In the feminine mystique betty friedan5/15/2023 ![]() ![]() Since 1963, the book has sold over two million copies and has been translated into a dozen languages. ![]() Although Friedan faced some negative reactions, she also received hundreds of letters from women who said that The Feminine Mystique had changed their lives. In suppressing women's personal growth, Friedan argued, society lost a vast reservoir of human potential.įriedan's book is credited with sparking second-wave feminism by directing women's attention to the broad social basis of their problems, stirring many to political and social activism. In The Feminine Mystique, she showed how women's magazines, advertising, Freudian psychologists, and educators reflected and perpetuated a domestic ideal that left many women deeply unhappy. Enlarging her inquiry, Friedan found that what she called "the problem that has no name" was common among women far beyond the educated East Coast elite. The book highlighted Friedan's view of a coercive and pervasive post-World War II ideology of female domesticity that stifled middle-class women's opportunities to be anything but homemakers.Ī survey she conducted of her Smith College classmates indicated that many felt depressed even though they supposedly enjoyed ideal lives with husbands, homes, and children. The publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, on February 17, 1963, is often cited as the founding moment of second-wave feminism. ![]()
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