Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which inspired a flood of commemorative essays everywhere from Slate to the New York Times.
It also inspired what I think is one of the most hilariously dumb sentences I’ve ever read on The Spearhead. In a post talking about Friedan’s “youthful Bolshevik activism” – she spent a number of years as a labor journalist – Spearhead head boy W.F. Price offers this assessment of the book that jumpstarted feminism’s second wave:
Although I haven’t read the book, it apparently stresses the need for women to engage in work outside the home, which is a basic Communist tenet.
Yeah, that’s why most women work. Not to pay the bills, but because they are pawns of the worldwide communist conspiracy.
Weirdly, Price is well aware that he’s full of shit here, and that most women throughout history have worked, not because of Communism but because of economic necessity. Indeed, he even points this out in his post. But he follows this acknowledgement with more thoughts on Friedan’s evil commie ways:
[I]t looks as though Betty Friedan was one of the many dedicated Communists who caused so many problems immediately after WWII. I once looked up a list of known Communist front groups in the US, and noticed that quite a few of them were women’s groups. Combined with accounts I’ve read from former Cheka agents, it makes for pretty convincing evidence that feminism was deliberately fostered in the US by Soviet agents. It makes sense to use women in that manner, because authorities are not as suspicious of women, and they can operate under the radar far more easily than men. Women also make excellent spies.
Although I’m sure resurgent feminism would have emerged in one form or another with or without Betty Friedan, it is interesting to note second wave feminism’s Cold War origins in Marxist infiltration of US society. …
It turns out she was little more than a loyal Bolshevik pawn who suddenly stumbled onto success by writing a thinly-veiled Marxist critique of American capitalist society from a woman’s perspective.
In the comments, TheTruthishere enthusiastically agreed with Price’s feminism-was-a-Soviet-plot thesis:
You are right a read the same thing on another site … feminism was thought up in a russian thinktank to basically destroy the family as the states smallest cell. Basically so communism could be introduced in the western world. Well, it worked, it just took them longer than expected. By the way the Rockafellas are involved in this as well
RockEfellers. Not RockAfellAs. Or even RockAfellERs.
Uncle Elmer gave us this weird socio-sexual fantasy:
Speaking of Freudian, all feminists have a major clit-boner for “1963”, though it was not technically part of the mythic “50s”. Based on their persistent mention of that era, it’s clear they would gladly trade in their Birkenstocks for a chance to be slapped and rogured by Ward Cleaver.
They didn’t call him “The Cleaver” for nothing.
And Towgunner, for some odd reason, used the opportunity to express his disdain for “female” – in quotes – music composers.
I have a lot of classical music as my pandora stations, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, etc. So, guess what gets inter-mixed with the play sets from time to time…yep, the token “female” composer. I’m usually doing something else while listening and this never fails – I always know its a female composer because it, well, is bad music. Also, all of the female composers I’ve heard basically sound the same. All things aside, forget I’m an MRA, it has very little aesthetic value for anyone, except for those who think talent is the same thing as “social justice”. female composers create music that is akin to cold coffee left over from breakfast and now its 2:00 PM. And its not after a few minutes, I can tell a female composer in the first few seconds…that too never fails. Many of them painfully subject their listeners to simple scales and scattered and disagreeable harmonies…kind of like the background music for greys autonomy or any chick flick. Above all, it’s not, even in the slightest, original…frankly female composers are a perfect case study in that you can hear the innate female tendency towards conformity.
By the way, here are some songs by female composers – sorry, “female” composers. I’m not sensing a lot of conformity here.
Of course it’s special! I was born that year!
Yup. I have that song on a record the Early Music Consort of London did in the 1970s. 🙂
As to equating god-awful music with women composers … yeah, well, when I hear something on the radio (we have Classic FM on at work) that sounds like a violin or piano being tortured, it doesn’t turn out to have been written by a woman, but one of the Great Menz Who Composed Stuff.
>>>Whoa, whoa, whoa! Cold brew is amazing precisely because it’s NOT hot coffee that’s gone cold.
I know that, but I was under the impression that that guy would dismiss it as soon as you said “cold brew”, just like he dismisses all women composers because of the single word “women”.
Can we just start telling semi-relevant political stories now? A friend of mine was active in a USian socialist group in the 60s & 70s, before health problems caused her to retreat from political work. In the 90s, she submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for her FBI file, not really expecting to find anything. She wasn’t an important figure or anything. It took a long time and multiple requests, but when it finally came it was a huge pile of stuff. Every meeting she attended, verbatim notes of every comment she (and everyone else there) made from the audience, lists of all of the license plates on the cars in the parking lot and surrounding area, etc. The best part was tons of pictures.
She was freaked out (who wouldn’t be), but also kind of enjoyed it. She said it was like someone had kept an amazingly detailed scrapbook of her life over two decades.
