|
COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
When Betty Friedan wrote "The Feminine Mystique," forty-four years ago, she did more than launch a revolution by identifying "the problem that has no name"--the crushing ennui of the modern housewife. She also invited a bit of wordplay that has proved irresistible both to her detractors and to her would-be successors. If "The Feminine Mystique" has acquired the status of a classic, the various iterations of "The Feminine Mistake" have provided something of a barometer of a shifting cultural climate.
In 1967, "Alice in Womanland, or The Feminine Mistake," by the pseudonymous Margaret Bennett, provided a satirical overview of the condition of the American woman, its chapters on marriage, family, and work framed within an extended allusion to Lewis Carroll--a tactic that, like the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," might once have made sense but these days indicates a culture that was on the verge of losing its collective mind. By 1971, the feminist movement was sufficiently well established to merit a parodic counterblast from the humorist Cal Samra, whose own "The Feminine Mistake" was, he claimed, "perhaps the first true masculinist tract since the Koran." When Judith Posner's "The Feminine Mistake" appeared, in 1992, it was time for feminist one-upmanship. Posner, a sociologist influenced by the burgeoning New Age movement, argued that those women who had followed Friedan's counsel and sought to enter the workplace on a par with men had gained nothing but their own subjection to corporate culture, and would do well to cast aside career in favor of personal growth, forming a vanguard for the wholesale reformation of consumer capitalism. "We can even say that the glass ceiling was a blessing in disguise," she maintained. "Today, women can not only see to the glass ceiling, they can also see through it."
The latest "Feminine Mistake"...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
