{"id":16325,"date":"2018-02-07T22:26:26","date_gmt":"2018-02-08T06:26:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=16325"},"modified":"2018-02-12T07:07:12","modified_gmt":"2018-02-12T15:07:12","slug":"the-feminine-mystique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/the-feminine-mystique\/","title":{"rendered":"The Feminine Mystique"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Vincent Miller\u2019s Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture <\/em>was eye-opening, to say the least. Miller did an excellent job of presenting the argument that religious people have come to be consumers of religion much like we consume everything else in our culture. The chapter of the book that caught my attention was the chapter on \u201cThe Commodification of Culture\u201d, and how we have consumed aspects of American culture like it is a commodity to be consumed. One of the sections talked about the introduction of the single-family home. \u201cAglietta calls attention to the correlation of the greater extraction of workers\u2019 energy during the workday with the decline of the homestead as a place of production and the rise of the single-family home, where the nuclear family depends on wages to support a consumption-centered lifestyle.\u201d[1]<\/a> This change from a multi-generational home, where the whole family worked together to make a life for themselves, to a home with just one family altered the landscape of America forever. Miller states, \u201cThe corporate motto of the Federal National Home Mortgage Association\u2014\u201cWe\u2019re in the American Dream Business\u201d–communicates how important the single-family home is as a social idea. Other politically powerful myths, such as \u201cfamily values\u201d, Betty Friedan\u2019s feminine mystique, and the innocence of childhood are link to it as well.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In reading about what the single-family home did to change our culture, I noticed a reference to Betty Friedan\u2019s concept of the \u201cfeminine mystique\u201d, and as you can imagine (and expect), I had to explore this further. In my research, I found that this is the title of her book written in 1963, which was republished in 2013 for the fiftieth anniversary. In the book, she talks about \u201cthe problem that has no name\u201d that plagued many, many American women. Friedan states that \u201cthe problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night\u2014she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question\u2014\u201cIs this all?\u201d[3]<\/a> This aspect of American culture that became consumed left women holding the bag by themselves at home, depressed, lost, and angry. What used to be a thriving multi-generational homestead of teamwork and enterprise became a single-family prison for most women.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cJust what was this problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say \u201cI feel empty somehow . . . incomplete.\u201d Or she would say, \u201cI feel as if I don\u2019t exist.\u201d Sometimes she blotted out the feeling with a tranquilizer. Sometimes she thought the problem was with her husband, or her children, or that what she really needed was to redecorate her house, or move to a better neighborhood, or have an affair, or another baby.\u201d[4]<\/a> Women knew deep down inside there had to be more to this life than being trapped inside a home serving everyone inside of it. Granted, not every woman struggled with this to the same extent, but the women who wanted to pursue education and a career of their own felt very alone and disregarded. This is the time when the media would focus on marketing home products that were not only targeted exclusively to women but were also designed to keep them trapped in their little automated, consumer world. The saddest part was that no one was listening to these women and they had no real help. As Friedan says, \u201ceven so, most men, and some women, still did not know that this problem was real. But those who had faced it honestly knew that all the superficial remedies, the sympathetic advice, the scolding words and the cheering words were somehow drowning the problem in unreality.\u201d[5]<\/a> This book became groundbreaking in highlighting the plight of the American housewife, and many women would recognize Betty Friedan as the reason they have a voice and a fulfilling life today. In fact, in 1970 Friedan called for women around the country to march to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the women\u2019s suffrage amendment, which created a mass turnout in cities across the country.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Just like when the invention of the single-family home changed our culture dramatically, our culture continues to undergo commodification in the way we adapt and change the way we live in order to feed our selfish desires. In Terry Clark\u2019s review of Miller, he states, \u201caccording to Miller, a self-centered therapeutic culture has been created from a variety of movements that fed into consumerism. Outsourcing of production rather than home-crafting products and services reduces consumers to “passive spectators” (p. 60). Drawing on ethicist Peter Sedgwick, Miller argues that consumerism grounds its moral justification in eighteenth-century Romanticism, which emphasizes self-creation and the importance of display for the maintenance of social identity. The result, he claims (p. 85), is “a fragmenting narcissism that transforms everything, including religion, into a self-centered, therapeutic exercise.”[6]<\/a> It is interesting he uses the term therapeutic to describe the consumerism in our culture, and I have to agree with him that we have created a country full of narcissists who can\u2019t see past their own nose to see the hurting world around them. I\u2019m grateful for the progress that has been made in bringing women out of the home, men back in the home, and more gender-balance in our leadership\u2026but we have a long way to go.<\/p>\n

______________________________<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [1] Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture<\/em>, New York: Continuum, 2005. P. 46.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [2] Ibid., 46.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [3] Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (50th Anniversary Edition)<\/em> W. W. Norton & Company, Kindle Edition, Kindle Locations 225-229.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [4] Ibid., 309-312.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [5] Ibid., 400-402.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [6] Terry Clark, “Book Review (Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture)” Journal of Marketing 69, no. 4 (2005): 264.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vincent Miller\u2019s Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture was eye-opening, to say the least. Miller did an excellent job of presenting the argument that religious people have come to be consumers of religion much like we consume everything else in our culture. The chapter of the book that caught my attention […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":95,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,255],"class_list":["post-16325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dminlgp","tag-miller","cohort-lgp8"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/95"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16325"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16421,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16325\/revisions\/16421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}