Betty Friedan's View of Women & Work

Betty Friedan, in "The Importance of Work," an excerpt from her book The Feminine Mystique, makes the strong argument that women need to discover themselves through meaningful work. Friedan argues that if women fail to find such work and make such discoveries, not only will they suffer as a result of failing to live up to their full capacity, but their children and the entire society will suffer as well. While making this convincing argument, however, Friedan commits a number of fallacies which distract from and weaken her position.

In the first place, Friedan conveniently fails to describe precisely what sort of work would qualify as self-realizing for a woman. Would she consider it self-realizing for a woman to pursue a conservative activist agenda, for example, fighting against the right to have an abortion? Who is to determine what is "meaningful" work and who is going to decide if a woman has actually discovered herself through such work? If Friedan truly believes in the independence and freedom of woman, then she must be willing to leave these decisions up to individual women and not impose her own views in other women who might not agree with her.

In addition, Friedan makes outlandish statements about the traditional role of the housewife and mother. There is no doubt, as Friedan argues, that "We now know that the same range of potential ability exists for women as for men" (Friedan 633). However, Friedan then contradicts herself by limiting the range of possibilities

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er problem with Friedan's argument is her tendency to exaggerate. Hyperbole can be effective in shocking the reader into an awakening with respect to the argument. If it is too strong, however, the writer risks alienating the reader and distracting unnecessarily from the heart of the argument being made. Certainly it is clear why Friedan makes the exaggerated comparisons she makes. She is writing at a time when the society needed to be shocked awake with respect to the restrictions placed on women in work. She is taking a chance with such hyperbole as the following, however: The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. There is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps except by finally putting forth an effort---that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the narrow walls of home, to help shape the future (Friedan 633). By comparing "the narrow walls of home" to a concentration camp, even to a "comfortable" concentration camp, simply allows the reader to reject her argument on the basis of the fallacy of hyperbole. Certainly being "enslaved" or "tortured" by the many conveniences of the American home in the early 1960s was in no way comparable to th

Category: Psychology - B