Summary: The Perfect Housewife

As the 1960s raged on, women were beyond tired of fifty five hours a week of mindless chores such as cooking, ironing their husbands shirts and keeping the house spotless. Many housewives felt as if they were losing their personalities.

Books like Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care gave advice on how women should raise their children, nonetheless it was written by a man who would barely be the caretaker of his own children, and “Home Economic” books, which many of them were also written by men, gave high school girls and women starting their own families tips on how to be the perfect housewife.

Women also got the idea imprinted that they needed to conform to the “perfect housewife” model because this is how women were portrayed in films and

television. Such as Lucille Ball who starred in the hit sitcom I Love Lucy and other shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show. In I Love Lucy, Ball played the clumsy and often confused wife of Ricky Ricardo, who often flubbed up and sought the help of her husband to fix her mistakes.

Soon, that would begin to change as women no longer felt that their sole purpose in life was to raise children and sit idly by their husbands who were the sole breadwinners of the family.
Sharisse Wilkerson
Women around the United States and the world would take action in what would become known as the Second Wave of Feminism. They would no longer sit aside and suffer under patriarchal politics.

As with any uprising, the messages and ideas of second-wave feminism spread like wildfire and were often distorted by the media.

The beliefs of feminists varied from group to group and city to city, from one race to another, even down to the individual woman. Second Wave Feminism addressed a wide range of issues, such as a social and economic justice, end to sexist portrayals of women in pop culture, equal pay, establishment of rape crisis and shelters for battered women, family, sexuality, and probably the most controversial issue of the time, reproductive rights.

After World War II, there was a revived perception of femininity that came with the post-war boom, that included new economic growth, a baby boom that lasted until the mid sixties, a setting in family filled suburbs and the ideal of flawless marriages. The Second Wave of Feminism came as a late reaction to the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Sharisse Wilkerson
Second Wave Feminist drew inspirations from many places, such as the very much alive and ongoing civil rights movement that produced great motivational speakers and they also drew inspiration from activists such as Gloria Steinem, Alice Paul, Susan B. Anthony and many others.

It is widely accepted that movement lasted from the early 1960s throughout the 70s and into the early 1980s, although the exact years of when the movement both begun and ended are almost impossible to pinpoint. It is, however widely accepted that the Second Wave of Feminism in the United States was sparked by a controversial book written by a woman named Betty Friedan, and President John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on the Status of Women released its report on gender inequality. The report, along with Friedan’s book revealed the amounts of discrimination against women, which led to the formation of many local, state and federal government’s women’s groups and many more independent women’s organizations.

Long before Betty Friedan published her book that inspired a generation Simone de Beauvoir published the book, The Second Sex, in 1949 which partly inspired Friedan’s book and it quickly became a staple and a classic of the feminist movement.

De Beauvoir wrote that male-centered ideology was accepted as the norm and the fact that women were capable of menstruation and getting pregnant does not make them the “second sex.”

The new feminism movement called for forward thinking and radical women who were empowered to make change despite their “second class citizenship” status determined by men, and women who also demanded drastic changes and took drastic steps.

Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique which was published in 1963. It became a best-seller and was eventually translated into 13 languages. In her book she protested mainstream media’s portrayals of women, arguing that shaping women into housewives hindered their possibilities and wasted talent and potential. Friedan would later be nicknamed the “Mother of Second Wave Feminism.”

At the time her book was published Friedan was a typical suburban housewife. During her 15th college reunion in 1957 she conducted a survey primarily focusing on the education and satisfaction of her fellow female and male college

graduates.

After many unsuccessful attempts at publishing her article based on the surveys she took, she decided to put her findings into a book and publish it. This book would become The Feminine Mystique.

She published articles about what she called “the problem that has no name.” She received many heartfelt responses from women who were grateful they weren’t alone in feeling lost and in despair as housewives and mothers. In her book she addressed the issues of why women were so unhappy and explaining how many women were forced to give up careers or never had a chance to pursue a career in order to take on the stereotypical role of a perfect housewife and mother. Friedan argued that women who take on the job of a housewife and mother sacrifice another part of their identity.

The movement which had been spurred on for decades, but died down with the passing of the 20th amendment in 1920, would begin to build up again and radically change they way the world viewed women. Women eventually took to the streets marching in their towns and the streets of Washington D.C using their physical appearance to change mental awareness of their ideas. Consciousness-raising groups, protests, and women’s liberation groups sprung up across the U.S in the 60s.