The Feminine Mystique
What metaphors are used in The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan?
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Jill W
Motherhood, like that suburban wasteland, is a trap: Friedan has vivid metaphors of confinement to express this, including a chapter title of what now seems to be dubious taste—'Progressive Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp'. A frequently repeated image of the apparently happy housewife with 'a stationwagon full of children' is itself used to epitomize 'this new image which insists she is not a person but a "woman."' Whereas the Victorians' problem was the repression of sexuality, that of the present is 'a stunting or evasion of growth.'
The Feminine Mystique