Status Updates From The Problem That Has No Name

Did women really go home again as a reaction to feminism?The fact is that to women born after 1920, feminism was dead history. It ended as a vital movement in America with the winning of that final right: vote. In the 1930s and 1940s the sort of woman who fought for woman's rights was still concerned with human rights and freedom -for Negroes, for oppressed workers, for victims of Franco's Spain and Hitler's Germany.

"The women and men who started that revolution anticipated 'no small amount of misconception, misinterpretation and ridicule.' And they got it. The 1st to speak out in public for women's rights in America- Fanny W, daughter of a Scotch nobleman and Ernestine R., daughter of a rabbi - were called "red harlot of infidelity' and 'woman a 1000 times below a prostitute'.

Did women want these freedoms because they wanted to be men?Or did they want them because they also were human? That this is what feminism is all about was seen symbolically by Henrik Ibsen. When he said in the play 'A Doll's House", in 1879, that a woman was simply a human being, he struck a new note in literature. Thousands of women in middle-class Europe and America, in that Victorian time, saw themselves in Nora.

"Is she trapped simply trapped by the enormous demands of her role as modern housewife: wife, mistress, mother, nurse, consumer, cook, chauffeur, expert on interior decoration, child care, appliance repair, furniture refinishing, nutrition and education? Her day is fragmented, she can never spend more than 15 minutes on any one thing; she has no time to read books, only magazines."

When a French woman named Simone de Beauvoir wrote a book called 'The Second Sex', an American critic commented that she obviously 'didn't know what life was all about'. The 'woman problem' in America no longer existed. (...) What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this fulfilment waxing the kitchen floor?

Department-store buyers reported that American women since 1939, had become three and four sizes smaller. "Women are out to fit the clothes, instead of vice versa", one buyer said.