Just in case anyone wonders what the USian version of a police state was like during that era…
You know the rule!
http://xkcd.com/385/
That picture pretty well settles the Stalin-vs-Putin debate.
I wish throughout my education, instead of reading the books we were assigned to read and writting papers based on that, I just could write one about what I assume the jist of the book was based on a one paragraph summary from Amazon and some biased hearsay. I totally would’ve passed.
How do MRAs expect to be taken seriously if they can’t even do their damn homework? It’s a little sad. Just a little.
Also, LAURIE ANDERSON.
I forgot about this, but dear old Uncle Elmer has been pushing the “feminists all secretly love the 50s/early 60s” line for a while.
http://manboobz.com/2011/04/16/do-feminists-secretly-want-to-be-betty-draper/
Hey, it works. Pre-packaged cake mix cuts down on the time it takes to make a cake, which means that women are able to spend less time in the kitchen, which leads to communism, feminism, and the fall of America.
There’s a section on cake mix in The Feminine Mystique that says pretty much that! The book talks about how women spent more and more time on housework in the 1950s, even though labor-saving inventions should have freed them to do other things, because social expectations pushed them into just using their time to do more housework.
According to Friedan, the companies that first introduced cake mix to the public started out with ad campaigns promising that instant cake would give women free time to enjoy themselves. When the advertisers showed these campaigns to focus groups of housewives, however, they got a negative reaction. Turns out the housewives felt guilty about having free time. So the advertisers created new campaigns around the idea that using cake mix would give women time to do even more housework. These were successful.
So yes. In the 1950s mindset, cake mix = communism.
I love the idea of a bunch of reactionaries working themselves into a tizzy over the evils of cake mix.
The closing of the commons in western Europe is what ensured the spread of market capitalism and necessitated working outside the home by preventing subsistence by the peasant class.
The communist witch hunt of the post war era was in response to the rise of communism, socialism, and labor organizing in the post WWI era.
Feminism, in its various forms has been around for over three hundred years.
These doodz need to learn some history.
I got the chance to see Friedan speak at the 150th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention. I had read TFM by then (and have read it several times, as I used excerpts of it in classes for various reasons). What I remember most about her talk was when she was reminiscing about the early attempts at influencing Congressional legislation, when the proto-network of feminists in DC was forming. A lot of the secretaries were involved, since of course back then they were called secretaries and they were all women. Friedan told some stories about running around to different offices trying to figure out how to get organized and then she broke out in this huge smile. “We were kids! It was exciting! And we had so much fun!”
That’s always stuck with me, the way she talked about the experience as if it was an adventure. It’s not a side of the women’s movement in the US that you ever hear about (and of course the feminist movement is often not mentioned at all).
Now I want cake. I used to make a good chocolate/rum bundt cake, but it wasn’t from a mix.
Anyway, I remember hearing that it was possible to make a cake mix that just needed water, but that didn’t seem enough like “cooking” to most women of the time so they added extra, unnecessary steps like beating & mixing in eggs. I may be making this up. My memory is unreliable, and I am too lazy to look it up.
I dunno, a mix that just required water would have to have powdered eggs, powdered milk, and some kind of dry shortening or other fat. I imagine the end result would be a lot less tasty.
I fell for an urban legend. 0_o
And now I am being punished by the HTML gods.
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/cakemix.asp
I’m an anarcho-communist as well! I didn’t know other anarchists hung around here. =D
To be fair, the fact that cake mixes took off when they pointed out that it freed up time making a basic cake to dress the hell of a ready-mix cake might be an outcropping of that housework ethic you describe.
This also means that ready made cakes can probably be the source of blame for Cake Wrecks. And at least partially culpable for the TV career of Sandra Lee.
Weird, I just had a slice of cake. From the supermarket.
Now I want cake.
Have you heard the fan theory that James Bond isn’t meant to be one guy? That it’s a series of spies using the same code name? Well, I was thinking it would be really cool if they wrote a James Bond movie, then switched it to be a female Bond (maybe with some minor tweaks).
I would love to see that.
@Franky T
I actually wrote some of my papers for 12 grade English class using Cliff’s Notes. I didn’t even buy them, I just skimmed them in the bookstore. I got away with it because the teacher was an idiot who hadn’t read the books herself.
It was really good cake. Birthday Cake.
I made meat cake for dinner. I may call it “loaf”, but it’s cake.
🙂
I was pretty disappointed that Skyfall reverted to an all-dude cast. I was hoping for a cool hacker chick quartermaster, at least.
James Bond is an obvious choice when one talks about iconic male roles that could be given to women, since he’s been portrayed many different ways by many different people. The question, I think, is whether a “Jane Bond” would feel like a “true” James Bond or more like a deconstruction (or, to put it another way, whether such a film would fit in with the existing franchise or whether it would seem like something new). It would be cool either way.