The Feminine Mystique

Reading this one felt like a really lengthy, sometimes tedious Feminism 101 course. After finishing all 532 pages of this tome, I’m mostly grateful that I was born in 1978. I can’t imagine not having earned my own money from the time I was 16. As meager as my salary was during my teens and early 20’s, I made my own money and it was MINE. Nor can I imagine not going to college or being discouraged from getting an education just because I’m a woman. Huh? But fifty years ago this would not have been unusual.

So, my feelings are mixed. I’m grateful to Betty Friedan and all the other women who fought so hard to get us to this point, where it’s totally  normal for women my age to get a good education, a decent job and a fair paycheck. It’s not to say that things are perfect and sexism doesn’t exist anymore. In her epilogue, BF was so sure that there would be a strong female candidate for president and VP in 1976, and we all know that even in 2008 no female managed to get into office for pres or VP. And the women who ran weren’t exactly treated fairly.

But things have come a long way since 1962. Ladies, imagine a time when magazine editors assumed you had no interest in politics, current affairs, or basically anything other than children and marriage. When women were only 35% of the workforce. When colleges prepped you to be a wife and mother and discouraged you from pursuing any “difficult” subjects like science or math. When you’d have a tough time finding examples of women successfully balancing career and family life. You were either a career woman or a housewife, and no one encouraged mixing the two.

BF said that at this time women were only encouraged to be housewives and mothers. Their resulting boredom and unhappiness is what she referred to “the problem that has no name.” I guess what makes me uneasy about this book is that “the problem that has no name” was really a state only experienced by middle- to upper-class white women in American suburbs. BF describes housewives who are so miserable that they suffered from depression to the point of becoming addicted to tranquilizers, seeing psychiatrists, attempting suicide, and spending time in loony bins. Now, was this really the norm or was she describing a few extreme cases? Hard to say. But I do believe that women were not encouraged to pursue careers that used their talents and intellects. They were so unsatisfied that they got their kicks from buying new household products and stretching out the housework to fill the time available just so they had something to do. They claimed to be exhausted, but were they really just depressed? I’m sure any women home all day with kids will confirm that it IS exhausting. But I’m sure a lot of it was just malaise from being stuck in the house all day too. The point is that I don’t think this was a problem for anyone in the lower classes, because those women always needed to bring in a paycheck to help support their families. I wonder what percent of families ever fit this neat picture of the nuclear family where the dad is the breadwinner and the mom is  a housewife?

Today this isn’t the reality for most of us. I personally don’t know any women who can afford to stay home with their kids these days. I know a few who would like to, but they need two incomes in their household. So in that sense, this problem has been solved by inflation and a shitty economy. But for the women who are stay at home moms today, it’s their choice, not something they’ve been forced to do. As my godmother reminded me recently, the important thing is that we have the choice to work or stay home. But would I even want to stay home with my kid even if the husband and I could afford that? Most women I know are happy to balance work and home life, so that they still get to have adult conversations and use their brains for at least part of the day. What I think most of us would like is jobs that allowed more scheduling flexibility to minimize the time kids have to spend at daycare and whatnot. Some people have better luck with this than others. So that is the next challenge I guess.

Other than focusing on this one segment of somewhat rich white people, my other problems with the book were sort of not BF’s fault. Like anyone else, her opinions were shaped by the information available at the time. Some of her ideas are really outdated and shocking as I read them in 2012. She blamed overbearing mothers who had nothing better to do than smother their children for everything from homosexuality to autism. Huh?! She talked a lot about how educators were concerned with “a new and frightening passivity, softness and boredom in American children” and to her a son being gay was an extension of this passivity. According to her, dominant moms stopped sons from growing up intellectually and sexually. Well, I think by now most sane people agree that folks are born gay or straight or somewhere in between. Let’s not put this one on mom. The autism thing had something to do with parents who set a bad example of not engaging in a productive way with humanity or something. It didn’t really make any sense. Yeah, they didn’t understand much about the disease in 1962, and they still don’t know a lot in 2012. But again, I don’t think we can blame housewives for autism.

But I do understand the concern with kids who were not given enough independence and had too much time on their hands. BF describes college kids who no longer knew how to manage their time or take initiative to organize activities. Any teacher, including my mom, can tell you that today the trend continues. Some parents do everything for their kids, and so kids now get to college not knowing how to write their own terms papers or do their own laundry. NOT GOOD! I get so mad when parents come into the library to do their kids’ homework! I thought the goal of parenting was to teach a kid to be independent? So hovering over your kids every minute of the day might not be such a great thing for the little darlings. I have fond memories of the summers when my sister was in charge of me and my cousin because our moms were working downtown. Not only did we have a lot of fun and act really silly having the house to ourselves, but we learned some independence. My sister started cooking at this time and today it’s become her career. We definitely knew how to do our own damn laundry and we didn’t count on mom and dad to do everything for us.

