Inequality In Betty Friedan

Throughout history when a girl is born, it wasn’t received as a blessing. Many cultures see this as a curse. A girl’s anatomy seemed to be her destiny as Freud once said. A girl is born with the burden of being simply a woman. Betty Friedan experienced being a woman in the middle class suburbs of America. And although it did not discuss the struggles of all women, it did give us a glimpse of a particular group of women and their struggles as housewives and mothers. In the book, Friedan describes the injustices women faced when they were forced to go back home after the war. The short lived freedom of being able to achieve a college education and put it to good use was swept away from them. Forcing them back to their homes and hypnotizing them

We are treated differently because they make us believe we are not good enough, smart enough, and capable of holding such positions of power that men have held throughout history. In the Hollywood industry, women are experiencing inequality in the form of stereotyping and unequal pay. Women are not being paid the same income compared to men, something that has been happening for too long. To date the U.S. Supreme court has been unwilling to rule on comparable worth (Hunter College, 377). Not to mention, women are sexualized to extremes in order to make profit on films. They are forced to change their appearance, weight and demeanor in order to obtain a leading role. It also doesn’t help that most of these people making these decision are male.

In the Media, women are feed the false illusion of what the perfect woman is supposed to be, what body type is ideal, what color of skin is preferred. In magazines, women are bombarded with suggestions of what men really want by “experts”. Which again, are mostly men. We are not allowed to be our unique selves, to be different, to love who we are. Equally speaking, social media has become a monster in falsely allowing women to believe there is such thing as perfection. Photo shopped pictures are idolized and ordinary women feel the need to change their bodies. When all they want is to feel accepted and

Thus Friedan’s persona and political positions she favored seemed to be entirely of a piece with her liberal feminism. The non-inclusion of women of color and of lower working classes agree with its goals such as; the right to an abortion and equality in job hiring. However, most women of color dismiss the label of feminism because the movement had largely focused on the concerns of the middle class white women. Attempts to address the racism of the feminist movement have largely been token efforts without lasting effects. Many young women of color still feel alienated from a mainstream feminism that doesn’t explicitly address race (Disch, 639). Feminism in the United States has stagnated in part because it has largely neglected a class and race analysis. Feminism can’t survive by helping certain women climb the corporate latter while ignoring women on welfare. Feminism has to recruit beyond just the college