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| | The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan (1963) |
 | | The concept ‘penis envy’, which Freud coined to describe a phenomenon he observed in women –; that is, in the middle-class women who were his patients in Vienna in the Victorian era – was seized in this country in the 1940s as the literal explanation of all that was wrong with American women. |
 | | If one interprets ‘penis envy’ as other Freudian concepts have been reinterpreted, in the light of our new knowledge that what Freud believed to be biological was often a cultural reaction, one sees simply that Victorian culture gave women many reasons to envy men: the same conditions, in fact, that the feminists fought against. |
 | | You cannot explain away woman’s envy of man, or her contempt for herself, as mere refusal to accept her sexual deformity, unless you think that a woman, by nature, is a being inferior to man. Then, of course, her wish to be equal is neurotic. |
| www.marxists.org /reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/friedan.htm (6916 words) |
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