*Choosing for Happiness: Part One
*Women in Business: The Art of S & M
The role of American women has been gradually changing since the WWII. During World War II, many men joined the armed service and went abroad so that women took care of both households and the jobs that were previously closed to women. One of the significant reasons why the US won the war was that those women successfully raised their children during day time and managed the jobs, such as manufacturing, by taking night shifts while men were fighting out in the battle fields. The notion of women being too weak to handle men’s jobs was proven wrong by this. Yet, after the war, despite of their willingness to continue their career, many were fired from their jobs so that the returning soldiers could be employed again. Some of them still kept their jobs such as secretaries and waitresses that are considered not very important compared to the men’s jobs. Today, the women are typically more educated and have more successful careers than about 60 years ago. In this assignment, two video clips, “Choosing for Happiness: Part One” and “Women in Business: The Art of S & M”, that talk about the role of women during post-war and that of modern women are compared in order to identify and analyze the changes in the portrait of the women.
In the video clip, “Choosing for Happiness: Part One”, the story focuses on the past relationships of the narrator’s college friend, Eve during the post-war era. It points out the characteristics of men that are important for women at that time to look for when choosing a marriage partner. For instance, she broke up with a football star boyfriend because he only cared about how people perceived him and paid a little attention to how she felt. In addition, she also broke up with a boyfriend who was a mathematician since he only viewed women’s heart as mere a mathematical puzzle to be solved and failed to realize her individual thinking or feeling. The story signifies how important it was for women at that time to analyze whether their personality really suits the characteristics of the partner in order to determine whether they will be able to accept those characteristics of men that cannot be changed. This shows that they had relatively little control or influence on men since Eve had to switch her partner every time she found some attributes that she hate about.
Unlike “Choosing for Happiness: Part One,” another video clip, “Women in Business: The Art of S & M,” focused on discussing how women can pursuit or maintain their successful career by manipulating the mind of men in modern age. The speaker in the clip is Nina Disesa, who is considered one of the 50 most powerful women in 1999 fortune magazine. She says that women should use their own skills, such as empathy and listening, that men tend to neglect at work in order to maintain pleasant relationship with the male workers. She says that women can influence the male workers to work harder and become more cooperative by loving them and showing sympathy toward them. From this, we can understand that women in modern age realize that women can use their own skills to influence the attributes or behaviors of men that they used to think it was impossible to change.
The difference in the portrait of women between the two clips is that many women in a modern age acquired a power to compete or to be cooperative with men by having the equivalent jobs. In “Choosing the Happiness,” the mathematician boyfriend told Eve that she is different from the other girls by being smart like a man. This shows that during the post-war, women were perceived inferior to men and women had accepted the perception without questioning if that is actually true or not. In contrast, “Women in Business: The Art of S & M,” points out that women have their own way of solving problems in the world and it is as effective as that of men.
Therefore, women in modern age are more independent and becoming the indispensible part of jobs in many fields by having the distinctive skills from men while they had to depend on their partners to anticipate the future in their lives back then.
Source:
“Choosing for Happiness: Part One”
<youtube=http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=PGnRgCC70RU>
April 27, 2008 at 5:15 pm
I agree with most of what you have said and think that its great to see how far women have come in the world. I also don’t think that it was fair for women to be fired from their jobs when the soldiers returned from WW2. I think that it is great that more and more women are becoming independent and learning how to balance the household as well as how the men have taken on some more of the womens roles in the house. I know that their are some women out their who still prefer the old times when all they had to do was stay at home and take care of the children, but with today’s fast paced society it becomes difficult to expect people to sit back and do nothing during the day.
May 12, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Your opening statement in this article is something that I think a lot of people forget, and I was really glad when we talked about it in class. Men were off at war, so they needed the women to step up in the workplace. Women really do not get enough credit for what they did for this country in those times. They were not only raising their children, but also were making money to support the family that was at home while the men were overseas. When the men came back, they took back the jobs, and this became the beginning of the feminist movement.