Jill Ker Conway & On the Feminine Mystique

Jill Ker Conway's life is interesting and filled with careful manuvering, and our small group discussion on Monday night really showed how difficult her situation was. The quotes that Ms. Robicseck shared in class highlighted the climate of the time. Her struggles and her experience is a unique perspective on a time when feminism was begining to take hold, and there is no doubt that she inspired and encouraged generations of women to come, as well as made her fellow men in the workplace understand her own needs and abilities to be respected. On that note, she was flipping between two worlds at all times. The world of men she was fighting to enter, the "boys club" per se, and her own world as a female.

Also on the culture at Govs, I don't think it's terrible. Could be better, but also isn't exactly the worst thing. I think yes it's a very male dominated culture, it feels like a boys club a lot of times across all areas of life. The comic was terrible, but also I think it has a lot to say about our own culture and what we accept and condone. Even within the music and the way we talk about each other, it's pretty obvious and clear what my role as a female has been made out to be. The joke that's been thrown around is that she's going to college for her Mrs. degree just annoys me at this point. I'd love to be seen as a little more than being prepped up for marriage. Maybe, I dunno, god forbid I'm going to get educated!

So on the feminine mystique... I do believe that it was an incredible catalyst for feminism to take hold. But I think we can trace the problems within the feminist movement today back to Betty Friedman. Feminism was aimed at the white female suburban class, and contrary to how she portrayed herself, she was not a cooped up wife out in the country tied down to her children and her husband. In fact, she was also a Smith graduate and lived out a fairly colorful life as a journalist for a women. She was a feminist long before she might have known what that meant, long before she had even decided to write about it and had engaged in activism before she wrote it. This is actually a large critism of her work, (and intersectionaly issues of exluding black women and also lesbians-- surprisingly I believe she is the one that coined the term "the Lavender Menace") and is written about in a biography of her life, Betty Friedman and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz. So she built up this image for herself to perpetuate her cause to make herself more relatable to the people she was trying to reach. I guess I'm just wondering in hindsight if she had to have made that choice. Maybe she did, but I'm not sure if it was justifiable or what her process was exactly in making that choice. And if she was going to artificially create this image for herself, why she had to exclude other groups of people. Just food for thought I guess.