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It argued that women would be better wives and mothers if they pursued other interests outside of the home in addition to their domestic duties, and Friedan often blames women for their own oppression. The fault lies with the way society has denigrated and wasted your capacities.Īs Coontz makes clear, the book was far from radical. It is not your fault, Friedan told them, that you feel trapped and discontented. As Coontz argues,Ī half century after they read the book, many of the women I talked to could still recall the desperation that they had felt in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and their wave of relief when Friedan told them they were not alone and they were not crazy…. Through countless interviews and extensive research, Coontz explores The Feminine Mystique’s impact on a generation of women-many of whom felt the book literally saved their lives. In A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, Stephanie Coontz provides a must-read history and analysis of the book and its role in galvanizing (and at times antagonizing) the burgeoning women’s liberation movement.

That The Feminine Mystique was ranked theirty-seventh in a list of most important works of journalism by a panel of experts from New York University and seventh in a list of the ten most harmful books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the right-wing Human Events is a testament to its far-reaching and long-lasting influence.

While the book and its legacy are often contested, Friedan’s seminal work The Feminine Mystique, which exposed the “problem with no name,” was widely read, and played a crucial role in giving expression to the suffering of millions of women held hostage by the 1950s myth of the domestic bliss of the American housewife. PUBLISHED ALMOST half a century ago, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is often credited with helping to launch the women’s liberation movement, providing the decisive spark to the long quiet but smoldering anger of women in the United States. We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.” -Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963 The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill…. For human suffering there is a reason perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough…. This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women.