The Criticisms of The Friedan Mystique Article - Essay Example

One of the first and major criticisms of the feminist movement found in the article “The Friedan Mystique” is that the advances of women for which they have found and that have been hard won are still only exceptions and not the rule. The writer contends that feminism has still not advanced very far in that only a few women, of the many who aspire, have been able to achieve the goal for which they have struggled. During the time that Betty Friedan lived, while she reared her children under the burden that, according to Friedan herself “has no name” (Friedan, 1963), there seemed little hope for women beyond the role of wife, mother, or condemned spinster (should she choose to go against the grain and enter marriage in her youth).

The difficulties that Betty Friedan saw women facing were most likely enough to let her realize that any revolution that would take place in women’s favor would do so at a slow and painstaking pace. Therefore, Friedan might have predicted that at some point during the change, women’s advances would not be commonplace. It might very well have been known to her that during the revolution, women’s wages as compared to men’s would rise to equality—not overnight, but gradually.Friedan’s idea was to grant women the wide variety of choices that men had.

It was not to be conceived that women should abandon child-bearing and rearing altogether and launch out into the business world without concern for family and the perpetuation (or at least prolongation) of the human race. Her goal was to grant women the choice and opportunity to pursue business should they have that desire. In light of this, it would seem that Betty Friedan would have known that some women might consciously choose to remain in the homes, bear and rear children, and take care of their husbands.

Certainly, at the time that she lived and wrote, while some women seemed eager and were clamoring for equality, others seemed quite satisfied with their domestic lot. Some were even critical of the women who wanted the choice to become educated and actually use that education in the corporate and professional world. The existence of these phenomena would have made it possible for Friedan to predict the criticisms of feminism made in “The Friedan Mystique.”As far as feminism now challenges “the structure of family and gender roles,” this fact, with some deep thought, should certainly have been predictable at the time that Freidan wrote her book.

If a woman who has a husband and family also goes out to work, then equality predicts that she is likely to get as tired as her husband does, and that occurrence is also likely to lead to a sharing of the responsibility for doing the work of the house and rearing the children. At that point, an astute thinker would consider that confusion might set in as to whose job it really is to do those things. Though some couples might agree to share the responsibility, given the plethora of homes in which this could happen, others are bound to have a contention about it.

One would think that at the time of Friedan’s writing, it would be possible to conceive that even in academia ideas and conjectures would be put forward about the roles of men and women in a changing household. Change does not happen overnight, and it usually bring conflict between those people who would see the change occur and those who would have things remain the same. These ramifications are all hinged to the removal (or slackening) of the ties that bind women to the home. Therefore, most of the criticisms made in the article “The Friedan Mystique” could have been at least predicted at the time that Betty Friedan wrote her book The Feminine Mystique.

ReferencesFriedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1983.The Friedan Mystique. Commentary Magazine.