My mom feeds us all. Big Sunday meals – she’s bopping around – making sure everyone is happy and content. She never sits, never asks for help, & – now that I think about it – never really eats. She’s a size 4 woman – who bakes cakes & teaches preschool for a living. She thinks girls should never call guys, men should always be the ones that propose, and always shops, cooks, & does laundry like a fine-tuned, super-efficient machine.
She is a rockstar. I love her. But holy cow – talk about self-constraint. Societal oppression. That’s all I ‘read’ when I look at her role. She is sooooo much more of a woman than that. But to her… my mom…. THOSE CHORES – mean ‘Woman.’
My mom is a product of the 50s and 60s – where, according to the text -- women were heavily domestic and labeled as dependents of their men. A lady, as Betty Friedman described in that part of the text, was “childlike, nonassertive,”… “content in a world of bedroom, kitchen, sex, babies, and home.”
Hellllo – my mom.
Completely a social construct of her time. She learned from her mom – how a lady should act. As the text states: delicate, dreamy, sexually passive, charmingly malleable, and uber-emotional. And I not only got that dose from my mother – but the tv and magazines reaffirmed that as well.
Self-control. Slenderness. I pluck my eyebrows – shave my legs – heck, I’ve even used that nasty tanning cream – and nail polish. Diets, weightloss, dating rules…. intertextual cultural restraints --- instead of abandoning those rules – we’ve simply added even more extremities to the bs.
I did those things – cuz my mom did/does those things… and society backed her up in my upbringing. Today – I hate nail polish, & wouldn’t dream of self-tanner. But my mom is 2 for 3. My sisters are both pretty lady-like, if we are going by Betty Friedman’s definition…
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I can empathize with this because my mom is the exact same way. She gave up almost all of her dreams and social life so she could work a job she hated just to provide for my brother and I.
ReplyDeleteYour post was very interesting to read. I completely agree that society has added to the already long list of social restraints that shape a "textbook woman," so to speak. One thing that comes to mind that's different in today's society is the fact that women have made considerable strides in what we're able to do and achieve. Equality for women in today's world has improved greatly since previous decades. Without laws and rules banning women from doing certain things that only men were once able to do, the only restraints placed on women are ones brought on by themselves, like the ones you explained in your post.
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