Despite my strong dislike of the novel thus far, I have actually found a positive aspect of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" that I find very amusing. That is, that a woman, Nurse Ratched is in charge of a male mental hospital. Whether a coincidence of not, I found that one year following the 1962 publication date, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique became a legendary non-fiction novel which inspired women to strive for more equality in American society. Her inspiration for this novel came from a 1942 class reunion of her college, after she followed up with a questionnaire for her fellow woman classmates. In interpreting the findings, Friedan hypothesized that women are victims of a false belief system that requires them to find identity and meaning in their lives through their husbands and children. She believed this causes women to completely lose their identity within their family. Friedan specifically locates this system among post-World War II white middle-class suburban communities. She suggests that men returning from war turned to their wives for mothering. At the same time, America's post-war economic boom had led to the development of new technologies that were supposed to make household work less difficult, but that often had the result of making women's work less meaningful and valuable.
I am proud to learn about this uprising of women questioning the status-quo in America in the early 1960's. I and often cheer to myself while reading, as I come across evidence of how much Nurse Ratched intimidates the male patients.
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