Another problem with women staying home was that it put a huge burdens on their husbands not only financially, but also emotionally. Being the center of the wife’s universe sounds like a recipe for marriage disaster to me! BF argues that all humans, men and women alike, wouldn’t reach their full potential until they found jobs that were creative and contributed to society in some way. I agree that we should all aspire to use our particular talents and strengths in our jobs. But the reality for most people is that they just have to earn a paycheck to support themselves and their kids. I think her view was sort of elitist, assuming that all men has these awesome spiritually fulfilling jobs that women were unfairly kept from. Uh, as far as I know, most men, especially if they were the sole breadwinners, had to work some pretty shitty jobs to support their families. So her world of academia and white-collar jobs was again not the reality for most people. I think she was kind of living in a bubble. I doubt most men were super happy at this time either.

But of course we should all do our best to get a good education and take the best advantage of it. As she puts it, if women are well-educated and get decent work experience when they’re young, there’s no need to marry for anything but love. Or heck, you don’t have to get married at all! I think most of us have reached that point. But I’ll never forget the mother of my college ex-boyfriend who warned me to make sure I finished college and got a good job to support myself. She had been married for 20+ years when her husband divorced her for another women. She had no college degree or work experience and had to find a way to enter the workforce in her 40’s. Needless to say, she worked her ass off at a crappy job with long hours and low pay. I took that lesson to heart. She’s not the only woman of our mothers’ generation to experience this by a long shot. Even though I have an awesome hard-working husband, I can’t count on him to make all the money. Someday he might not be around for one reason or another, and I still would have to support myself and my kids. I can’t imagine not having my own income to fall back on. That’s putting yourself in an extremely vulnerable position. And these days either of us could lose our jobs out of the blue. So no 1960’s housewife life for me, even if that’s what I wanted!

I guess where BF really started to lose me was when she compared these miserable 1960’s housewives to concentration camp victims. Nope, I’m not making that up. There’s a whole chapter about it. I think today she’d probably use a Walking Dead zombie reference of some sort. She was saying that women who don’t use their brains are basically dead inside. Okay, sure, but comparing American suburban housewives who lived pretty cozy lives by the standards of most of the world to concentration camp victims is absolutely ridiculous and insulting. By saying something this melodramatic, she undermined all of the valid points she made throughout the rest of the book.

It also leads to me ask: were all of these housewives so unhappy? Maybe some women genuinely enjoyed staying home and running their houses and raising their kids. Some women even enjoy that today! I don’t think every woman in this era ended up in the psych ward. But again, the point was having options. What’s frustrating is that the media at this time ran with the idea that all feminists hated men and wanted to destroy the American family. As BF said in her epilogue, “the media began to publicize, in more and more sensational terms, the more exhibitionist, down-with-men, down-with-marriage, down-with-childbearing rhetoric and actions. Those who preached the manhating, sex/class warfare threatened to take over the New York NOW [National Organization for Women] and the national NOW and drive out the women who wanted equality but who also wanted to keep on loving their husbands and children.” In 2012, people still can’t shake this idea that if you’re a feminist, you are a crazy power-hungry man-hater. Why??? All we’ve ever wanted is to be treated like intelligent capable humans, equal to men.

We’ve come a long way, but any young woman who thinks that feminism irrelevant to her life is kidding herself. A new book called How to be a Woman  humorously addresses the fact that we’re all reaping the benefits of all the hard work that BF and her pals did for us. It’s on my to-read list. So, even though The Feminine Mystique was a tough read, it’s still an important book. We can’t afford to forget how we got to this point.

The Power of Joseph Campbell

The Power of Myth is full of so many ideas on mythology, religion & modern culture that I had to just pick a few favorite quotes and go from there.

p.26: “There you have the three great Western religions, Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam-and because the three of them have three
different names for the same biblical god, they can’t get on together.
They are stuck with their metaphor and don’t realize its reference.”

JC talks a lot about how all the major religions use the same basic stories, ideas and images. Another one of his major points is that none of these stories were meant to be taken literally. They are metaphors about how to live our lives in a moral way. 

 p.45: “All over the earth people recognize these images. Whether I’m
reading Polynesian or Iroquois or Egyptian myths, the images are the
same, and they are talking about the same problems.”

