Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Betty Friedan published important pieces of feminist writing decades apart. Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 1892 and Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963. And while seventy years separate these pieces publish dates, the same current runs through them.Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” in a semi-autobiographical nature. She struggled throughout her life with depression. After the birth of her first child Gilman suffered from post-partum depression, which was diagnosed as hysteria. Gilman was ordered rest and for months was not allowed out of bed let alone to lift a finger for any purpose, including writing--her passion. Aside from just this difficult time in her life, in general marriage and motherhood had not fulfilled her. She questioned the decision she had made to marry in the first place; Gilman writes in her autobiography The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman that part of her longed to follow a career as a writer.
Betty Friedan identified a similar—if not directly related—problem in the Feminine Mystique. She noticed her
classmates were unfulfilled by what they had been taught should fulfill them: a husband, a home and children. She writes: “Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own feminity” (198).The "woman problem” doesn't stop there...just to throw one more example into the mix, Anne Koedt—author of “Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” (published in 1970)—identifies yet another male created problem for which women are blamed. Koedt deconstructs the Freudian concept of frigidity and redirects the blame for this “problem.” She identifies numerous reasons why the myth of the vaginal orgasm is still believed and essentially debunks the idea that frigidity is woman’s dysfunction. Rather, Koedt writes, frigidity is a result of a patriarchal understanding and misuse of the female body.
Koedt says: “looking for a cure to a problem that has none can lead a woman on an endless path of self-hatred and insecurity” (230). This statement sums up not only her argument, but also Friedan’s and Gilman’s. While women forced to partake in the cult of true womanhood found themselves wrestling with post-partum depression and insanity, and housewives during the 1950s turned to popping pills and buying ready-made clothing, women caught between the first and second wave of feminism found themselves feeling misunderstood and their bodies being misused for male pleasure only.
These trends will continue so long as women don't ask the important questions they owe it to themselves to be asking: Should I accept the answers a male dominated society has handed me? How can I push past the oppressive structures of patriarchy that force me to feel unhappy and uncomfortable in my own body? What will it take for me to find my own truth, one that isn't relative to role I play in the dominant system of male hierarchy?
Its a rather shallow plunge into the differences you say you faced. You talk of the challenges and rejections faced by your father, and the successes he has enjoyed, but you dismiss him as "self-centered." Did you just watch him (objectively) try to navigate his life, or did you put some actual empathy into your analysis - (subjectively) imagine what he sees, instead of seen as. Maybe then you might have seen his self-centerness as a necessary coping strategy.
ReplyDeleteReading your blog in regard to your father, those things that you found to be embarassing should have been elements that encouraged pride in your father. Despite having CP, he became a member of the PA BAR and had a successful legal practice and was a long-term schoolboard member thus giving back to the community. You were embarassed when the family arrived in a handicapped van. Many kids in that crowd would have simply been happy that their parent came to the game. If this is what it means to be a feminist, give me June Cleaver.
ReplyDeleteYour Dad's an oxymoron: a self-centered man who - as you related - does pro bono work; a bad father who - as you acknowledged - worked ten times as hard as others to support his family. He truly is different.
ReplyDeleteOr you're quite cold.
Oh, the insensitivity and self-centeredness...of youth. I remember all too clearly at age 30, sitting on my dad's hospice bed during the last hours of his life retracing memories in my mind and trying to think of a way to retract the horrible things I had said, and felt, and foolishly assumed just 10 years earlier.
ReplyDeleteIf all goes well, you will age and grow wiser. Hopefully you can come to a more full perspective and your dad will get to see it, as I hope my dad saw it in me.