The Feminist Critique By Betty Friedan

The Second Wave of Feminism arose in the 1960s and lasted through the 1980s where it ended with the intra-feminism disputes of the feminist sex wars over issues such as pornography, which ushered in the third wave of feminism in the early 1990s. However, second wave feminism rose in conjunction with the rise of hegemonic feminism as minorities were limited in the public sphere and thus were not recognized by the ruling class. The second wave broadened the debate of gender equality to a wide range of issues: sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy created the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, which empaneled constituent state
The Feminine Mystique was an assault against the social norms and legal practices that trapped women in the role of a housewife dependent on her husband. However, Friedan did not analyze the effect of domestic service on women in any concrete way. Her solution was much more simplistic: “women must reject a certain image of themselves, they must “say ‘no’ to the feminine mystique”.” As Dijkstra stated in her journal article, Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan: The Politics of Omission, “[s]he limited her attack to the more superficial enemies, such as the media, the social science, and consumerism, themselves not the cause but rather the means, the agents by which the subordinate condition of women is ideologically maintained and
It is important to not organize white women around racism as an issue because their lives are not intrinsically intertwined with racism; uniting white and black groups around common concerns would be a concrete, and more morally sound, way to objectively fight racism in the feminist community. Ultimately, the feminist movement evolved to incorporate more small groups and single-issue organizations; lesbians and women of color joined what had been predominately white women’s organizations. However, in order for women to become more united and develop a more cohesive movement, it was necessary to create a space separate to that of men that catered only to women and their