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Origins of Modern Feminism and Literature

norms principally dictated a wife-and-mother role for women, and there was by and large an absence of public-policy debate on that subject.

Evolution of the third wave of feminism was all about discourse and debate. It achieved momentum in the 1960s. Part of the reason was publication of the popular Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, which gave voice not so much to new ideas as to ideas that had lain dormant after World War II and during the 1950s entrenchment of the American nuclear-family myth. It would be hazardous to claim too much for Friedan's text, but its modest agenda came down to the idea that working mothers were perhaps not such a bad idea and might expand women's horizons; that was heresy enough for popular imagination.

Another part of the reason third-wave feminism reached critical mass was the "authority of experience" (Diamond & Edwards, 1977). Social critique that at the time dominated popular consciousness was mainly grounded in race-based civil-rights activism. As of 1960, women who completed advanced college degrees or who worked outside the home were a social anomaly, almost a curiosity. So was divorce. Women were very much defined in terms of their roles in nature--mate, mother, daughter. But social cleavages of all kinds that were, vexingly, overlapping and converging made definitions increasingly ambiguous. Further, evidence was mounting against the idea that women's natural province was exclusively home and family. Meanwhile, women involved in social activism for civil rights and against the Vietnam War began to notice the hierarchies of social power embedded in nominally egalitarian movements. Women social activists (a) exposed to Friedan's tentative assertions that women who worked outside the home would not destroy the family and (b) disenchanted by New Left reformers "who wanted the women in the movement as tea-makers, typists, envelope lickers, and, in the memorable words of Stokely Carmichael--'pron...

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Origins of Modern Feminism and Literature. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:06, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689234.html