Is that All? : Leading Post

Simone de Beauvoir writes about the problem with modern women and how she influenced them with her writing: “The Second Sex”. She talks about the main question what is a woman? The first point she brings up that I find interesting is that when men present themselves as an individual they never identity themselves with a certain sex, it is always presumed. That is not the same fro women. We make it highly clear that we are female. This goes into the main problem that women face that “man can think of himself without women. She cannot think of herself without man” (255). We are then considered the weaker sex and by definition the other. They question that is asked by Beauvoir is whether this state of affair should continue? I personal think that it shouldn’t because I am sick of being looked at as the weaker sex and I think that we should be considered equal to men. This question leads into the reading by Betty Friedan because are women ready and willing to change? Men thought that the Second Sex was a joke and Beauvoir had no idea what she was talking about.

After WWII women went back to their role of being wives and mothers. They were told that if you wanted to be feminine then you should not want a career and a job, that you should want a family, a nice house and good husband. Women went to college to find husbands instead of for the educational purposes. They were afraid that if they were too smart that men would not want to marry them. This caused more then a 60% drop out rate by women to marry and a trend of younger marriages. Women felt alone and they needed to be busy, so having more children was one way to distract them and make them feel important. This caused a huge baby boom throughout the country. After a while many women began to worry because they felt like something was missing. They never voiced it because they believed they were the only ones that felt that way and that it was a wrong feeling. They thought that their perfect life should be well…perfect. It reminds me of the old show Leave It To Beaver. Every aspect of life seemed so perfect and clean cut. These women masked how thy truly felt in order to make others happy. These women really wanted a chance to break out and be free from the men. They wanted to have their own life and to feel important and useful to someone other then their families. This brought on the question: “Who am I?” (280). They were taking the next step in human evolution. Susan Brownmiller and Robin Morgan then concluded these two experts with articles about women’s femininity and the changes they made in their lives with movements and committees.