The True Story behind Trifles — Unit test

Question 11 • IA-English Language Arts 11 B

Which excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique contains underlined keywords that reflect mainstream society’s view of a woman’s role in the 1950s and ’60s?

Answer

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women.

They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents.

Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them.

All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.

Explanation

The excerpt that reflects the mainstream expectation of women in the 1950s and ’60s is the one describing women as devoting their lives to finding a husband and having children. This presents marriage and motherhood as a woman’s expected role, rather than pursuing ambitions such as becoming a poet, physicist, or president. Choice D contains that idea.

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