The second wave began in the 1960s nearly as soon as the end of World War II and continued into the 90s. This wave unfolded in the context of the anti-war and
civil rights movements and the growing self-consciousness of a variety of minority groups around the world. During the war, it was proven that women were completely
capable of doing the jobs that men had abandoned when they went to war. Women requested to be freed from the traditional roles of housewife and caregiver. They hope
to gain a higher position in the work force. The third wave of feminism in America took place in the early 1990’s. This
wave did not have a specific goal but instead raised awareness to gain all sorts of equality, such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and social class. This modern
wave of feminism also gives attention towards issues like gender violence, reproductive right, sexual harassments and provides support of all sorts.
4.1.2 American Society During 20
th
Century
Betty Friedan’s book Feminine Mystique pressed on the idea that women had no other roles other than being a wife or mother. She began encouraging women to
pursue what they desired to do in life and gain the roles in a society that was labeled as male-dominated. Women started to oppose to gender discrimination in workplaces
and demanded full equality to men. The typical image of America in the 1950s was of a simpler, happier one
emerging from the aftermath of the Second World War. Families moved to the suburbs, raised a baby boom, and lived a life in which everyone had a specified role.
Women were considered domestic caregivers, with a single responsibility for the home and child, while men brought home the money. This was what social
construction labeled women as.
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Popular since the 1950s, this tenacious stereotype conjures mythic images of culture icons - June Cleaver, Donna Reed, Harriet
Nelson - the quintessential white, middle- class housewives who stayed at home to rear children, clean house and bake cookies.
Meyerowitz, 1994
The idea of the ideal women gave a clear picture to women of what they were supposed to imitate as their proper gender role in society. As a result, women began to
construct their identities around this image, and some still do so today. Gender construction is nothing new to American society or even to any other society. Society
does play a huge role in the construction of individual gender roles, and in turn our identity. This is not to say that society has complete control over this construction.
Historians of American culture began to pay close attention to the socializing experiences of women from 1945 to 1960 also referred to as the “post-war” era.
Before this change, historians considered these years fairly unimportant for women, often seeing them only as a passive link between women workers in World War II and
the political activists of the 1960s. But in fact the ideological and institutional limitations of 1950s American society had a significant impact on the construction of
women’s identities during this time period. Women had achieved perhaps too much economic independence during World War II, which makes the oppressive qualities
of the domestic ideal of the 1950s harmful to the construction of women’s identities. At the time during the 1950s, there were many more men in the work force and
women earned far less money. However in 1963 when Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique was published, this critical study of middle-class womens anger and
proposed solutions made the way for a redefinition of sex roles in America. In 1966, three years after Plath had taken her own life, Friedan and her colleagues established
the National Organization for Women NOW.
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Betty Friedan was perhaps the first to identify what is now referred to as the stereotype of the “ideal woman”. In her classic study The Feminine Mystique she
stated that, magazines did not passively participate in enforcing these gender roles, but were in fact an active force behind the creation of what she termed the “feminine
monster.” She claimed that the manufacturing sector had decided to make women better
consumers of home products by reinforcing and rewarding the concept of women’s total fulfillment through the role of housewife
and mother” Friedan, 1963.
She was greatly alarmed at how advertising had become such a powerful force in shaping the social fabrication of women such as pressuring women to stay at home.
She was also alarmed by how with certainty these advertisements shaped the creation of a woman’s identity in terms of this ideal model. Throughout almost every source
discussing the domestic ideal there is an agreement that media, primarily magazines and film, were the primary methods of which this model was send out to women, in
effect the social construction agent. Women could find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male
domination, and nurturing maternal love. It denied women a career or any commitment outside the home and narrowed woman’s world
down to the home, cut her role back to housewife Friedan, 1963.
The slight absence of feminism in the 1940s and 1950s in American society made an impact on women’s life. Perhaps more specifically referring to the condition
at the time and relating it to the novel The Bell Jar. The setting and social condition where the story and how social reality was like at the time. Even though waves of
feminism already begun and develop there are still absence of the movement. It is probably impossible to fully understand The Bell Jar without an awareness of the
relative absence of feminism in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. These
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decades were fairly wealthy ones in American history, and womens social and financial positions are usually based on their husbands occupation and income.
