Impact of Women in 1950 to 1975 Post War World Discussion How did changing views of women impact lives in the post-war world? Consider domestic roles, work

Impact of Women in 1950 to 1975 Post War World Discussion How did changing views of women impact lives in the post-war world? Consider domestic roles, work outside of the home, and activism in your response. Don’t forget the two additional readings and ethical issues.Please include evidence from attached readings. Phyllis Schlafly
The Power of the Positive Woman (excerpted), 1977
The cry of “women’s liberation” leaps out from the “lifestyle” sections of newspapers and the
pages of slick magazines, from radio speakers and television screens. Cut loose from past
patterns of behavior and expectations, women of all ages are searching for their identity – the
college woman who has new alternatives thrust upon her via “women’s studies” courses, the
young woman whose routine is shattered by a chance encounter with a “consciousness-raising
session,” the woman in her middle years who suddenly finds herself in the “empty-nest
syndrome,” the woman of any age whose lover or lifetime partner departs for greener pastures
(and a younger crop).
All of these women, thanks to the women’s liberation movement, no longer see their predicament
in terms of personal problems to be confronted and solved. They see their own difficulties as a
little cog in the big machine of establishment restraints and stereotypical injustice in which they
have lost their own equilibrium. Who am I? Why am I here? Why am I just another faceless
victim of society’s oppression, a nameless prisoner behind walls too high for me to climb
alone?…
For a woman to find her identity in the modern world, the path should be sought from the
Positive Women who have found the road and possess the map, rather than from those who have
not. In this spirit, I share with you the thoughts of one who loves life as a woman and lives life as
a woman, whose credentials are from the school of practical experience, and who has learned
that fulfillment as a woman is a journey, not a destination.
Like every human being born into this world, the Positive Woman has her share of sorrows and
sufferings, of unfulfilled desires and bitter defeats. But she will never be crushed by life’s
disappointments, because her positive mental attitude has built her an inner security that the
actions of other people can never fracture. To the Positive Woman, her particular set of problems
is not a conspiracy against her, but a challenge to her character and her capabilities.
The first requirement for the acquisition of power by the Positive Woman is to understand the
differences between men and women. Your outlook on life, your faith your behavior, your
potential for fulfillment, all are determine by the parameters of your original premise. The
Positive woman starts with the assumption that the world is her oyster. She rejoices in the
creative capability within her body and the power potential of her mind and spirit. She
understands that men and women are different, and that those very differences provide the key to
her success as a person and fulfillment as a woman.
The women’s liberationist, on the other hand, is imprisoned by her own negative view of herself
and of her place in the world around her….Someone – it is not clear who, perhaps God, perhaps
the “Establishment,” perhaps a conspiracy f male chauvinist pigs – dealt women a foul blow by
making them female. It becomes necessary, therefore, for women to agitate and demonstrate and
hurl demands on society in order to wrest from an oppressive male-dominated social structure
the status that has been wrongfully denied to women through the centuries….Confrontation
replaces cooperation as the watchword of all relationships. Women and men become adversaries
instead of partners….Within the confines of the women’s liberationist ideology, therefore, the
abolition of this overriding inequality of women becomes the primary goal.
This goal must be achieved at any and all costs – to the woman herself, to the baby, to the family,
and to society. Women must be made equal to men in their ability not to become pregnant and
not to be expected to care for babies they may bring into the world. This is why women’s
liberationists are compulsively involved in the drive to make abortion and child-care centers for
all women, regardless of religion or income, both socially acceptable and governmentfinanced….
If man is targeted as the enemy, and the ultimate goal of women’s liberation is independence
from men and the avoidance of pregnancy and its consequences, then lesbianism is logically the
highest form in the ritual of women’s liberation….
The Positive Woman will never travel that dead-end road. It is self-evident to the Positive
Woman that the female body with its baby-producing organs was not designed by a conspiracy
of men but by the Divine Architect of the human race. Those who think it is unfair that women
have babies, whereas men cannot, will have to take up their complaint with God because no
other power is capable of changing that fundamental fact….The Positive Woman looks upon her
femaleness and her fertility as part of her purpose, her potential, and her power. She rejoices that
she has a capability for creativity that men can never have.
The third basic dogma of the women’s liberation movement is that there is no difference between
male and female except the sex organs, and that all those physical, cognitive, and emotional
differences you think are there, are merely the result of centuries of restraints imposed by a maledominated society and sex-stereotyped schooling. The role imposed on women is, by definition,
inferior, according to the women’s liberationists….