I remember taking a comparative religions class during my junior year of high school and feeling amazed at how similar the ideas were from all over the world. The same concepts kept appearing in a goddesses of the world class I took in college. There is something comforting in comparing these stories and realizing that we’re all dealing with the same human experiences and problems. But having said that, some religions make more sense than others to me. And I tend to like the ones that don’t force their ideas on others, or you know, kill people for believing something different from what they believe.

p. 65: “The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is
wrong. There is an oft-quoted verse in Sanskrit, which appears in the
Chinese Tao-se Ching as well: ‘He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know.
He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows.’ For in this context, to
know is not to know. And not to know is to know.”

To me this is the basic wisdom of getting older. When you’re 18, you think you know everything. As life gets more complicated, you realize that you don’t know shit. It’s humbling. But the more you keep your mind open to not knowing, the more you learn.

p. 68: “Astronomy and physics have simply eliminated that as a
literal, physical possibility. But if you read ‘Jesus ascended into
heaven’ in terms of its metaphorical connotation, you see that he has
gone inward-not into outer space but into inward space, to the place
from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source
of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward,
but the reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with
him by going inward.”

p.69: “Reincarnation, like heaven, is a metaphor.”

Again, all of this stuff is metaphorical.  Science took away the possibility of a physical place in the sky where we go after we die. Forgive me if you are a religious soul who believes in a literal heaven. But I don’t. I do like the idea of ascending to a more spiritual form of consciousness within. And reincarnation is the idea of starting a new life to learn from the mistakes in the previous one. But we all have the opportunity to start over every morning when we wake up and make better decisions that we did the day before. And that is why life is beautiful. So, no, I don’t believe you were Cleopatra or Billy the Kid in a “previous life.” It’s all a symbolic idea of renewal!

p. 71: “Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield
yourself, and the book talks to you an builds itself. To a certain
extent, you become the carrier of something that is given to you from
what has been called the Muses-or, in biblical language, “God.” That
is no fancy, it is a fact.”

Oh, JC, how I want to believe you. Where are my Muses?! Maybe their voices are being drowned out by the sounds of E News and the Bachelor in my apartment! In my idealistic youth I used to believe in divine inspiration. But now I realize you have to sit and force yourself to do the work of creating something. Is there something in our subconscious that leads to great creativity? I think so, but it requires a lot of hard work to get at it.

p. 78: “That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don’t teach
until you are asked. You don’t force your mission down people’s
throats.”

A to the Men, JC! Yeah, Buddhist monks aren’t the ones who show up at your door trying to preach to you. Eastern religions appeal to me more and more as I get older for just this reason. It’s more of an internal journey and you have to come to it on your own when you’re ready. Nothing turns more off more than someone trying to force me to convert to their ideas, or insisting that they’re right and everyone else’s ideas are wrong. And that seems especially silly when, as discussed above, the major religions all preach the same basic ideas of right and wrong. Der. Can’t we all just get along?

p. 82: “The hero is the one who comes to participate in life
courageously and decently, in the way of nature, not in the way of
personal rancor, disappointment, or revenge.”

All mythology has stories of the hero’s journey. The basic idea is that we all go on a journey where we have to grow the fuck up, stop acting like kids, and take on whatever challenges life puts in our path. You can either face your problems or you can run away like a lil bitch. But then a three-headed monster will probably eat you. So better to prepare yourself with some weapons and stuff. Ha. But…pssst…the monsters and weapons are symbolic, get it? I had a few ex-boyfriends who were sort of like mythological monsters, but luckily I slayed their asses. Kidding, kidding… Dealing with a chronic illness?  Finding my true career path in life? Taking on the challenge of becoming a parent? Those are battles I will keep fighting every day, folks. And I’m sure you have of plenty your own.

p. 153: “BM: That’s a wonderful image, though-the mother as hero. JC: It
has always seemed to me. That’s something I learned from reading these
myths. BM: It’s a journey-you have to move out of the known,
conventional story of your life to undertake this. JC: You have to be
transformed from a maiden to a mother. That’s a big change, involving
many dangers.”

Thanks, guys! It’s nice to give the ladies some credit on this one! Obviously this is my current path, maiden to mom. It’s a lil scary, but I’m no wuss. I can handle it.

“BM: There are women today who say the spirit of the Goddess has been in
exile for five thousand years, since- JC: You can’t put it that far
back, five thousand years. She was a very potent figure in Hellenistic
times in the Mediterranean, and she came back with the Virgin in the
Roman Catholic tradition. You don’t have a tradition with the Goddess
celebrated any more beautifully and marvelously than in the twelfth
and thirteenth-century French cathedrals, every one of which is called
Notre Dame.”

