Do the feminist classic mean anything to women in their twenties? Sarah Geraghty and Roise Goantry to make sense of Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique and the 1979 documentary 'Town Bloody Hall'

SARAH GERAGHTY

"YOU'RE READING Betty Friedan. Well done to you!", exclaims a 50-something American, when she spots the battered copy of 1964's "most controversial bestseller". Her surprise and pleasure that someone is (still) reading The Feminine Mystique - the book that exploded the glorified image of the 1950s American housewife - makes me hope, in a conflicted kind of way, that I will find Friedan's work as relevant as it was 40 years ago. But it's just an academic exercise, isn't it? The last thing I expect to feel is sadness . . .

I encountered the book four years ago but didn't read it. Why would I? In my privileged college bubble, the world depicted by Friedan - where women were infantilised by "occupation: housewife" - belonged on a far distant planet.

I'd always been surrounded by strong, confident, warm women. Forty years on, we had moved beyond that "life-restricting, future-denying" cult of the housewife, hadn't we? Women are no longer denied an education, career or opportunity to explore the world; no longer expected to give up their jobs when they marry ; no longer seen as "unnatural" if they choose not to have children.

But Friedan would still find some things woefully familiar.

Housework, for instance. The woman may have a full-time job now, but she's still the one sorting the socks, ironing the shirts, scrubbing the toilet, supervising the homework, looking in on his mother.

The imagery isn't hugely different either. At least the 1960s image knew what it was: pretty, busty, passive, coy, under control. Now the girls have to be all that, plus know instinctively when to be vivacious, assertive, aggressive. Or "sexy", God help us. Try not to be the smartest or most subtle one in the room. Batting lashes led by a blinding cleavage still wins every time.

Out in the real world where my generation is tip-toeing now, the messages are way more confused than in Betty's time. But that passion of hers to convince women to know - truly know - who they are and what they can be, is even more relevant now.

For me, the most enduring message to come out of "The Feminine Mystique" is Friedan's conviction that "women, as well as men, can only find their identity in work that uses their full capacities." That's how you achieve that "sense of being complete and fully part of the world." There are probably easier ways to negotiate the world - WAGs anyone? I'm sticking with Betty.

Sarah Geraghty is a fellow at the European Institute in Washington

ROISE GOAN

Until last August, I was a latent feminist. Feminism was largely, for me, a thing of the past. I had learned about the feminist movement in the 20th century. But that was history, a battle my mother's generation had fought and won. I was born in 1981 and equality was my proud birthright. Why make a fuss about my rights as a woman when things are so much better now in twenty-first century Ireland? I was fine. I was liberated.

This changed, radically, when I saw Nic Green's Trilogy at the Edinburgh Fringe last year. In the first part of the show she posits that women of her own generation, my generation, have forgotten about the feminist movement and that we are oppressed by a patriarchal society where sexual freedom is governed by a politics of the body that demands physical perfection. Nic urges us to resist this oppression by celebrating our bodies.

This section culminates in a joyously cheesy dance performance by a flood of naked women of all shapes, sizes and ages. I've seen a lot of naked dance performances, and yet this collection of women dancing before me shocked me. Why? Was it because their live, wobbling bodies were imperfect and they didn't seem to care? If so, what a deeply troubling realisation after all this time.

In the second part of the show, she quotes directly from Town Bloody Hall, the 1979 film that documents a town hall meeting about women's liberation chaired by the supremely patronising Norman Mailer after the publication of his The Prisoner of Sex, with speakers Jacqueline Caballos, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston and Diana Trilling. In the final part of the show, Nic proposes a new feminist manifesto. I found this three hour performance shocking, uneasy, frustrating, inspirational, moving and at times, deeply embarrassing. She was talking to me.

I have since watched Town Bloody Hall in its entirety, and the anger of its speakers, the tangible injustices captured on film, are dated and stale, in the same way that the writing of Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir was to me previously. When juxtaposed, however, with the dancing images that preceded them in Trilogy, a new feminist anxiety was ignited in me.

Roise Goan is director of the Dublin Fringe Festival in which Trilogy will have its Irish premiere.