Second-Wave
Feminist Rhetoric
Despite much of the hard work accomplished by first-wave rhetors, members
of the second wave of American feminism found that they had to cover much
of the same ground: patriarchy still considered women as “idols of lust”
in many ways. Indeed, obsessive control over women’s bodies is one of patriarchy’s
oldest and most insidious commonplaces. In 1963, Betty
Friedan’s (pictured) The Feminine Mystique helped usher in the second
wave of American Feminist thought. Among the many issues Friedan addressed
was patriarchal control of the female body: "American women, since
1939, have become three and four sizes smaller [. ...] In the magazine image, women
work to keep their bodies beautiful to get and keep a man [. ... A woman in a] woman’s world
is confined to her own body and beauty" (17, 36).
In 1967 Beverly Jones and Judith Brown collaborated to produce "Toward
a Female Liberation Movement," another of the most important position papers
that helped provide focus and a foundation from which the Radical Feminism
of the second wave could launch. In this paper, Jones also expressed outrage
over the emphasis 
placed on a woman’s physical appearance in American patriarchy: "The average American woman spends two hours a day in personal grooming, not including shopping.
That is one-twelfth of her whole life, one-eighth of the time she spends
awake. If she lives to be eighty, a woman will have spent ten whole years
of her time awake in the complex business of making herself attractive
to men" (Crow 26).
Friedan and Jones wrote these words over 30 years ago, but a check of
the software dominating the current
“girl-game” market suggests that their arguments haven’t impacted the
E-gaming community.