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A study of feminism through some key thinkers: 2 - Betty Friedan

In my first article I talked about the real founder of modern feminism (second wave feminism if you prefer to call it that), Simone de Beauvoir in her 1949 book 'The Second Sex.' This article will deal with the next important feminist thinker, a far more sympathetic character IMO than de Beauvoir whose cold lack of humanity I find disgusting and totally anti-life. As well as being logically and factually wrong on almost every level de Beauvoir is also MORALLY wrong. Betty Friedan's book 'The Feminine Mystique,' published in 1963, is quite different. It's written in a spirit of anguish rather than anger, sympathy rather than callousness and instead of setting cultural norms and biology in opposition - as de Beauvoir does to the point of near insanity - Friedan sees both as part of a whole. She begins by, IMO rightly, attacking the so-called 'standard' of beauty for women. The problem she addresses is very much still a live issue, at least in the West, and
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A study of feminism through some key thinkers: 1 - Simone de Beauvoir

A study of feminism through some key thinkers: 1 - Simone de Beauvoir   I'm not a feminist but over the last sixteen years I've been slowly groping towards an alternative that retains what's good in the movement but discards the bad. I'm married with four children, two sons and two daughters. Because I AM anti-feminist (but not in any conventional way) I get used to being told I'm a gender traitor. Before I put forward my own gradually evolving philosophy I'll begin with a series of articles analyzing some key feminist thinkers. I'm sure that at least some feminists will say 'no woman could possibly write about philosophy or look at these kinds of ideas; they're so intellectual they must be the work of a man!' Typical of the contempt for women that feminists have. They think we're useless, stupid and without value. To them only men have value and I've come to see over the course of the last sixteen years of my life that it's not just
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Introduction

Under the Nazis, it was believed that 'biology is destiny.' For Jews and gypsies this meant persecution and genocide. It was natural that the revulsion against their racist mythology led to a turning away from the view that biological and genetic factors could be the primary determinants of an individual's path in life. There was an even greater reluctance to accept that whole groups could be categorised in general terms rather than seen as individuals first and foremost. Feminism as a philosophy has existed since at least the Middle Ages with Christine de Pizan perhaps the first overtly feminist writer. The impact of the suffragettes is also well known but after the Second World War a new kind of feminist emerged. Most modern feminists take as their starting point the ideas put forward by Simone de Beauvoir in her book 'The Second Sex.' This launched the 'radical feminist' movement, though the actual term came into use later. In the sixties the slogan
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