Betty Friedan Feminist Theory

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Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and bell hook’s Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center have changed the way people think about feminism. Friedan’s book was written in the 1960s and talked mostly about housewives. It talked about the boredom they faced and how they wanted more out of life. Her book revolutionized the way people looked at feminism and people had begun to ask their mothers, sisters, daughters how they felt about restritive gender roles. Women were being looked as human beings not just objects that popped out babies. It personsonalized the movment and put faces behind the complaints. The book was credited with starting second wave feminism, which opened up rights like access to jobs and reproductive freedom. bell hook’s…show more content…
It talked about how The Feminine Mystique was only for white women. She talks about the “problem that has no name” but failed to recongize who would take care of the children if white women wanted to go out and have carreers. Betty Friedan’s book was class based in the sense that it did not focus on lower class women (hooks 2). It talked about the needs of a select group of women who could afford to be housewives. Women of color and lower class women were working out of the house and were able to have careers but these were not fufulling careers. They were usually maids and nannies or even prostitutes in the worst case scearnios. Starting the conversation about women’s rihts is very important but it is necessary to not exclude one group of women. The lack of reaching out to men is another aspect of how feminists failed. Poor men and men of color do not feel that thye are oppressors. They are themselves discriminated against by their race and class. The feminists had been more concerened with demonizing men but black women could not do that (hooks 72). This book is relevant in the sense that feminism has had a hard time reaching out to women of color. Women and men of color have the right to be skeptical of movements that do not reach them. Many feminist movements in the country have failed to reach out to other races as a result of linking their struggle. White upper class white women have to recongize that other groups are hurt by sexism too. They can not afford to have this assumpation that “all men are the enemy” because that is not true in their
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