If I would lead a women’s discussion group my first priority would be to introduce The Feminine Mystique to explore some of the ideas raised by many pieces of women’s literature, as well as giving students a solid history and background to the female experience in America. I would not have students read the entire book, but I would pull out a selection of excerpts, especially ones where popularity and fitting in were the main issue, and how just a few years earlier women were expected to have big dreams, or about the empty feeling women got from doing nothing more than taking care of children and making food all day. This book would bring up some very interesting issues. In our Western culture, women are given many opportunities never before offered. We are almost limitless, and are pressured far less often to be stay-at-home wives and mothers. The Feminine Mystique would give students perspective on how women have been in past times and how some women still live today. Students would probably be amazed at both the dramatic change that women have undergone over the past several decades, and women would possibly identify if they are still in such a position. After that, my first choice of novels would be Beloved, followed by Susanne LaFleshe, because they are both very different novels that bring up very different issues.
Beloved, the first novel I would choose, focuses mainly on a group of women and their connections with each other. It would bring up the fact that women, especially women of color, were expected to do things that women would never be expected to do. They live alone, with no man to protect them, and they are expected to make all their own money and work to keep up the house and land. They had no luxury of having a housekeeper or cook while they take care of children. Women would never do work that was difficult or physical; that’s what men were for. The contrasts between The Feminine Mystique and Beloved are endless, creating many different issues. First, why is it that white women never have the plight of having to work so hard? Why do they never have the problem of having their children murdered? Are the colored women more powerful? Are white women less able to take care of themselves or unable to work? Is that why they are pampered? Are black women more able to be on their own because they are physically capable of doing more? There are so many issues that could come out of these two novels juxtaposed one after the other. Another issue that would certainly come up would be that of women’s progress and regression throughout the last 100 years. When The Feminine Mystique took place, women had nearly come full circle, from gaining the right to vote and being allowed to attend college and take up a serious profession to pitying the girls who have jobs and do not want husbands. Women went from gaining independence from depending on men and staying at home to being able to work on their own and having their own aspirations and dreams and career plans. Somewhere in the mix the next generation, the one living in the 1950s and 1960s, rebelled against their mothers’ ideas, because many of them fell flat. So they would rather stay at home and raise children. They went right back to bumbling around the house all day, like women 50 and 100 years before these women. If women in the 1800s, like Sethe and her family would have been able to have the option of working, going to college, or being a housewife, they would have been tremendously jealous! They were never given a choice as to whether or not they wanted to live the way they did, and they did not have the option of getting out of their current circumstance. They could not decide to go to college to educate themselves and get a better job, or find wealthy men to marry, because at that time black men would not have had much more money than they themselves had. At that point, the issue of race would come up. While that is not at all the point of the class, it would certainly be an interesting point to bring up, and would make the class more well-rounded. It would also tie the issue of race briefly into the context of The Feminine Mystique, and students could discuss how accurately the book applied to all women, including black women.
Another question that would certainly be raised would be which of these standards applies today and which has been made obsolete. How is being a stay-at-home mom accepted today? How is it portrayed in media, including other novels? Is it a luxury? Is it considered laziness? Do women still go to college for the purpose of finding a husband? How many women wind up using their college education for a solid profession? Is it possible for women without educations to achieve a similar level of wealth as those with a college degree? Another question I might pose for students to consider relates to Beloved: How has the idea of being a single mom changed over the years? Is it more or less acceptable? Have single mothers become stronger or weaker than Sethe was? This could stir some very interesting reactions. First, how was Sethe a strong mother? How was she a weak mother? What about Baby Sugs? How was she a different kind of mother than Sethe? Baby Sugs had the courage to harden her heart and accept the fact that she would lose all of her children to slavery. Does it make her weak because she chose never to love those children in the first place? Is Sethe a weak woman because she chose to kill one of her children instead of teaching them to grow up and be strong enough to handle slavery? Most students would probably say that Sethe’s idea of killing her child to “save it” from slavery and ill-treatment is absolutely horrible. However, don’t most mothers say that they wish they could prevent their children from feeling pain or hurt? Is this situation any different? And if I could ask a question without any political agenda and without starting a major debate, how is this situation different from abortion? They both occur to prevent a child from being born into inadequate or unpleasant circumstances. What implications does that have today, and how does that make the novel relevant today? How has Toni Morrison taken a story about slavery in the 1800s and made it applicable to America today? Is this intentional? Responses to this question could be very interesting. For example, students might respond by talking about how the idea of single motherhood has become very real with the rise of the divorce rate, especially over money matters. Also, the “slave drivers” in Beloved could be very vaguely compared to major company CEOs, especially in today’s receding economy. They keep the lower-class citizens from getting ahead at times, and those are the people who work so hard to have anything at all. Furthermore, divorce is often blamed on financial stress, and this would certainly be a factor with today’s economy.
In relation to that, how has the institute of marriage changed over the years? How have women become more independent than the 1950s, and how have they become more or less independent from the time when Beloved takes place? It seems that two people living together and having a child together is so much more acceptable today than it was in the 1950s, but it seems that it was more acceptable in some conditions in the 1800s than it even is today. I find this to be very interesting. Have women’s options decreased? Has society’s view of women gone from liberal to conservative to moderately liberal? Is it still more accepted to be “the happy housewife” than a strong single mother? Can women be well-educated, well-off, well-accepted, and single with a child? It seems the answer to this is pretty obviously that women can be all of those things, but will they ever be as well accepted as those with husbands and houses in the suburbs?
The final issue I might bring up is that of male dominance and freedom as a woman. Women in the 1950s were basically ruled by their husbands. That is not to say that they had no rights or decisions on their own, but they chose to leave most of the decision making to their husbands. On one hand, this allows them a far more worry-free life than Sethe had, but on the other hand Sethe had far more control over the events in her life, for as much as they could be controlled. Sethe had the problem of having many of the events in her life controlled by men, but those men were mostly slave drivers or slave catchers, except for a few men who ended up dying or leaving anyway. Although those men they could not control, the women of Beloved controlled anything within their power. Most significantly, they controlled their reactions to these men. For example Baby Sugs controlled her reaction to losing her children to slavery by not allowing herself to love the children to begin with. The women mentioned in The Feminine Mystique, however, chose to give up their ability to control everything in their lives by allowing men to control it instead. They were perfectly capable of going to college and getting a good job to support themselves, being then able to have any material thing they wanted. They would have control over where they lived and what they did on a daily basis. However, being a wife and mother at this time only allowed them to stay at home and take care of children, make dinner, and hosting the occasional garden party. While women of the 1950s, and sometimes even today, gave up their freedom to do as they pleased on a daily basis, controlled by the money their husbands gave them and their children’s schedules, they had it much easier. There was no struggle for money or safety, or hard backbreaking labor to be done by the women, but was that enough? That is certainly not to say that a wife and mother cannot have her freedom today, because the “working mom” is accepted and celebrated today, but there are still women who prefer to stay at home, whether by choice or by their husband’s insistence. Was it better that Sethe had the choice to do as she pleased, spending her time between her job and her daughters? Or was it better to stay at home all day piddling with things such as vacuuming, ironing, dusting, and pampering one’s husband?
If I were to have my own class or workshop on women’s literature, I would not only be overjoyed but also overwhelmed on which books to use. There are so many phenomenal novels out there written about the struggles women have gone through over the years, but The Feminine Mystique and Beloved are the two that I would start with. They give a very diverse background of women’s experiences in America over the last 200 years, as well as insight into how our society views women today. I find both books, especially Beloved to be so intriguing and thought provoking that even the most stubborn and reluctant reader would be captivated.
