and a lot of the women who got
into educational institutions as a result
of the
%uh suffrage and women's movement of the twenties
came to the fore in the nineteen sixties and
i'll just mention one for example rachel carson
who got to go to johns hopkins and was
trained as a geneticist and i think as a
chemist
and but she was also a very skillful and talented
writer
and she earned her living
in the fish and wildlife
office of
i think the interior department
but she had learned through a number of people
some of whom were in massachusetts about the
effects of d_d_t_ on bird population and she
did that research and wrote and published
silent spring
which is considered one of the most influential
books of the twentieth century
so i would say she was a product of that
earlier generation
%uh betty friedan came
she was born a little later
%um jane jacobs who wrote life-and-death of american
cities she was also a product of the education
that
women were finally able to get didn't you
say by the away
that betty friedan not that she copied
from simone de beauvoir but that
simone de beauvoir had said earlier on
what %uh what betty friedan later said do
I have that right
simone de beauvoir's second sex
was not widely read in the united states until
betty friedan's book
and the central thesis of her book is that
social
forms are constructed and other words all
these
patterns that we felt were just
anchored in concrete about
the way women should be the way marriages
should work that women were
supposed to stay in the home
simone de beauvoir said
this is ridiculous these are constructed
for social reasons
and that is the theme in betty friedan's book
the feminine mystique but she's
analyzing american society and particularly
the freudian freudian psychology that was
so influential in the fifties
