Essay on trapped it is urgent
Answers
Imagine a caterpillar, a beautiful, richly colored caterpillar. Each passing day, this caterpillar grows more and more beautiful in anticipation for the day when she would form a cocoon, eventually leading to the day every caterpillar’s dream becomes a reality. This day occurs when that small caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Such a process seems so natural to us; many of us have even seen the transformation right before our eyes. But how would we be affected if, in the middle of the cocoon-transforming-to-butterfly stage, the beautiful caterpillar shriveled up and died? For some of us, we would be devastated—how terrible that the caterpillar was unable to finally gain freedom from the darkness she experienced as she lived in a cocoon! For some of us, we would be apathetic to the death—what does a natural process have to do with my life? And for some of us, the experience would be trivial—death happens all the time, especially when we least expect it. This tragic caterpillar story is relatable to most women in our American society. They are that caterpillar, striving every day to be a butterfly, but something (that cocoon) prevents them from reaching their full potential, from becoming who they were meant to be. In segments taken from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the author discusses the role of what she calls “the feminine mystique” in the development of women’s self-identity. According to her argument, Friedan claims that women face an inner struggle as they form their identity because of the pressure society has placed on them to become mothers or housewives despite all of the rights that women have gained in this country. On the same note, I argue that males undergo a similar crisis, except society expects them to be the “breadwinners,” causing males to feel pressured by traditional ideas of what it means to be a “man.” I further argue that the book is not outdated since males and females alike face this crisis even more-so today than previously.
What is the crisis in women’s identity? How can we be certain that what Friedan discusses is a valid claim? Friedan states, “the feminine mystique permits, even encourages, women to ignore the question of their identity” (1963, p. 126)* But how is this proven? What evidence does she offer? Friedan powerfully argues that “American women no longer know who they are. They are sorely in need of a new image to help them find their identity…American women are so unsure of who they should be that they look to this glossy public image to decide every detail of their lives. They look for the image they will no longer take from their mothers” (p. 127). There are two major claims within this quote: first, Friedan stipulate that women in the United States attempt to find their self-worth, self-image, and even their self-identity by looking to media images of stick-figure, seductive and even plastic women; second, she believes women in this society do that in order to retaliate against the role model their mothers set for them in their own attempt to discover their femininity. Friedan discovers that “girls were so terrified of becoming like their mothers that they could not see themselves at all” (p. 128). Friedan blames society for creating such a fear in women: traditional thoughts of male dominance and gender roles have deterred women from advancing politically, socially, or in the work force. However, she also reveals through her book that the issue is not just about overt injustice; it is about the covert injustice that still haunts women to this day—it’s about the psychological trauma that women face in their identity crisis. Therefore, in making these claims, Friedan attempts to overcome this issue by bringing awareness to the inner conflict that women face and encouraging them to change the way society views women.