Woman Between Islam and Western Society
3. Western Woman
~ 105 ~
questioning of traditional values and institutions,
especially among the youth.
The “new feminism” movement was a phenomenon
of the restlessness found in the American woman of
the 1960s and 1970s. “By all rights, the American
woman today should be the happiest in history,”
Bonnie Angelo observed in
Time’s
1972 cover story.
“She is healthier that U.S. women have ever been,
better educated, more affluent, better dressed, more
comfortable, pampered by gadgets. But there is a
worm in the apple. She is restless in her familiar
familial role, no longer quite content with the
homemaker-wife-mother part in which her society
has cast her ... Many are in search of a new role that
is more independent, less restricted to the
traditional triangle of — children, kitchen and
church.”
According to Angelo, all but the staunchest
advocates of “women’s liberation” agree that
woman’s place is different than man’s — but the
restless American woman of the 1970s was not so
sure just
what
that place was. The “new feminism”
increasingly influenced young women to stay
