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Betty Friedan
Agreed that Farm Women Were Strong
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MassNews Staff
July 2002
Betty Friedan agreed in The
Feminine Mystique that it is the improvements
to our lives that have caused the discontent
among some women.
Until, and even into, the last
century, strong, capable women were needed
to pioneer our new land; with their husbands,
they ran the farms and plantations and Western
homesteads.
These women were respected and
self-respecting members of a society whose
pioneering purpose centered in the home.
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The identity crisis
for women did not begin in America until the
fire and strength and ability of the pioneer
women were no longer needed, no longer used,
in the middle-class homes of the Eastern and
Midwestern cities, when the pioneering was
done and men began to build the new society
in industries and professions outside the
home. p323.
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Strength and independence,
responsibility and self-confidence, self-discipline
and courage, freedom and equality were part of the
American character for both men and women, in all
the first generations. The women who came by steerage
from Ireland, Italy, Russia and Poland worked beside
their husbands in the sweatshops and the laundries,
learned the new language, and saved to send their
sons and daughters to college.
Women were never quite
as feminine, or held in as much contempt, in America
as they were in Europe. American women seemed to European
travelers, long before our time, less passive, childlike
and feminine than their own wives in France or Germany
or England.
By an accident of history,
American women shared in the work of society longer,
and grew with the men. Grade and high school education
for boys and girls alike was almost always the rule;
and in the West, where women shared the pioneering
work the longest, even the universities were coeducational
from the beginning.
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