essays on doing cooking and feminity

The essays, "doing cooking" and "problem has no name" both talked about women's role in society, but in quite different ways.

For "doing cooking", author talked about specifically how women are excluded from society by describing one of their everyday task:cooking. At the time of writing, most women were"excluded from public life and the communication of knowledge"(321), they are separated from outside society and these women's work are totally within their houses. As a result, women's focuses and what they concern are really narrow and trivial, such as "will the cake be moist enough?" or "add some water while cooking tomatoes" or "add a drop of vinegar to grilled pork ribs"(322), that's all their worries, knowledge and views. For them cooking is the medium of everyday practice "that is repeated in time and space". Giard herself loves cooking but that's only she has extra time and really enjoys cooking food, meanwhile most of the women are cooking only because it's their jobs, and always has a "limited duration of success"(323)

For "problem that has no name", Friedan talked about how women are excluded and discriminated from social works. At the beginning of the essay, there are a lot of statistics showing how women's marry age became younger and how the rate of entering college is decreased year by year. Moreover, in a way that numbers and statistics cannot tell, trend of women's dream had become a housewife, and they are satisfied given only a nice house in the suburb, get married and have children. Gladly, women are becoming aware of the problem of themselves, they realized they can do something else besides their husbands and kids though they cannot tell what exactly the problem is.