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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A paper which considers the theories of Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir on the social role of women, with particular reference to the formation of traditional gender roles in a patriarchal social culture. Bibliography lists 2 sourcs
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6 pages (~225 words per page)
File: JL5_JLfriedan.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
Beauvoir come to very similar conclusions about the role of women in the post-war Western world, with regard to their lifestyles and aspirations in the wider context of social culture.
Freidan, for example, describes the increasing trend in the 1950s and 1960s to steer women towards a highly constrained and specific role, confined primarily to the home and to the
support of the rest of the family - especially husbands and sons - rather than acknowledging that women themselves were capable of creative and meaningful activity in their own right.
As she points out, whilst
it had always been recognised that women played a vital part in the family unit and that it was generally accepted that the majority of women would at some point
marry and have children, developments in social economics meant that womens other roles in the community were constantly being diminished and eventually excluded altogether. The focus of womens lives was
almost entirely on the construction and maintenance of an image dictated by men, in the sense that women did not regard themselves as autonomous individuals in their own right but
as adjuncts of male society, defined through the male gaze and the male cultural perspective.
Young women were taught that the most essential element of their lives was attracting a husband, and the age
at which romantic relationships assumed this priority became younger and younger. As Friedan comments, not only were high-school girls expected to be "going steady", clothing manufacturers produced imitations of adult
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