Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique'
It is in the news a lot again because of the 50th anniversary of its publication so I'm devoting some time to reading it. I will post a lengthier piece on it, once I finish it, but for now the biggest impact it has had on me is the realization that Friedan feels that women's rights had gone backwards in her era, that the 1920s and 30s were actually more progressive than the 1950s and 1960s. We tend to look back at the progress of women's rights as a linear thing, with women gaining more and more rights, decade by decade, bit by bit, but reading 'The Feminine Mystique' it becomes clear that women really were pushed back into the home after the war, possibly as a reaction to the all the destruction and instability, and a desire for home and family, but also possibly as part of reactionary politics.
News articles:
WSJ: Why Getting an MBA Isn't Worth It:
The Wall Street Journal finally saying the unsayable about MBAs: you're better off just getting out there and working and doing business instead of just studying business and reading case studies. Some MBAs are better than others, obviously, and some are good for building a network of professionals that you can tap into over the long term of your career, but many of them are money-making exercises for universities. As an MBA is often a mid-career qualification and often marketed as a qualification that will boost your earnings, universities tend to charge a premium for them. They are exceptionally profitable 'products' for educational institutions as, unlike medical or engineering degrees, they are cheap to provide with no lab costs.
This brings me on to one of my soapbox topics - why universities need to change their business model to survive the changing economy. One for a longer blog post...
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