17 February 1963 was a defining moment in
the history of the feminist movement, in that, Betty Friedan’s path-breaking
book The Feminine Mystique was born!
 |
| Betty Friedan |
The
Feminine Mystique rips apart the hitherto pervasive,
stereotyped ideology of the ‘domesticity of women,’ which, according to Betty,
was more of a dampener and a ‘stifling stereotype’ that prevented women from
putting off their domestic roles and realizing their fullest potential, outside
the confines of the home!
This notion of the woman as a homemaker,
was, generated, perpetuated and disseminated by a host of conditioning,
constructing and constraining factors in society, such as the coercive,
menacing and intimidating advertising by the commercial media with vested
interests, the impact of Freudian psychology on the societal psyche, the perpetuation
of the feminine myth by a plethora of women’s magazines, and also by
educational institutions that served to spread abroad with equal gusto, this
myth of the domesticity of women full throttle!
In a startling survey that Betty did
amongst her classmates in Smith College, she found out that, many of them felt
quite a drudge at home, depressed and stifled at not being able to realize their
real selves, and breathe real freedom, although they were supposedly enjoying
the so-called ideal lives back at home with their family – husbands and children.
By this curtailing of the woman’s prowess and progress, Betty opines that, society
is in fact doing a great injustice to the ‘second sex’ and thereby losing out
on a vast repertoire of immense talent and expertise, argues Betty!
To Betty, the feminine mystique then, is the
perpetuation of a gendered stereotype that, a woman’s ideal role in her society
is to be a dutiful housewife, and a loving mother, and there’s got to be
nothing outside of these constraining roles! Therefore, the mystique is a superficial notion of
femininity that promotes domesticity and housewifery as the domain proper of
the woman, and any aspirations or ideals apart from this, would be a misnomer,
as it would be going against these fixed, pre-ordained ‘roles’ expected of her!
If The
Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan published in 1963, is such an eye-opener
of sorts,
then
The
Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer published in 1970 has been
such a soul-shocker of sorts!
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| Germaine Greer |
This book not only challenges the
traditional, stereotyped roles of women in society, but also provided a
wonderful framework for the feminist movement, in that, it empowered and
encouraged women from across the world (like Nora does towards the climax in A Doll’s House), to question and to
critique with vehement courage, the physicians, the psychiatrists, the priests,
the media and the police who were beyond the ambit and the confines of being
questioned, and who were in the most responsible for perpetuating the feminine
stereotypes anywhere and everywhere they set foot!
By interrogating these patriarchal
stereotypes that have resulted in a slew of epistemic violences unleashed on
the ‘second sex’, Germaine Greer avers that, women could clearly see through the
shallow and flippant postulates on which most of these patriarchal premises
hinged upon!
Germaine Greer’s foreword to her 21st
Anniversary Edition of the The Female
Eunuch contains within its mould, the germs of an enlightened inspirational
of sorts!
And I quote –
What
more could women want?
Freedom,
that’s what.
Freedom
from being the thing looked at rather than the person looking back. Freedom
from self-consciousness. Freedom from the duty of sexual stimulation of jaded
male appetite, for which no breast ever bulges hard enough and no leg is ever
long enough. Freedom from the uncomfortable clothes that must be worn to
titillate. Freedom from shoes that make us shorten our steps and push our
buttocks out. Freedom from the ever-present juvenile pulchritude.
Freedom
from the humiliating insults heaped on us by the top shelf of the newsagents;
freedom from rape, whether it is by being undressed verbally by the men on the
building site, spied on as we go about our daily business, stopped,
propositioned or followed on the street, greasily teased by our male workmates,
pawed by the boss, used sadistically or against our will by the men we love, or
violently terrorized and beaten by a stranger, or a gang of strangers.
The
freedom I pleaded for twenty years ago was freedom to be a person, with the
dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, pride that constitute personhood.
Freedom to run, shout, to talk loudly and sit with your knees apart. Freedom to
know and love the earth and all that swims, lies and crawls upon it. Freedom to
learn and freedom to teach. Freedom from fear, freedom from hunger, freedom of
speech and freedom of belief. Most of the women in the world are still afraid,
still hungry, still mute and loaded by religion with all kinds of fetters,
masked, muzzled, mutilated and beaten.
This book of 400-odd pages, begins with
an impressive foreword, followed by an impactful summary, that literally
paraphrases in about 14 pages, what is contained within the book, in a
nutshell!
Then, in five clearly outlined parts that
so define the scope and ambit of the book, Germaine Greer elucidates on the
five important aspects that have thus far affected, impacted and conditioned
women across the ages! No spoilers at that, though!
Just giving y’all a sample slice from off
the 'Summary,' that’s been such an impactful read for academia and the rest of
the world, over the years! Well, she’s also interspersed this summary of hers,
with three memorable quotes, reproduced below –
I quote –
The
World has lost its soul, and I my sex
-
Ernst Toller’s Hinkemann
We
may safely assert that the knowledge that men can acquire of women, even as
they have been and are, without reference to what they might be, is wretchedly
imperfect and superficial and will always be so until women themselves have
told all that they have to tell.