There are countless physical differences between men and women. The female body is 50 to 60
percent water, the male 60 to 70 percent water, which explains why males can dilute alcohol
better than women and delay its effect. The average woman is about 25 percent fatty tissue,
while the male is 15 percent, making women more buoyant in water and able to swim with less
effort. Males have a tendency to color blindness. Only 5 percent of persons who get gout are
female. Boys are born bigger. Women live longer in most countries of the world, not only in the
United States where we have a hard-driving competitive pace. Women excel in manual dexterity,
verbal skills, and memory recall….
Does the physical advantage of men doom women to a life of servility and subservience? The
Positive Woman knows that she has a complementary advantage which is at least as great – and,
in the hands of a skillful woman, far greater. The Divine Architect who gave men a superior
strength to lift weights also gave women a different king of superior strength….A Positive
Woman cannot defeat a man in a wrestling or boxing match, but she can motivate him, inspire
him, encourage him, teach him, restrain him, reward him and have power over him that he can
never achieve over her with all his muscle. How or whether a Positive Woman uses her power is
determined solely by the way she alone defines her goals and develops her skills.
The differences between men and women are also emotional and psychological. Without
woman’s innate maternal instinct, the human race would have died out centuries ago….The
overriding psychological need of a woman is to love something alive. A baby fulfills this need in
the lives of most women. If a baby is not available to fill that need, women search for a babysubstitute. This is the reason why women have traditionally gone into teaching and nursing
careers. They are doing what comes naturally to the female psyche. The schoolchild or the
patient of any age provides an outlet for a woman to express her natural maternal need. …The
Positive Woman finds somebody on whom she can lavish her maternal love so that it doesn’t
well up inside her and cause psychological frustrations. Surely no woman is so isolated by
geography or insulated by spirit that she cannot find someone worthy of her maternal love….
One of the strangest quirks of women’s liberationists is their complaint that societal restraints
prevent men from crying in pubic or showing their emotions, but permit women to do so, and
that therefore we should “liberate” men to enable them, too, to cry in public. The public display
of fear, sorrow, anger and irritation reveals a lack of self-discipline that should be avoided by the
Positive Woman just as much as by the Positive Man. Maternal love, however, is not a weakness
but a manifestation of strength and service, and it should be nurtured by the Positive Woman….
Another silliness of the women’s liberationists is their frenetic desire to force all women to
accept the title Ms in place of Miss or Mrs. If Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan want to call
themselves Ms in order to conceal their marital status, their wishes should be respected. But most
married women feel they worked hard for the r in their names; and they don’t care to be
gratuitously deprived of it….
Finally, women are different from men in dealing with the fundamentals of life itself. Men are
philosophers, women are practical, and ’twas ever thus. Men may philosophize about how life
began and where we are heading; women are concerned about feeding the kids today. No woman
would ever, as Karl Marx did, spend years reading political philosophy in the British Museum
while her child starved to death. Women don’t take naturally to a search for the intangible and the
abstract….Where man is discursive, logical, abstract, or philosophical, woman tends to be
emotional, personal., practical, or mystical. Each set of qualities is vital and complements the
other. Among the many differences explained in [Amaury] do Riencourt’s book, [Sex and Power
in History], are the following:
Women tend more toward conformity than men – which is why they often excel in such disciplines as spelling and
punctuation where there is only one correct answer, determined by social authority. Higher intellectual activities,
however, require a mental independence and power of abstraction that they usually lack, not to mention a certain
form of aggressive boldness of imagination which can only exist in a sex that is basically aggressive for biological
reasons.
To sum up: The masculine proclivity in problem solving is analytical and categorical; the feminine, synthetic and
contextual….Deep down, man tends to focus on the object, on external results and achievements; woman focuses on
subjective motives and feelings. If life can be compared to a play, man focuses on the theme and structure of the
play, woman on the innermost feelings displayed by the actors.
De Riencourt provides impressive refutation of two of the basic errors of the women’s liberation
movement: (1) that there are no emotional or cognitive differences between the sexes, and (2)
that women should strive to be like men….An effort to eliminate the differences by social
engineering or legislative or constitutional tinkering cannot succeed, which is fortunate, but
social relationships and spiritual values can be ruptured in the attempt….
The Feminine Mystique: Chapter 1
“The Problem that Has No Name”
Betty Friedan
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange
stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century
in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for
groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub
Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night–she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent
question–“Is this all?”
For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women,
for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek
fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian
sophistication that they could desire–no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts
told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training,
how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook
gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more
feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons
from growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who
wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want
careers, higher education, political rights–the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned
feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those
dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. A thousand expert voices
applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives
from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.
