![]() ![]() Some of Friedan’s attitudes are not only dated but odious. ![]() Hundreds wrote to her, many with the same sentiments: “I felt the article was written for me” or “I am one of the people you wrote about” or “Now I know I am not alone.”įeminists in the 21st century, however, might find some parts of the book simplistic, elitist, homophobic and sexist. For women, Friedan’s book and an earlier article she wrote for Good Housekeeping, “Women Are People, too,” opened the floodgates. Basically, women had been sold a bill of goods.Īlmost 50 years later,social historian Stephanie Coontz has written A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, a sort of biography of Friedan’s groundbreaking book. Coontz describes the era in which it was written and explores its impact on women and men at the time. ![]() It was “the problem with no name” that denied women the opportunities for realize their full human potential. All the trappings of a successful nuclear family.īut something wasn’t right for many of them, and author Betty Friedan identified it for them. They had achieved the American Dream–a husband, children, a comfortable home, enough money. Written in 1963, it was directed at college-educated, married white women who felt strangely unsatisfied with their lives for no good reason. ![]() If you were to pick up The Feminine Mystique today, I suspect you’d wonder what all the fuss was about. ![]()
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