The Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan
Summary
The book that started it all: the Second Feminist Revolution. Friedan identified “the problem that has no name,” and millions of women responded. “The Crisis in Woman’s Identity,"Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available,” and other provocative topics made the book a best-seller when it appeared, and it’s been a classic ever since. Celebrate Women’s History Month!
Excerpt
The Problem That Has No Name
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question--"Is this all?”
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. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion, how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights--the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.
Reviews
"The book that pulled the trigger on history"--Alvan Toffler, author of “Future Shock”
"Changed the world so comprehensively that it’s hard to remember how much change was called for"--New York Times Book Review
"It will leave you with some haunting facts as well as a few hair-raising stories"--Saturday Review
Author's Biography
Betty Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. She wrote “The Fountain of Age,” “Life so Far,” and many other titles.