Sunday, March 16, 2014

How Women Learned to be Unhappy

In the 1950s and 1960s especially, society taught women that having a home, a family, and a loving husband to take care of them was the perfect life. “Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American Suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their station-wagons-ful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor” (Friedan/The Feminine Mystique p18).

 

How did this happen? What did society do to ‘show’ women this was their role, their place? And did society change?  I found advertisements that put women into specific feminine gender roles from then and now.   

 

 As you look them over, the underlying message of the stereotypical role of females as a subordinate to a man is obvious. In the past it was more obvious than ads of today, but it still exists, just in a less overt way.
 

 


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