By the end of the nineteen-fifties, the average marriage age of women in America dropped to 20, and was
still dropping, into the teens. Fourteen million girls were engaged by 17. The proportion of women
attending college in comparison with men dropped fro m 47 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1958. A
century earlier, women had fought for higher education; now girls went to college to get a husband. By
the mid-fifties, 60 per cent dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much
education would be a marriage bar. Colleges built dormitories for “married students,” but the students
were almost always the husbands. A new degree was instituted for the wives–“Ph.T.” (Putting Husband
Through).
Then American girls began getting married in high school. And the women’s magazines, deploring the
unhappy statistics about these young marriages, urged that courses on marriage, and marriage counselors,
be installed in the high schools. Girls started going steady at twelve and thirteen, in junior high.
Manufacturers put out brassieres with false bosoms of foam rubber for little girls of ten. And on
advertisement for a child’s dress, sizes 3-6x, in the New York Times in the fall of 1960, said: “She Too
Can Join the Man-Trap Set.”
By the end of the fifties, the United States birthrate was overtaking India’s. The birth-control movement,
renamed Planned Parenthood, was asked to find a method whereby women who had been advised that a
third or fourth baby would be born dead or defective might have it anyhow. Statisticians were especially
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astounded at the fantastic increase in the number of babies among college women. Where once they had
two children, now they had four, five, six. Women who had once wanted careers were now making
careers out of having babies. So rejoiced Life magazine in a 1956 paean to the movement of American
women back to the home.
In a New York hospital, a woman had a nervous breakdown when she found she could not breastfeed her
baby. In other hospitals, women dying of cancer refused a drug which research had proved might save
their lives: its side effects were said to be unfeminine. “If I have only one life, let me live it as a blonde,”
a larger-than-life- sized picture of a pretty, vacuous woman proclaimed from newspaper, magazine, and
drugstore ads. And across America, three out of every ten women dyed their hair blonde. They ate a
chalk called Metrecal, instead of food, to shrink to the size of the thin young models. Department-store
buyers reported that American women, since 1939, had become three and four sizes smaller. “Women are
out to fit the clothes, instead of vice-versa,” one buyer said.
Interior decorators were designing kitchens with mosaic murals and original paintings, for kitchens were
once again the center of women’s lives. Home sewing became a million-dollar industry. Many women no
longer left their homes, except to shop, chauffeur their children, or attend a social engagement with their
husbands. Girls were growing up in America without ever having jobs outside the home. In the late
fifties, a sociological phenomenon was suddenly remarked: a third of American women now worked, but
most were no longer young and very few were pursuing careers. They were married women who held
part-time jobs, selling or secretarial, to put their husbands through school, their sons through college, or
to help pay
the mortgage. Or they were widows supporting families. Fewer and fewer women were entering
professional work. The shortages in the nursing, social work, and teaching professions caused crises in
almost every American city. Concerned over the Soviet Union’s lead in the space race, scientists noted
that America’s greatest source of unused brain-power was women. But girls would not study physics: it
was “unfeminine.” A girl refused a science fellowship at Johns Hopkins to take a job in a real-estate
office. All she wanted, she said, was what every other American girl wanted–to get married, have four
children and live in a nice house in a nice suburb.
The suburban housewife–she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was
said, of women all over the world. The American housewife–freed by science and labor-saving
appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was
healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found
true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a full and equal partner to
man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had
everything that women ever dreamed of.
In the fifteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished and
self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture. Millions of women lived their lives in the
image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in
front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they
ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They baked their own bread, sewed their own
and their children’s clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running all day. They changed
the sheets on the beds twice a week instead of once, took the rughoolag class in adult education, and
pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career. 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 their husbands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world
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outside the home; they wanted the men to make the major decisions. They gloried in their role as women,
and wrote proudly on the census blank: “Occupation: housewife.”
For over fifteen years, the words written for women, and the words women used when they talked to each
other, while their husbands sat on the other side of the room and talked shop or politics or septic tanks,
were about problems with their children, or how to keep their husbands happy, or improve their children’s
school, or cook chicken or make slipcovers. Nobody argued whether women were inferior or superior to
men; they were simply different. Words like “emancipation” and “career” sounded strange and
embarrassing; no one had used them for years. When a Frenchwoman named Simone de Beauvoir wrote
a book called The Second Sex, an American critic commented that she obviously “didn’t know what life
was all about,” and besides, she was talking about French women. The “woman problem” in America no
longer existed.
If a woman had a problem in the 1950’s and 1960’s, she knew that something must be wrong with her
marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a
woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so
ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she…
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