given role is positive or functional. Please explain how it can be positive even if it makes lots of the people assigned to it miserable, wastes their talents, and denies them much control to do anything about those facts.

First of all, are you personally agreeing that social roles can be positive and functional things? I want you to answer that before I answer the next bit, please.

"I know you are but what am I? I know you are but what am I? I know you are but what am I?" etc.

This only works if you assume that "female" = "woman".

Logic: 0
Momus: 1

You then doubted that the Lysistrata (a play about women achieving a political objective by withdrawing personal services) was a good political model. Hence you don't believe the personal is political.

This is an extrapolation based on one datapoint.

Scientific Method: 0
Momus: 2

So go on. A great number of people in one role are -- all on their own, and in concrete, palpable ways -- unsatisfied with their place. They're starting to think the role is broken, and that they want to be able to opt out of it. What are you going to tell them?