feminine mystique

On the sitcom The Office, as in real life, middle class working mothers are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

They often face the choice of either compromising their career—working part-time or quitting altogether—or feeling like an absent mother. Men, on the other hand, are typically not held to the same standard. Rarely do employers worry whether their male employees will have children and scale back their working hours. Seldom do people worry whether men can "have it all." The Office paints a fairly balanced portrait of what it means when a husband and wife clash over their careers and their families. In the evolving relationship of Pam and Jim in the American version of the series, the married coworkers are equally responsible for their marriage's breakdown, and they should be equally responsible for fixing it—if it can, in fact, be fixed.

The show's central relationship echoes dynamics that feminist writers have pointed out for decades. This week is the 50th anniversary of the Feminine Mystique, the book which so clearly articulated the tension between the roles expected of women in their work and home lives. Writer Stephanie Coontz spelled out the real-life statistics behind this continuing conflict this week in a great New York Times piece:

When family and work obligations collide, mothers remain much more likely than fathers to cut back or drop out of work. But unlike the situation in the 1960s, this is not because most people believe this is the preferable order of things. Rather, it is often a reasonable response to the fact that our political and economic institutions lag way behind our personal ideals....Female professionals are twice as likely to quit work as other married mothers when their husbands work 50 hours or more a week and more than three times more likely to quit when their husbands work 60 hours or more.

TGI Tuesday! Here's our list of news links for today.

• Roxane Gay reviews Identity Thief: "McCarthy's character, Diana, is increasingly painted as lonely and miserable.... This is, it appears, the only narrative the filmmakers can imagine for an overweight woman." [Buzzfeed]
• Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique turns 50...and Bitch Media creative director and cofounder Andi Zeisler reflects on its legacy. [LA Review of Books]
• Erica Sánchez asks several women—including Muslimah Media Watch founder and Bitch contributor Fatemeh Fakhraie—to weigh in on Islam and feminism. [Huffington Post]
• Ava DuVernay, director of Middle of Nowhere, has directed a short film starring Gabrielle Union and Adepero Oduye for fashion brand Miu Miu. (Don't worry, it's no "Fashion Film"). [Shadow and Act]
• Leaders of the Idle No More movement share what they see as the next step in their protest against the Canadian government. [Indian Country]
• Remember the amazing spark-shooting guitar from Beyonce's Superbowl performance? Meet Bibi McGill, the guitarist and kale-chip entrepreneur. [Ebony]
• Need some good nonfiction reads? Check out "17 Essays by Female Writers That Everyone Should Read," from the classic (Virginia Woolf's "Street Haunting") to the contemporary (Zadie Smith's "Joy"). [Flavorwire]
 

Post your reads in the comments!

In the week leading up to the release of the film Revolutionary Road, there was quite a media ballyhoo about Kate Winslet reading Betty Friedan's 1963 feminist classic The Feminine Mystique to prepare for her role as April Wheeler, as well as Winslet's declaration (albeit tepid) that she is a feminist ("I think I probably am. I mean, not in a bra-burning way. But I think I am a feminist, yeah.") Now that the film is in theatres, the connection between the film and feminism has continued to be the subject of much conversation. Over at HuffPo, blogger Melissa Silverstein goes so far as to write that the film "should be required watching for all young women who think that feminism is irrelevant." But in all this talk about feminism and Revolutionary Road, there hasn't been much dialogue about film's relationship to its source, the 1961 Richard Yates novel of the same name, or the way that the character of Frank Wheeler has been re-imagined. Casting a critical eye on the way the novel has been adapted calls into question just how revolutionary the film really is... More after the jump...

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for both novel and film.