Having It All: The Superwoman

Abstract

If, as we have seen, much of second wave feminist writing, fiction and activism was designed to lead women out of the kitchen, then the logical question that followed necessarily had to consider where they should go next. For Betty Friedan, there was no doubt that the first step in a woman’s “new life plan” had to involve a rejection of the housewife image in order to prepare her to make “a serious professional commitment” (Feminine Mystique 316). Friedan’s goal was to start a sex-role revolution and to accomplish this she advocated that housewives and mothers should enter the public sphere and take up paid employment. “Even if a woman does not have to work to eat”, Friedan writes, “she can find identity only in work that is of real value to society” — by which she meant, “work for which, usually, our society pays” (301). She makes reference to women’s “psychological need to be economically productive” and optimistically describes the “numerous opportunities for the able, intelligent woman”: “In Westchester, on Long Island, in the Philadelphia suburbs, women have started mental health clinics, art centres, day camps. In big cities and small towns, women all the way from New England to California have pioneered new movements in politics and education” (300–1). “Over and over”, she continues, “women have told me that the crucial step for them was simply to take the first trip to the alumnae employment agency, or to send for the application for teacher certification” (303).

Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.

— Shirley Conran, Superwoman (1975)