Feminine Mystique

Every so often a book comes along that really rattles America’s cage. Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1850. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in 1906. In the 1940s and 1950s, John Hersey’s Hiroshima and the Kinsey studies, Sexual Behavior rift gold in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Silent Spring in 1962. All these books delivered karate chops to the American perception of reality.

In 1963, it was tera gold a book that introduced America to what the author called “the problem without a name.” Betty Friedan (b. 1921), a summa cum laude Smith graduate and free-lance writer who was living out the fifties suburban dream of house, husband, and family, dubbed this malady “the feminine mystique.” The book reached millions of readers. Suddenly, in garden clubs, coffee klatches, and college sorority houses,rift platinum talk turned away from man catching, mascara, and muffin recipes. Women were instead discussing the fact that society’s institutions—government, mass media and advertising, medicine and psychiatry, education and organized religion— were systematically barring them from becoming anything more than housewives and mothers.