As I said earlier, I took a whole class on goddesses of the world and wow it was fun. Of course a lot of people get caught up in feminist ideas of “Why is God always called He in the western world? What happened to the Goddess?” But JC does a pretty good job of explaining the history of how different religions evolved. Basically, in ancient times when societies were more agricultural, the Goddess was a symbol of the ferility of the earth. And then some war like dudes from the West took over and with them brought a more aggressive male idea of God. And then there are Eastern religions always had male and female gods who got married and had babies and stuff. In nature, both male and female energy is needed to maintain balance in life. And God, or whatever you call the higher power, is actually above and beyond the concept of gender. The rest is again, just metaphorical stuff. But I always loved the idea of Mary worship in Catholicism. They can try to say that she’s not as powerful as God or Jesus, but c’mon. If I have a problem, I’m going straight to the mama. And many people do. I think Mary is really in charge here. 🙂 The idea of the Goddess is actually alive in many forms around the world as we speak.

p. 22-223: “JC: And so, when you stand before the cathedral of
Chartres, you will see over one of the portals of the western front an
image of the Madonna as the throne upon which the child Jesus sits and
blesses the world as its emperor. That is precisely the image that has
come down to us from most ancient Egypt. The early fathers and the
early artists took over these images intentionally. BM: The Christian
fathers took the image of Isis? JC: Definitely. They say so themselves.
Read the text where it is declared that: ‘those forms which were
merely mythological forms in the past are now actual and incarnate in
our Savior.”

Yeah, Isis and the Virgin Mary are like BFFs. The story is very much the same. Christianity took a bunch of pagan ideas and just gave them new names. To me, this proves that all religions just borrow ideas from each other and although it’s fun to read about, I have a hard time taking any of it seriously. But if you are a religious person, I guess it is just proof of the collective human experience? You decide!

“No one knows what the actual date of the birth of Jesus might have
been, but it has been put on what used to be the date of the winter
solstice, December 25″

Yep, pagan stuff repackaged. I loved reading about this stuff when I was younger. Fascinating.

p. 238: BM: You have said that the point of all these pioneers in love is that they decided to
be the author and means of their own self-fulfillment, that the
realization of love is to be nature’s noblest work, and that they were
going to take their wisdom from their own experience and not from
dogma, politics, or any current concepts of social good. And is this
the beginning of the romantic idea of the Western individual taking
matters into his or her own hands?

JC: Absolutely. You can see examples in Oriental stories of this kind
of thing, but it did not become a social system. It has now become the
ideal of love in the Western world.”

Here they were talking about courtly love and the troubadours in France, I think? The idea was that this was the first time in history that romantic love was valued over arranged marriages. Obviously arranged marriages still exist in certain cultures, and they can be successful in their way if the intentions of the families are pure. But I am a Westerner and a romantic fool at heart. One of the greatest triumphs of my life so far was choosing my husband because he was truly the best person for me. No one else’s opinion mattered.

p. 252-253: “That’s very mysterious. It’s almost as though the future
life you’re going to have with that person has already told you, This
is the one whom you will have that life with…It’s almost as though
you were reacting to the future.”

Anyone who has really fallen in love knows about this experience. You can’t explain it, but you KNOW this person and recognize them as THE ONE right away.  Yeah, it is one of life’s great mysteries, but listen to your instincts when it happens. They are never wrong. And if you try to choose a partner for money, security, status, or only based on looks, or because your friends think he’s a nice guy or whatever… you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of misery. Better to be alone and wait for the real thing. Okay, I’m done now.

What I Read on My Mental Vacation

Now that the holiday weekend is over, I should explain the mental vacation I’ve taken the past few weeks. After steadily reading some heavy classics and baby prep books all summer, I needed a break. I picked up Jennifer Weiner’s Next Best Thing. In doing so, I’ve proven that writers can successfully promote themselves on Twitter. I’d always heard that Weiner wrote intelligent but fun stories for women, brainy chick-lit if you will. But she really hooked me by tweeting hilarious comments about the Bachelor and the Bachelorette this year. How many times did I think one of her quips was so funny that I had to read it aloud to my viewing companions Sis and Husband? I lost count. So I finally grabbed her newest novel. The Next Best Thing is charming and heartwarming and honest. She writes about real, imperfect women who have complex emotions and thoughts and aren’t supermodels. In this one, her main character Ruth is a TV writer who pens a sitcom about a girl and her  grandmother. Unfortunately the show gets hacked to death by the studio, turning her beloved characters into size-zero shallow stereotypes. But in the process she learns a lot and falls in love and manages to get her revenge on the Hollywood execs. Insanely likeable is how I would describe
Weiner’s writing.

