Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan Started It All

'Feminine Mystique' by Betty Friedan 'Started It All' The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, published in 1963, is often seen as the beginning of the women’s liberation movement. It is the most famous of Betty Friedan’s works, and it made her a household name. Feminists of the 1960s and 1970s would later say The Feminine Mystique was the book that â€Å"started it all.† What Is the Mystique? In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan explores the unhappiness of mid-20th century women, describing women’s unhappiness as â€Å"the problem that has no name.† Women felt this sense of depression because they were forced to be subservient to men financially, mentally, physically, and intellectually. The feminine â€Å"mystique† was the idealized image to which women tried to conform despite their lack of fulfillment.   The Feminine Mystique explains that in post-World War II United States life, women were encouraged to be wives, mothers, and housewives- and only wives, mothers, and housewives. This, Friedan says, was a failed social experiment. Relegating women to the â€Å"perfect† housewife or happy homemaker prevented much success and happiness, among the women and, consequently, their families. Friedan writes in the first pages of her book that housewives were asking themselves, â€Å"Is that all?† Why Friedan Wrote the Book Friedan was inspired to write The Feminine Mystique when she attended her Smith College 15-year reunion in the late 1950s. She surveyed her classmates and learned that none of them was happy with the idealized housewife role. However, when she tried to publish the results of her study, women’s magazines refused. She continued working on the problem, the result of her extensive research being The Feminine Mystique in 1963.   In addition to case studies of 1950s women, the book observes that women in the 1930s often had education and careers. It wasnt as if it had never occurred to women over the years to seek personal fulfillment. However, the 1950s were a time of regression: the average age at which women married dropped, and fewer women went to college. Post-war consumer culture spread the myth that fulfillment for women was found in the home, as a wife and mother. Friedan argues that women should develop themselves and their intellectual abilities and fulfill their potential rather than making a â€Å"choice† to be just a housewife. Lasting Effects of 'The Feminine Mystique' The Feminine Mystique became an international bestseller as it launched the second-wave feminist movement. It has sold more than a million copies and been translated into multiple languages. It is a key text in Women’s Studies and U.S. history classes. For years, Friedan toured the United States speaking about The Feminine Mystique and introducing audiences to her groundbreaking work and to feminism. Women have repeatedly described how they felt when reading the book: They saw that they were not alone, and that they could aspire to something more than the life they were being encouraged or even forced to lead. The idea Friedan expresses is that if women escaped the confines of â€Å"traditional† notions of femininity, they could then truly enjoy being women. Quotes from 'The Feminine Mystique' Here are some memorable passages from the book: â€Å"Over and over again, stories in womens magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats the act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her childrens mother, her husbands wife.†Ã‚  Ã¢â‚¬Å"The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.†Ã‚  Ã¢â‚¬Å"When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on womens passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.†The cadences of the Seneca Falls Declaration came straight from the Declaration of Independence: When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that they have hitherto occupied. . . . We hold these truths to be self-evident:that all men and women are created equal.†

The Etymology of Geometry Terms

The Etymology of Geometry Terms Theres an anecdote about how the philosopher-mathematician Pythagoras overcame a students natural dislike of geometry. The student was poor, so Pythagoras offered to pay him an obol for each theorem he learned. Eager for the money, the student agreed and applied himself. Soon, however, he became so intrigued, he begged Pythagoras to go faster, and even offered to pay his teacher. In the end, Pythagoras recouped his losses. Etymology provides a safety net of demystification. When all the words you hear are new and confusing, or when those around you put old words to strange purposes, a grounding in etymology may help. Take the word line. You put your  ruler to paper and draw a line against the straight edge. If youre an actor, you learn your lines line after line of text in a script. Clear. Obvious. Simple. But then you hit Geometry. Suddenly your common sense is challenged by technical definitions*, and line, which comes from the Latin word linea (a linen thread), loses all practical meaning, becoming, instead, an intangible, dimension-less concept that goes off at both ends to eternity. You hear about parallel lines that by definition never meet each other except they do in some warped reality dreamt up by Albert Einstein. The concept you have always known as the  line has been renamed line segment. After a few days, it comes as something of a relief to run into an intuitively obvious circle, whose definition as a set of points equidistant from a central point still fits your previous experience. That circle** (coming possibly from a Greek verb meaning to hoop around or from a diminutive of the circular Roman circus, circulus) is marked with what you would have, in pre-geometry days, called a line across part of it. This line is called a chord. The word chord comes from the Greek word (chordà ª) for a piece of animal gut used as a string in a lyre. They still use (not necessarily cat) gut for violin strings. After circles, youll probably study equiangular or equilateral triangles. Knowing the etymology, you can break those words up into component parts: equi (equal), angular, angle, lateral (of a side/sided), and tri (3). A three-sided object with all sides equal. It is possible that youll see triangle referred to as trigon. Again, tri means 3, and gon derives from the Greek word for corner or angle, gà ´nia. However, youre far more likely to see the word trigonometry trigon the Greek word for measure. Geo-metry is the measure of Gaia (Geo), the Earth. If youre studying geometry, you probably already know you must memorize theorems, axioms, and definitions corresponding with names. Names of Shapes cylinderdodecagonheptagonhexagonoctagonparallelogrampolygonprismpyramidquadrilateralrectanglespheresquare andtrapezoid. While the theorems and axioms are pretty much geometry-specific, the names of shapes and their properties have further applications in science and life. Beehives and snowflakes are both dependent on the hexagon. If you hang a picture, you want to make sure its top is parallel to the ceiling. Shapes in geometry are usually based on the angles involved, so the two root words (gon and angle [from the Latin angulus which means the same thing as the Greek gà ´nia]) are combined with words that refer to number (like triangle, above) and equality (like equiangular, above). Although there are apparent exceptions to the rule, generally, the numbers used in combination with the  angle (from the Latin) and gon (from the Greek) are in the same language. Since hexa is Greek for six, youre unlikely to see hexangle. Youre far more likely to see the combined form hexa gon, or hexagon. Another Greek word used in combination with the numbers or with the prefix poly- (many) is hedron, which means a foundation, base, or sitting place. A polyhedron is a many-sided three-dimensional figure. Construct one from cardboard or straws, if you like, and demonstrate its etymology, by making it sit on each of its many bases. Even if it doesnt help to know that a tangent, the line (or is that line segment?) that touches at only one point (depending on the function), comes from the Latin tangere (to touch) or the oddly shaped quadrilateral known as a trapezoid got its name from looking like a table, and even if it doesnt save a lot of time to memorize the Greek and Latin numbers, instead of just the names of shapes if and when you run into them, the etymologies will come back to add color to your world, and to help you with trivia, aptitude tests and word puzzles. And if you ever do run into the terms on a geometry exam, even if panic sets in, youll be able to count through in your head to figure out whether its a regular pentagon or heptagon that you would inscribe with a traditional five-pointed star. * Heres one possible definition, from McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Mathematics: line: The set of points (x1, . . ., xn) in Euclidean space.... The same source defines line segment as A connected piece of a line. ** For the etymology of circle, see Lingwhizt and the possibility of an ancient Indo-European word for millstone, another round flat object.