XIDS 2100

The Liberated Woman c.1963-1980s

The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women.  It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in The United States.  Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone.  As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts  and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even herself the silent question—Is this all?

                                                Betty Freidan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)

“The first responsibility of a ‘liberated’ woman is to lead the fullest, freest and most imaginative life she can. The second responsibility is her solidarity with other women. She may live and work and make love with men. But she has no right to represent her situation as simpler, or less suspect, or less full of compromises than it really is. Her good relations with men must not be bought at the price of betraying her sisters.”

Susan Sontag, 1973

Women Are Not Chicks