I also skimmed through Mindful Birthing, which explains how moms-to-be can use meditation techniques to handle childbirth without freaking
the fuck out. I’ve been interested in meditation for the past couple of years. I’m not a religious person, but I like the concept of making time every day to take some deep breaths, calm down, and focus your mind. These techniques can be used in any situation. Theoretically you can use your breathing and meditation exercises to keep calm during labor and go with the flow of childbirth instead of feeling afraid and stressed. Now, there’s no way to avoid pain in this situation, but again, you can control your reaction to it. The only thing that bothered me about this book is the assumption that I will want to reject all forms of medication in favor of natural  childbirth. I like to keep an open mind, but I think this trend of women forgoing pain medication during childbirth is absolutely ridiculous. If there’s any time to take advantage of modern Western medicine, it’s during labor. Hello? Ladies, you don’t have to prove how tough you are. We know that women have been giving birth for millions of years
and that we’re strong enough to do it without an epidural. But….why? Why put yourself through more pain that is necessary? I don’t get it
at all. Many studies have been done to prove that no harm is done to the baby. So why are you torturing yourselves? I’m mostly trying to
mentally prep for all scenarios, like if I get to the hospital without enough time to do an epidural. Anything can happen, and I will go with the flow. But I want the drugs. Sorry. I believe in combining the best of old world wisdom with modern medicine, if that makes any sense. So please don’t write comments about how drugs make babies crazy and the only proper way to give birth is sitting in a hut in the woods in a bathtub with a doola and a life coach holding your hands instead of a nurse or doctor. I’m just not that kind of hippie girl, okay? I know there are pros and cons to all the available options. But give me my nice new hospital in downtown Chicago and all the painkillers it offers, thanks much.

That was a long detour, sorry. Back to books. I’m also listening to Rules of Civility as an audiobook, and I highly recommend it. I’m a sucker for good historical fiction, and this one is set in 1938 in Manhattan. A girl named Kate who works as a law clerk meets a bunch of socialites and her world gets turned upside down by them. It’s a fun era to explore, post-Gatsby, pre-World War II, and the female characters seem inspired by sassy, fast talking screen idols of the era: Katherine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, Rosalind Russell.

But to dive back into classics, I’m reading some nonfiction that may or may not be considered classics. One of the problems with working in a library is that every day some shiny new book catches your eye. Soon you end up with five or six books at a   time sitting on your coffee table without the time to read them all. The current pile falls into the “I’ve always meant to read that” category.  One of my meditation books by Jon Kabbat Zinn referenced Joseph Campbell. JC wrote about mythology and how it still influences society today. He did a great PBS series with Bill Moyers that was filmed at Skywalker Ranch in the 80s. The Power of Myth is the book version of their conversations. This is geeky, fascinating stuff. Campbell was a big influence on George Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy. So I’ll write more about that in a future post.

And then, since September is back to school time, I’m putting myself through a self-taught course called Feminism After 1960. Watching Mad
Men with my husband inspired me to pick up Betty Friedan’s TheFeminine Mystique. So what’s changed for American women since Joan and Peggy’s heyday? Everything and nothing. I haven’t gotten that far but the introduction contains rants about padded bras for 8-year-old girls and over-nutured children who can’t make decisions for themselves because their moms do everything for them. Sound familiar? Watch an episode of Toddlers and Tiaras or read an article about helicopter parenting and it could be 1962 again, eh?

And then the latest issue of Elle featured articles written by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Naomi Wolf, two big names in the 90s feminist movement. I’ve always wanted to read the Beauty Myth, so that’s on its way to me. And today I checked out Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by EW. In Elle, she talked about how the book’s cover enraged people in 1998 when it was published. In the photo, she’s topless and giving the finger. Scandalous! Well, in 2012, my husband picked up his book off the hold shelf at the library and didn’t even notice topless EW next to it. “How desensitized have we become as a society that I didn’t notice a picture of a naked woman?” Good  question. hus. I thought I could always count on you to act like a heterosexual oaf. Geez. Anyway, I remember thinking EW was super annoying in the 90s. Prozac Nation struck me as the whining of a overpriveleged, over-medicated white girl. So I guess I’m wondering what 15 years of perspective will leave me thinking about 90s riot grrrl feminism. Classics? Betty F, yes, for sure. The Beauty Myth? Quite possibly. Bitch? Hmm… probably not, but by now the 90s are considered retro. It will be interesting to compare the social atmosphere of my high school and college years to what’s going on today. I’m starting to feel old but it’s nice to have more years of experience to draw from.