Beth Bailey’s article She “Can Bring Home the Bacon”, discusses gender issues, particularly in the 1970’s.  I thought this piece of work was very interesting and eye-opening.  This piece explored women’s liberation and the support and resistance against it through the 1970’s.  I thought this article was very well organized which allowed the reading to be very enjoyable.  I liked how in the beginning of the article Bailey jumped right in with an example of the resistance that women faced when trying to gain equality.  The piece then went into women’s liberation, what was it and the different definitions and stigmas around the term.

Although unfortunate, I thought it was very important and key to show the resistance to the women’s liberation movement by women.  I think that Bailey used a lot of great examples to take the audience through the women’s liberation movement.  She used examples like the Miss America Pageant and then interviews as well.  The interviews were so eye-opening to me.  I really enjoyed them because it was crazy to me that women were fine with their “place” in the home, and that they did not think things really needed to change or that they wanted them to.  I think Bailey also did a great job on showing how people confused the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement.

Her example of this, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, went into great analysis to show how this movie confused the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement.  Summarizing the movie, along with picking out specific scenes to analyze allowed this part of Bailey’s article to be very informative.  Lastly, I thought how Bailey ended the piece with how things were changing, and then how advertising how to change because of this was very intriguing.  Some questions I have are how are things different with equality now?  Do you think people still confuse the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement?  How do you define women’s liberation?  Do you think some women are still against equality?

-Blake Cohen