Although more than six million women went to work when America was engaged in World War II, after the war ended, many were encouraged to leave the work force and
the patriarchal system emerges back into society. Dr. Benjamin Spock, who published the book Baby and Child Care, once even
said that the federal government subsidizes housewives to discourage them from entering into the work force. Many single women worked out of economic needs, they
were not encouraged to show ambition or to stay in the work force indefinitely. A married woman who is either with or without children that earns as much as her
husband was rare. But women who worked in basic or low-paying jobs were less of a threat to mainstream America. Just like in The Bell Jar, Mrs. Greenwood encourages
her daughter, Esther, to learn shorthand because that skill will at least guarantee her some kind of job after college. The lack of choice, freedom, and social support really
puts a pressure on the roles of women at the time. It was either living their desired life but not deserving as much, and living the traditional role of women and relying on
their husband. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place
an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a
Fourth of July rocket. Plath, 2013:83
Esther confesses that she hates the idea of being captivated by men. The life that she wants is not to live under a set of rules all her life, but she wants to
experience she own excitement through her own freedom.
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The changing world of women has had a dramatic impact on Americans in the last 30 years. Historically, men have held jobs outside the home while women care for
the house and family, the study noted, but that situation began to change when the baby-boom generation started to grow up. The 1950s were perhaps the last decade in
which womens behavior and social norms were in agreement with the family oriented lifestyle. By 1960 one-fourth of married women with children were in the labor force,
and today the figure is more than half. The Bell Jar functions on many literary levels, but it is perhaps most obviously
about the limitations forced on young, intelligent American women in the 1950s. A brilliant woman with literary desires, Esther glances into the future and does not like
her choices. As it has been discussed before, The Bell Jar relies heavily on Plaths own life experience. Like Esther, Plath attended Smith College on scholarship, earned
top grades, published poetry at a young age, and majored in English. Like Esther, she did a summer internship in New York City, suffered a mental collapse, and was
institutionalized. Both eventually recovered to the extent they were released from psychiatric units into the real world. While Esthers future, by the novels
conclusion, remains uncertain, Sylvia Plaths recovery only lasted a decade and on February 11
th
1963, she chose to end her own life. In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, there are major feminist issues, mainly
concerning liberal feminism and some radical feminism. Esther struggles to live her desired life, doing what she loves. She is instead burdened with the thoughts of her
mother’s wishes and other voices of society. This kind of pressure is what made the construction of women’s life at that time. The issues that women face in order to get a
small bit of freedom is pushed aside by what society decide.
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The way society is taught to be socialized is most important and goes unnoticed, therefore it is valid to claim that gender is socially
constructed through our everyday practices, whether we are aware of the construction or not - Gender: A Social Construction Greco,
2013.
But as society moved to a different decade, women were educated during the 1960s at a higher rate than in any previous time, many of them in fields not
traditionally thought to be accessible to women. Birth control also became available during this time, which increased the sexual independence and professional career
options of women. The 1960s, with its increase of women in the workforce, education and
availability of birth control, this idea appeared to be the exact opposite of the “ideal woman” of the 1950s. However, most studies indicate that while women succeed in
these areas, they still felt it was necessary to hold on to the domestic ideal as much as possible in order to maintain their identity as a “good woman, mother, and wife.” So
while women in result achieved great rise of liberation during the 1960s they were still bound by the oppression of the domestic ideal, much like the problem that
workingwomen of today face. Even for Plath, after all the liberation and changes that have happened for women, the oppression in her life in the 1960s still made her to end
her life. The construction of gender construction in our society had almost made a
permanent label from when it first started. The phenomenon of this construction has made a huge effect in the lives of women especially. This is because from the
beginning women were treated as a second-class citizen by men. It affects women greatly because as human beings just like men, they are restricted to do things that
men can. This kind of discrimination oppresses women’s lives, as it is completely
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unfair. The misjudging perspective that men put on women is lowering the standards of women, even if they are way more intelligent and skilled in various aspects than
men are. It has almost become a tradition and a typical stereotypical ideology even to this day in certain places and culture. As we have looked into the social condition of
how women’s life were constructed in America particularly during the 1950s, linking to The Bell Jar.
4.2 The Struggle of the Main Character in Facing Social Oppression
