This week’s readings were incredibly interesting, especially Betty Friedman’s, “The Feminine Mystique” which is a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while now! Betty Friedman dissects what it meant to be a woman in the 1950s and the duties and perils it took to fill the role of the coveted “housewife”. A job many women still to this day idealize and wish to serve. However, with idealization comes disappointment in most occasions.
I didn’t realize the quote, “a woman’s work is never done” was until very recently. The duties of cleaning the house, raising the children, cooking, etc. are only part of what being a housewife entails in contemporary culture. Imagine being a woman in the 1950s, with a most likely emotionally unavailable husband, having to navigate this world knowing there are only a handful of career opportunities for you to choose from. In theory, being a housewife would be a no-brainer, most people are in the mindset that cooking and cleaning is a part of life regardless, might as well make it their “job”. In the text, Betty Friedman writes, “Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep husbands.” This particular quote really emphasizes the yearning for security, comfort, and beauty found in women who most of the times, had nothing else to fall back on in a time where they were barely respected if not perceived as a “quiet, well-mannered wife”. This reading made me better understand a book I am currently reading called, “Play It As It Lays” by Joan Didion. It chronicles the life of a woman in the 1960’s in vignettes of her life as a working actress in Hollywood and her yearning to just ‘be‘. She doesn’t want to be a housewife as well as a mother, she just wants to be a mother. She doesn’t want to sacrifice parts of herself for a man, but she wants a husband. Housewife culture is very much a give and take dynamic, there will rarely be a perfect balance between a self-identifying woman and a housewife. Despite the hard work, the title of a housewife has never been respected in society, especially in the 50s where men were considered the “breadwinners” of the family. The job of maintaining a clean house, as well as raising kids was deemed as “expected” of women. Having a beautiful house and well-mannered kids was something that most men loved to boast about to their friends, along with having a decent job, it was the pinnacle of success to have a beautiful home and family to go along with it, all while underestimating the work that comes along with it.
I really liked Mitch’s snapshot for the week as it detailed the struggles of a woman breaking away from her preconceived role in her society. This, however, rarely comes easy and without cost. So many women in the 50s and 60s especially had to check into mental hospitals for exhaustion and many other untreated mental illnesses. This wasn’t something that many wanted to share and was kept a shameful secret most of the time. Ultimately showing that the job of a housewife isn’t the “easier” role, many women lacked a sense of agency to even go out and do anything other than that.