Berry Friedan & Susan Faludi

But whatever anxiety the Vindication's male readers felt about the women in their own lives, events soon put them at ease about the little dears. Wollstonecraft might have put a dangerous idea into circulation, but it long remained an idea without much effect, untroubling to men. Even when, a century later, women started dressing up in white and marching around shouting troublesome slogans about the franchise, the crisis was only fleeting. Once given the vote, women turned out to use it just about the way their men did, and in any case they quietly went back home and forgot this whole annoying business about women's rights.

Then, 161 years after Mary Wollstonecraft, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique--and suddenly there was no end of trouble, trouble which shows no signs of letting up. This raises an obvious question: Why did The Feminine Mystiqu

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wking of merchandise giving way to the use of pollsters and psychologists to develop "hidden persuaders" (a name taken from another characteristic 1950s book). Friedan addresses these in her chapter entitled, a bit luridly, "The Sexual Sell." Friedan imagines a pair of executives confronting the problem of how to sell more electric household appliances "'Too many women getting educated'" complains a vice-president; "'If they all get to be scientists and such, they won't have time to shop. But how can we keep them at home? They want careers now.'" To which "the new executive with horn-rimmed glasses and the Ph.D. in psychology suggests, 'We'll liberate them to have careers at home'" (Friedan, 207). More than that, women's insecurities could be used to sell products. (Then as now, women did most of the shopping--and we're speaking here of toasters, not the clothes shopping that many women really do enjoy.) But if insecurity is used to sell merchandise, it is crucially important that the purchase not really satisfy the insecurity; if it did, the market would dry up. Women had to be kept insecure. What the marketers perhaps did not count on was that the purchases women made to assuage their insecurities might, by 1963, incl
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1423
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)