Betty Friedan in her 1963 book entitled "The Feminine Mystique" gave voice to what she called "the problem that has no name" experienced by many white, middle-class women enmeshed in the Parsonian functionalist reality:
"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 is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?"
In so doing, she touched off what it is now popularly referred to as "the women's movement", "the feminist movement", and, in academic circles, "second-wave feminism." In this book, she drew upon her experience at a class reunion of her 1942 Smith College and a subsequent questionnaire to argue that women who committed themselves to husbands and family lost their identity, value and meaning in the act of becoming housewives. An educated (in 1942), upper-class white woman, Friedan explicitly critiqued Parsons as well as popular incarnations of the Parsonian narrative ("family studies") in the book, arguing:
"In colleges that would never stoop to the 'role-playing lessons' of the so-called functional family course, young women were assigned Talcott Parsons' authoritative 'analysis of sex-roles in the social structure of the United States,' which contemplates no alternative for a woman other than the role of 'housewife,' patterned with varying emphasis on 'domesticity,' 'glamour,' and 'good companionship'.....Parsons, a highly respected sociologist and the leading functional theoretician, describes with insight and accuracy the sources of strain in this 'segregation of sex roles.'...True equality between men and women [in his estimation] would not be 'functional'; the status quo can be maintained only if the wife and mother is exclusively a homemaker or, at most, has a 'job' rather than a 'career' which might give her status equal to that of her husband. Thus Parsons finds sexual segregation 'functional' in terms of keeping the social structure as it is, which seems to be the functionalist's primary concern....
Functionalism was an easy out for American sociologists. There can be no doubt that they were describing things 'as they were' but in so doing, they were relieved of the responsibility of building theory from facts, of probing for deeper truth. They were also relieved of the need to formulate questions and answers that would be inevitably controversial (at a time, in academic circles, as in America as a whole, when controversy was not welcome). They assumed an endless present, and based their reasoning on denying the possibility of a future different from the past. Of course, their reasoning would hold up only as long as the future did not change...Social scientists under the functional banner were so rigidly present-minded that they denied the future; their theories enforced the prejudices of the past, and actually prevented change....
Unfortunately, the female objects of functional analysis were profoundly affected by it. At a time of great change for women, at a time when education, science, and social science should have helped women bridge the change, functionalism transformed 'what is' for women, or 'what was,' to 'what should be.'...In all the concern for adjustment, one truth was forgotten: women were being adjusted to a state inferior to their full capabilities. The functionalists did not wholly accept the Freudian argument that 'anatomy is destiny,' but they accepted whole-heartedly an equally restrictive definition of woman: woman is what society says she is."
Friedan's analysis resonated with many housewives and became a best-seller in 1963. What followed were successive efforts to reform the labour force, education, and the law to knock down barriers which kept women from realizing their "full capabilities." In turn, feminists theorists in the academy have alternatively drawn upon and critiqued Friedan for both calling attention to the effects of the unequal distribution of power in the functionalist family (and between women and men in general) as well as for her class, race, and sexuality biases. Friedan, for example, later went on to become a founding member and President of the National Organization for Women and discouraged its involvement in lesbian causes, famously (and allegedly) calling lesbianism the "lavender menace."
It is in tandem with these political changes that feminist theorists in the academy first called attention to the significance of gender and inequality that characterized most political, institutional, and family life in North America. The readings this week embrace the significance of gender, but have expanded their analyses to account for interactional dynamics that reproduce inequality to the intersectionality of other forms of oppressions such as race, class, and sexuality which constitute most individuals' lived experiences. In this, three points are of import:
1. Ferree provides a nice overview of the academic field, including especially the notion of intersectionality first defined by Kimberle Crenshaw and the effects of which are interestingly addressed in this clip by sociologist Michael Kimmel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgaOK74HqiA
2. Kimmel also represents the expansion of the field to address the notion of masculinity and which is addressed in the second article (Pyke) with respect to class. She importantly discusses men's and women's power in these arrangements, including how women enforce and reproduce gender inequality in their relationships.
3. Finally, Hochschild brings together sociological analysis and cultural representation with the lived, emotional experience of many women. While we will explore "feeling rules" more in-depth more next week, she importantly addresses how difficult it is and how we navigate expectations of our own and others' emotional understanding of care and emotion in the (post)modern family.
Please label your posts with your name and "Feminism and Care Perspectives".
Anna-Liisa
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