Essay on From Rosie To Lucy

The most prevalent and popular stereotype of the post World war II era in America is one filled with women abandoning their wartimes jobs and retreating into the home to fulfill their womanly duties. In Joanne Meyerowitz’s Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, she shows how far women departed from this one dimensional image. While Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is reflexive and focused on the mainstream, Meyerowitz’s analysis is a broader and more inclusive exploration of media, as she draws upon multiple sources. Although Friedan effectively unveiled the thought process and reasoning behind society's belief that the message of media was to make women think that their place was to be the happy housewife, Meyerowitz expanded her media archives and found a differing message in analyzing both female responses to media and exploring their stories.

In the 1960’s, women had been placed in stereotypical roles for years. But women were tired of these roles and were done with being complacent. They felt like something was missing in their lives, and they desired something more. The typical American

During the first World War I women were left at home to try and figure out how they were going to care for their families. Their husband, father, and brothers were sent off to war. Many companies around the United States were left with production needs and little to no employees to do the job. In a time period, where women are expected to be confident and independent, they had to also realize they had little to no power in society. They had societal rules that they must stay at home to cook, clean, and care for the children. With the men who were prominent in their lives coming and going from war. These factors caused the birth of a new era. This is the era where women were emerging. Women were changing by being more independent sexually and expressing their emotions through music, poetry, and movies.

In the colonial American time period during the seventeenth century there were many important sources that have come up missing. Some are just missing and others destroyed. The modern- day historians have the task of trying to find this lost information to determine the facts about

3) What role did mass media play during the 1950s and 1960s in regard to supporting or undermining the “feminine mystique”?

World War II gave women the chance to take part in and prove what they where cable of handling men’s work. However there were limitations that women had to overcome during the war such as sexism and sexualized violence.

Women’s roles change during World War II because men were gone and their responsibilities weren’t being taken care of. The women began working and doing the men’s house chores for them along with their own responsibilities has women(Graves 1-2). The women were the only people who could take the mens places and money was tight. Women were needed to get work done because it

Frederick Lewis Allen, in his famous chronicle of the 1920s Only Yesterday, contended that women’s “growing independence” had accelerated a “revolution in manners and morals” in American society (95). The 1920s did bring significant changes to the lives of American women. World War I, industrialization, suffrage, urbanization, and birth control increased women’s economic, political, and sexual freedom. However, with these advances came pressure to conform to powerful but contradictory archetypes. Women were expected to be both flapper and wife, sex object and mother. Furthermore, Hollywood and the emerging “science” of advertising increasingly tied conceptions of femininity to

World War II was the catalyst that changed the opportunities available to women and eventually the way they were regarded as a viable workforce. Suddenly women throughout the United States were pushing themselves to their limits to support the war effort. Women were fulfilling jobs and responsibilities that many previously believed to be impossible for their gender. Opportunities were opened in steel plants, ammunition factories, and even the United States military. As the war progressed the number of male workers declined dramatically. Society had no choice but to turn to the mothers, sisters, and daughters of our nation for help. The results for each woman varied

The Feminine Mystique is a first person narrative about the struggles of feminism. It highlights the problems of women in the 1950s to the 1960s and challenges gender roles. The book includes several first person interviews and discusses the Second Wave of feminism. It introduces the idea of the sexulization of women being used in consumerism and the lack of sexual education in school during the time. The Feminine Mystique is a useful resource because it is considered the groundbreaking book about feminism and lists issues that women have had to deal with from the 1960s until now. The book could be used to argue the struggles that women have faced and continue to face.

In the book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan brings attention to what she calls the feminine mystique, or “the problem that has no name”. Through the use of anecdotal narratives, her own personal experiences as a journalist, editor, mother, and the interviews of many women from different backgrounds in order to unveil the truth about the women of the 1950’s. The problem which sparked the second wave of feminism in the United States is one that focuses on the inequality between men and women and the undervaluing of women in both the social and private spheres. The women of the time gave up pursuing their passions, such as getting an education or careers in science or business in order to fit the image of the stereotypical stay-at-home mom whose main goal in life is to raise her children while providing a safe and comforting home for her husband. The Feminine Mystique, as she called it, was the idea of widespread unhappiness of women, despite the preconceived notion that women were happiest when they have a family. Throughout her work, she dives into many of the problems associated with the feminine mystique and builds a powerful concept of what would eventually be labeled feminism.

The overall theme of the 1950s depicts the representation of women and their linkage to sexuality. In unit two Marilyn Monroe, Barbie, and beauty pageants expose how many parallels are transparent. As the golden age lecture points out during this duration women received punitive treatment compared to men when it came down to categories composed of their sexuality (Vlahoulis, 2018). Women were expected to maintain a positive image and not appear sexual but carry themselves in a domestic goddess way. In fact, they were expected to shelter their sexuality for wifely duties and propagating offspring. As for women like Marilyn Monroe she was the center of a sex symbol for women of her time and was thought to be a “dumb blonde” based on roles assigned to her in her career as an actress. However, Monroe had a life behind the eye of the public and detrimental childhood experiences influenced a broad array of her actions and encounters she had with the men in her life.

By 1970 America was restless with social, economic, and political change. The Feminine Mystique had been released for eight years and had begun to strike a chord with the unsatisfied housewives of America. Women were realizing that they were not the only ones who were unsatisfied, and that their credentials and degrees were going to waste. More women were beginning to enter their selves in the public sphere. By the 1970s many women were able to express themselves in a productive, sexual, and creative manner.

Mellencamp speaks of two key issues, that of the rising female star within the 1950’s and the erosion of their power occurring within comedies. During the time of my first text ‘I Love Lucy’ (1951-1957), women are being urged to leave the city and move to the suburbs for leisure and children. TV supported this idea of blissful domesticity, this form of excluding women from the work place and keeping them at home can be seen as a form of military containment.

When looking at the shift occurring with gender roles in this postwar period, the simplified answer to why these advancements were happening is because of the impact of the war on society but Roberts goes in depth about the issues that were brought out in society because of the war. Jacques Boulenger said, “The femme moderne is above all a creation of the war.” The femme moderne is a prevailing image of women after the war and they are described as “scandalous in her dress and