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| Self-portrait of John Ruskin (1819-1900) |
John Ruskin's essay "Of Queen's Gardens" is based on a lecture he delivered on December 14, 1864 at Manchester (England) Town Hall in aid of St. Andrew's School. Its companion piece "Of King's Treasuries" was given a week earlier to support the book collection of the public library in Manchester. Both lectures were written in support of books, reading, education, and right conduct, and they were published together in a book entitled
Sesames and Lilies. Charles W. Eliot writes in his introduction to
Sesames and Lilies in the American and English Essays volume of the Harvard Classics that Ruskin was "the greatest master of ornate prose in the English language." In the excerpted version of "Of Queen's Gardens" we are reading, Ruskin offers views of the proper role of women in society.
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| Betty Friedan (1921-2006) |
Betty Friedan was an American journalist who in 1963 published
The Feminine Mystique based on extensive research she had conducted including questionnaires submitted to 200 members of her Smith College class and many other studies. Friedan created a concept she summarized as follows:
"There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique. I wondered if other women faced this schizophrenic split."
Friedan has been subsequently criticized for representing a middle-class suburban point of view, but her book stands as an important influence on the development of modern-day feminism.
