The Feminine Mystique

This idea that we should be able to have sex without there being the natural consequences of sex, which obviously is children.

In 1963, Betty Friedan published a book called The Feminine Mystique.

If you've never heard of it, there's a reason that you've never heard of it.

A lot of times the modern feminist movement doesn't like to talk about it, but she argued that suburban homemakers were deeply unfulfilled by being confined to domestic roles.

And then you had, underneath this all, this rumble of discontent among s- women.

1953 comes, and Betty Friedan, who you may have heard of, publishes a book called The Feminine Mystique, and she's a well-educated, middle class, white woman who's talking to her friends who graduated from, I think, Smith or Vassar, one of the Seven Sisters, and they're like, "This can't be my life.

I can't be ser- ...

You know, this can't be my only choice.

Hmm.

I have a couple of books here.

You didn't know there was a reading list for tonight, did you? But I know that this is one of your favorites.

Here's New York by E.B. White.

Amy Richards, who I have the great pleasure of working with for 20 years, who runs what she calls a feminist boot camp in which young people come to New York, young men too, and visit all kinds of social justice projects and it changes their lives.

She could probably be my granddaughter, I have to figure it out.

She has written more books than me, done more lectures now.

There are just so, so many.

I love this question.

This is such a smart question because it took me two decades to realize that the feminine mystique was in bookstores by that summer.

And I have everyone in such a bubble in the film that the women are not talking about what's going on out there.

And so one new thing I brought in here, again, to, you know, none of these women would say, oh, I'm a feminist now.

But to start thinking about this.

And again, I try to make it realistic.

So we have one of our wonderful bungalow colony characters, a woman named Bunny, who bought the feminine mystique because she thought it was about beauty tips.

And she, wouldn't you from that title? And she opens it up and she's reading about women saying, is this all? You know, I cook and I take the kids to camp and you know, and my husband comes home and I'm tired.

But what I would say about that is that any good thing that feminism takes credit for could have been obtained without feminism, and in fact, many things were being obtained without feminism.

The fact is, for example, the trend in women's participation in higher education- And women's participation in the labor force, those trends started around the turn of the 20th century, Todd, well before World War II, and certainly well before The Feminine Mystique and Gloria Steinem and the rest of it.

But what feminism did was to take that trend that was already in motion and claim credit for it, number one, and number two, direct it in a very particular direction and assign a particular meaning to it.

And so, no, I'm not willing to give feminism credit for that, not at all.