Introduction to Modern Drama Study Answers

According to the article "Introduction to Modern Drama Study," which of the following best explains why more women began to emerge as playwrights in the 1960s?

Read the excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough. I do not accept the answer that there is no problem because American women have luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of; part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold. The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill.Based on Friedan’s word choice, which best describes the tone of the excerpt?

Based on the article "Introduction to Modern Drama Study," what is a common issue addressed in feminist dramas?

Read the following excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.The suburban housewife—she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife—freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. The underlined key terms most relate to what issue?

Read the excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity.Which words best emphasize society’s view of the “experts” who claimed to understand women’s needs?

Read the excerpt from The Feminine Mystique.Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. Which keywords from the excerpt most relate to the issue of domesticity?

Read the excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.In the late fifties, a sociological phenomenon was suddenly remarked: a third of American women now worked, but most were no longer young and very few were pursuing careers. They were married women who held part-time jobs, selling or secretarial, to put their husbands through school, their sons through college, or to help pay the mortgage. The key terms in the excerpt most contribute to which of the following ideas?

Read the excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.A mother of four who left college at nineteen to get married told me:“I’ve tried everything women are supposed to do—hobbies, gardening, pickling, canning, being very social with my neighbors, joining committees, running PTA teas. I can do it all, and I like it, but it doesn’t leave you anything to think about—any feeling of who you are. . . . I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?”The underlined words and phrases in the excerpt most contribute to a tone of

Read the excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets. Or she stays inside her house and cries. Or her children tell her a joke, and she doesn’t laugh because she doesn’t hear it.Which best describes the tone of the excerpt?

Read the excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.And so she must accept the fact that “American women’s unhappiness is merely the most recently won of women’s rights,” and adjust and say with the happy housewife found by Newsweek: “We ought to salute the wonderful freedom we all have and be proud of our lives today. I have had college and I’ve worked, but being a housewife is the most rewarding and satisfying role.”The underlined key terms most relate to what issue?

Read the excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.I heard echoes of the problem in college dormitories and semiprivate maternity wards, at PTA meetings and luncheons of the League of Women Voters, at suburban cocktail parties, in station wagons waiting for trains, and in snatches of conversation overheard at Schrafft’s. The groping words I heard from other women, on quiet afternoons when children were at school or on quiet evenings when husbands worked late, I think I understood first as a woman long before I understood their larger social and psychological implications.Based on the underlined words and phrases, what is Friedan most likely trying to express?

Read the excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. So the door of all those pretty suburban houses opened a crack to permit a glimpse of uncounted thousands of American housewives who suffered alone from a problem that suddenly everyone was talking about, and beginning to take for granted, as one of those unreal problems in American life that can never be solved—like the hydrogen bomb. By 1962 the plight of the trapped American housewife had become a national parlor game.Which key terms from the excerpt most support the theme that women can feel suffocated by societal expectations?

Read the excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. But the actual unhappiness of the American housewife was suddenly being reported—from The New York Times and Newsweek to Good Housekeeping and CBS television (“The Trapped Housewife”), although almost everybody who talked about it found some superficial reason to dismiss it.Which best describes the connotation of the word “superficial” in the excerpt?

Read the excerpt from Trifles, by Susan Glaspell. COUNTY ATTORNEY. No—it’s not cheerful. I shouldn’t say she had the homemaking instinct.MRS. HALE. Well, I don’t know as Wright had, either. COUNTY ATTORNEY. You mean that they didn’t get on very well? MRS. HALE. No, I don’t mean anything. But I don’t think a place’d be any cheerfuller for John Wright’s being in it.Which feminist theme is most supported by the excerpt?

Read the excerpt from The Feminine Mystique.But on an April morning in 1959, I heard a mother of four, having coffee with four other mothers in a suburban development fifteen miles from New York, say in a tone of quiet desperation, “the problem.” And the others knew, without words, that she was not talking about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home. Suddenly they realized they all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name. Which best describes the connotation of the word “desperation”?