Feminine Un/fulfillment

Both the Friedan and Giard readings were kind of shocking to me. Like having heard of but never read The Feminine Mystique, I know that women are and were systemically disadvantaged. But I had no idea how simultaneously obvious and implicit their repression was in the middle of the century. The statistics that Friedan lists were disturbing to me in their extent alone - even to learn that women were less apparently repressed (in some ways) before WW2. I think Friedan's work is moreover an extremely clear example of the fact that our perception of the opportunities available to us and those which we should pursue - for whatever reason, be it personal happiness, social conformity, or that the two are equal - is very deeply ("implicitly") constructed by our culture.  So much so that when these perceptions are fundamentally problematic (i.e. when social conformity is not what is best suited to our personal happiness), deep psychological dysphoria develops without any diagnostic, let alone curative, recourse (because none exists in the culture). Even if I had always thought that many women in that time period (or any, really) maintained a kind of cognitive dissonance between their repression and its rationale (e.g. "what kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor?" (Friedan 61)), I had never really appreciated the extent to which - due to the pervasion and exclusivity of these rationales - women didn't perceive their own repression as repression in the first place.

I think that Giard was as equally remarkable in writing about cooking because, in the same way, I had never really appreciated it for what it is. When she explains that "entering into the vocation of cooking and manipulating ordinary things make[s] one use intelligence, a subtle intelligence full of nuances and strokes of genius, a light and lively intelligence that can be perceived without exhibiting itself, in short, a very ordinary intelligence" (Giard 322), I think she appeals to the idea that every practice involves its own unique kind of intelligence and skill, different from but no less than the intelligence indicative of academia - which tends to be the only kind of intelligence that gets any legitimation. This is something I've learned more and more as I've seen the many kinds of and unique strengths that people have and nonetheless get little credit for. Thus, in a way, Giard can be read as a response to Friedan: femininity is repression, but what constitutes femininity (like the ordinary) is far from worthless or unskilled.