Feminism as a movement was dominated by various slogans such as ‘Equal pay for equal work’

which demanded that women should be paid equally to men and they should be given their
due income equal to that of men. These types of slogans were expressed in various works by
feminists such as Betty Friedan, an American feminist, in The Feminist Mystique described the
frustration and psychological distress of 1950s housewives of America. The National
Organization of Women (NOW) was also founded by Betty with the aim of fighting for the legal
rights of women. At first, they addressed the legal equality only as they could not stand against
the ancient imbalance between men and women. Despite the various flaws, Friedan’s equality
feminist was very famous in the traditionally liberal America.
Kate Millet, in Sexual Politics (1969), claims that relationship between men and women must be
studied and analyzed with respect to power and authority. She asserts that patriarchy, implicitly
promotes to propagate male supremacy. Millet also believed that women were subjected to
confine to an artificially constructed idea namely ‘feminine’.
Feminism and psychoanalysis were deeply related to each other as the many feminists accept
the ideas of psychoanalysis as it described the role of culture and society in shaping the role
women i.e. women are conditioned to accept an artificially constructed inferiority. However,
Freud was criticized by the later feminists that he reinforced the belief that inferiority was an
inherent quality of the female. Freud was criticized further when neo-Freudians used his ideas
to tell unhappy women that their social fate was biologically determined. Freud was criticized
for his attitude towards women that he asked them to change themselves and fit in to the
society while feminism asks for the change in the society. It was stated later that psychoanalysis
was not in favor of patriarchy but it examined patriarchy. It was also observed that if the
theories of Freud were separated from his culturally situated chauvinism then his theories were
accepted by different feminists (Freud and Feminism: A Critical Appraisal by Richards, A. K.).
The idea of ‘Personal is Political’ is the idea of sacrifice for the greater good through social
struggle. The notion of social responsibility is strongly connected with the idea of one is
responsible for one’s self. The same idea was adopted by women because they wanted to
detach themselves from social responsibilities especially children. In de Beauvoir’s terms, this
idea was only negative because women were limited due to immanence and that men could
bypass their social responsibilities and sacrifice for the greater good for the personal glory. Due
to Women’s Liberation, women realized their contradictory position and they were more
focused on detachment and less attached to absolute separation (A Desire of One's Own:
Psychoanalytic Feminism and intersubjective Space).

Beauvoir, in The Second Sex is of the view that Freud limited women to their fixed destinies and
it results in rendering women as the other to a subject rather than a subject herself due to
which her existential freedom is denied. Beauvoir claims that if women are not subject
themselves and they are seen in contrast to men then still they are responsible it because the
agree to be seen through the lens of men (Beauvoir 1989, 45). The Second Sex describes how
woman becomes woman by describing the practices and techniques which shows that Beauvoir
and Freud, both were of the view that femininity is not a biological process rather it is a social
and physical phenomenon resulting in the claim ‘one is not born but becomes a woman’. Both
of them are interested in this ‘how’ of this phenomenon but they disagree on the nature of
‘how’ that how this ‘how’ really is. Moreover, both of them are of the view that there is no non-
sexed human being and any other element is considered as the part of mind/body dualism
(Beauvoir 1989, 44). Freud was of the view that psychoanalysis does not explain what a woman
is rather it attempts to explains how a woman becomes a woman. Psychoanalysis never tried to
explain the current condition of women or that what a woman is when she becomes a woman
rather it observes the stage of children in which they are bisexual and later on become a
woman or a man. Psychoanalysis studies that how bipolar human becomes a woman.  (Freud
1968 [1933], 116)