-
John Stuart Mill
Draw
near, woman, and hear what I have to say. Turn your curiosity for once towards
useful objects, and consider the advantages which nature gave you and society
ravished away. Come and learn how you were born the companion of man and became
his slave; how you grew to like the condition and think it natural; and finally
how the long habituation of slavery so degraded you that you preferred its
sapping but convenient vices to the more difficult virtues of freedom and
repute. If the picture I shall paint leaves you in command of yourselves, if
you can contemplate it without emotion, then go back to your futile pastimes;
‘there is no remedy; the vices have become the custom.’
-
Choderlos de Laclos, ‘On the Education of
Women’, 1783
Female
sexuality has always been a fascinating topic; this discussion of it attempts
to show how female sexuality has been masked and deformed by most observers,
and never more so than in our own time. The conformation of the female has
already been described in terms of a particular type of conditioning, and now
the specific character of that conditioning begins to emerge. What happens is
that the female is considered as a sexual object for the use and appreciation
of other sexual beings, men. Her sexuality is both denied and misrepresented by
being identified as passivity. The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of
femininity in the same way that the signs of independence and vigour in the
rest of her body are suppressed.
The
characteristics that are praised and rewarded are those of the
castrate—timidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy and preciosity. Body ends with
a look at the way in which female reproduction is thought to influence the
whole organism in the operations of the Wicked Womb, source of hysteria,
menstrual depression, weakness, and unfitness for any sustained enterprise.
The
compound of induced characteristics of soul and body is the myth of the Eternal
Feminine, nowadays called the Stereotype. This is the dominant image of
femininity which rules our culture and to which all women aspire. Assuming that
the goddess of consumer culture is an artefact, we embark on an examination of
how she comes to be made, the manufacture of the Soul. The chief element in this
process is like the castration that we saw practised upon the body, the
suppression and deflection of Energy. Following the same simple pattern, we
begin at the beginning with Baby, showing how of the greater the less is made.
The Girl struggles to reconcile her schooling along masculine lines with her
feminine conditioning until Puberty resolves the ambiguity and anchors her
safely in the feminine posture, if it works. When it doesn’t she is given
further conditioning as a corrective, especially by psychologists, whose
assumptions and prescriptions are described as the Psychological Sell.
Then comes the sting and the most
vituperative remarks that have catapulted the book to its high regard and fame,
and made it such an impactful hot seller across the globe! Her thoughts are so
original, and filled with such intense angst at the condition of women, that
it’s almost impossible to take your eyes off even a word or a phrase through
the read as such!
I quote -
The
castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine
polarity, in which men have commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into
an aggressive conquistatorial power, reducing all heterosexual contact to a
sadomasochistic pattern.
Her
essential quality is castratedness. She absolutely must be young, her body
hairless, her flesh buoyant, and she must not have a sexual organ. No
musculature must distort the smoothness of the lines of her body, although she
may be painfully slender or warmly cuddly. Her expression must betray no hint
of humour, curiosity or intelligence, although it may signify hauteur to an
extent that is actually absurd, or smouldering lust, very feebly signified by
drooping eyes and a sullen mouth (for the stereotype’s lust equals irrational
submission) or, most commonly, vivacity and idiot happiness. Seeing that the
world despoils itself for this creature’s benefit, she must be happy; the
entire structure would topple if she were not. So the image of woman appears
plastered on every surface imaginable, smiling interminably. An apple pie
evokes a glance of tender beatitude, a washing machine causes hilarity, a cheap
box of chocolates brings forth meltingly joyous gratitude, a Coke is the cause
of a rictus of unutterable brilliance, even a new stick-on bandage is saluted
by a smirk of satisfaction. A real woman licks her lips and opens her mouth and
flashes her teeth when photographers appear: she must arrive at the première of
her husband’s film in a paroxysm of delight, or his success might be murmured
about. The occupational hazard of being a Playboy Bunny is the aching facial
muscles brought on by the obligatory smiles.
So
what is the beef? Maybe I couldn’t make it. Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile,
good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don’t
know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to
the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade.
I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence,
my own will, my own sex. I’m sick of peering at the world through false
eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick
of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified
of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered
curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room. I’m sick of pretending that some fatuous
male’s self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention,
I’m sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of
having no opinions of my own about either. I’m sick of being a transvestite. I
refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.
This explicit honesty of Germaine Greer
on the condition of womenfolk, and that, way way back in the 1970s, has made it the most
impactful and most intense read on feminism till date, [although Simone de
Beauvoir and Betty have had already garnered enough critical attention on this
question of the politics behind womanhood!
To be continued…
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