Baby Houseman's Inner Conflict About Femininity -- Part 2

This article follows up my previous article titled Baby Houseman's Inner Conflict About Femininity -- Part 1.

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In February 1963 -- six months before the Dirty Dancing story takes place -- the important and influential book The Feminine Mystique was published. Written by Betty Friedan, the book addressed mainly the dissatisfaction of American housewives, whose lives were rather comfortable materially but frustrated intellectually. Two of the books chapters, however, addressed the psychological issue of femininity. The Wikipedia article about the book summarized chapters 5 and 6 as follows:

Chapter 5: In this chapter, called "The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud", Friedan, who had a degree in psychology, criticizes Sigmund Freud (whose ideas were very influential in America at the time of her book's publication). She notes that Freud saw women as childlike and as destined to be housewives, once pointing out that Freud wrote:

I believe that all reforming action in law and education would break down in front of the fact that, long before the age at which a man can earn a position in society, Nature has determined woman's destiny through beauty, charm, and sweetness. Law and custom have much to give women that has been withheld from them, but the position of women will surely be what it is: in youth an adored darling and in mature years a loved wife.

Friedan also points out that Freud's unproven concept of "penis envy" had been used to label women who wanted careers as neurotic, and that the popularity of Freud's work and ideas elevated the "feminine mystique" of female fulfillment in housewifery into a "scientific religion" that most women were not educated enough to criticize.

Chapter 6: Friedan criticizes functionalism, which attempted to make the social sciences more credible by studying the institutions of society as if they were parts of a social body, as in biology. Institutions were studied in terms of their function in society, and women were confined to their sexual biological roles as housewives and mothers as well as being told that doing otherwise would upset the social balance. Friedan points out that this is unproven and that Margaret Mead, a prominent functionalist, had a flourishing career as an anthropologist.

In other words, conventional teachings of psychology and sociology had provided intellectual justifications for women to perceive their social roles as providing "beauty, charm and sweetness" to men and to serving as housewives and mothers" in order to maintain "social balance". These teachings were subjected to effective ridicule by Friedan.

It's likely that the Houseman family -- which included three intelligent, upper-middle-class females -- knew about the book and perhaps even had bought it for their home. Perhaps Baby's decision to obtain a higher education and then to pursue a professional career was inspired by reading the book.

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In my article here, however, I am concerned more about Baby's attitude toward femininity itself (not toward education and career). In that regard, a more relevant book was The Second Sex, written by a French female philosopher named Simone de Beauvoir. The book was originally published in French under the title Le Deuxième Sexe in 1949. The first English-language translation was published in 1953. During the subsequent decade from 1953 to 1963, The Second Sex was the most influential book criticizing traditional attitudes toward femininity.

I doubt that Baby herself read The Second Sex before August 1963 -- the book is long and ponderously philosophical -- but certainly she was influenced indirectly, by older feminists who had read it.

In a nutshell, de Beauvoir taught that females were subtly indoctrinated into self-defeating femininity by manipulative men. In modern jargon: Femininity was an artificial social construct.

In the movie Dirty Dancing, Baby comes to feel that she has been indoctrinated deceitfully by her father.

I'm sorry I lied to you, but you lied too. You told me everyone was alike and deserved a fair break, but you meant everyone who is like you.

You told me you wanted me to change the world, to make it better, but you meant by becoming a lawyer or an economist and marrying someone from Harvard.

I'm not proud of myself, but I'm in this family too. You can't keep giving me the silent treatment.

There are a lot of things about me that aren't what you thought, but if you love me, you have to love all the things about me.

And I love you. I'm sorry I let you down.

I'm so sorry, Daddy, but you let me down too.

Baby does not complain that her father has been indoctrinating her into acting more feminine. On the contrary, here she is complaining implicitly that he has been diverting her feminine attractions away from unintellectual, physically employed men like Johnny Castle. She complains that her father is manipulating her by "giving me the silent treatment" and by excluding her from the family.

Baby feels emotionally manipulated and sexually indoctrinated by her father, and so she is open to learn from de Beauvoir's teachings.

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The Spark Notes summary of The Second Sex includes the following passages:

De Beauvoir’s primary thesis is that men fundamentally oppress women by characterizing them, on every level, as the Other, defined exclusively in opposition to men. Man occupies the role of the self, or subject; woman is the object, the other. He is essential, absolute, and transcendent. She is inessential, incomplete, and mutilated. He extends out into the world to impose his will on it, whereas woman is doomed to immanence, or inwardness. He creates, acts, invents; she waits for him to save her. This distinction is the basis of all de Beauvoir’s later arguments.

De Beauvoir states that while it is natural for humans to understand themselves in opposition to others, this process is flawed when applied to the genders. In defining woman exclusively as Other, man is effectively denying her humanity. ....

She traces female development through its formative stages: childhood, youth, and sexual initiation. Her goal is to prove that women are not born “feminine” but shaped by a thousand external processes. She shows how, at each stage of her upbringing, a girl is conditioned into accepting passivity, dependence, repetition, and inwardness. Every force in society conspires to deprive her of subjectivity and flatten her into an object. Denied the possibility of independent work or creative fulfillment, the woman must accept a dissatisfying life of housework, childbearing, and sexual slavishness.

Having brought the woman to adulthood, de Beauvoir analyzes the various “situations,” or roles, the adult woman inhabits. The bourgeois woman performs three major functions: wife, mother, and entertainer. No matter how illustrious the woman’s household may be, these roles inevitably lead to immanence, incompleteness, and profound frustration. ....

Woman’s situation is not a result of her character. Rather, her character is a result of her situation. Her mediocrity, complacency, lack of accomplishment, laziness, passivity — all these qualities are the consequences of her subordination, not the cause. ...

Women reinforce their own dependency. Narcissists, women in love, and mystics all embrace their immanence by drowning selfhood in an external object — whether it be the mirror, a lover, or God. Throughout the book, de Beauvoir mentions such instances of females being complicit in their Otherness, particularly with regard to marriage. The difficulty of breaking free from “femininity” — of sacrificing security and comfort for some ill-conceived notion of “equality” — induces many women to accept the usual unfulfilling roles of wife and mother.

Only in work can she achieve autonomy. If woman can support herself, she can also achieve a form of liberation.

Although Baby herself probably had not read The Second Sex, de Beauvoir's book had been discussed much during the ten years since it had been published. The book had provided a philosophical scripture to women who felt unfairly manipulated, indoctrinated and dominated by men. Women's resentment had become intellectual and no longer could be dismissed as mere silly hysteria. Women were arguing back more intelligently against older, established men.

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In the following videos, Robbie Gould's philosophical guru, Ayn Rand, criticizes feminist politics.

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This is the second in a series of articles. Part 3 , Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7.