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The Feminine Mystique - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Feminine Mystique
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cover of the original paperback edition of The Feminine Mystique
The Feminine Mystique is a 1963 book written by Betty Friedan which attacked the popular
notion that women during this time could only find fulfillment through childbearing and
homemaking. According to The New York Times obituary of Friedan in 2006, it "ignited the
contemporary women's movement in 1963 and as a result permanently transformed the social
fabric of the United States and countries around the world" and "is widely regarded as one of the
most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century."
[1]
The Feminine Mystique came about after Friedan sent a questionnaire to other women in her 1942
Smith College graduating class. Most women in her class indicated a general unease with their
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The Feminine Mystique - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
lives. Through her findings, Friedan hypothesized that women are victims of a false belief system
that requires them to find identity and meaning in their lives through their husbands and children.
Such a system causes women to completely lose their identity in that of their family.
Friedan specifically locates this system among post-World War II middle-class suburban
communities. She suggests that men returning from war turned to their wives for mothering. At
the same time, America's post-war economic boom had led to the development of new
technologies that were supposed to make household work less difficult, but that often had the
result of making women's work less meaningful and valuable. It also served to disprove Freud's
theory of penis envy among women and freed women from being strictly confined to the role of a
mere housewife during the Post-War economic expansion. Critics have argued that Friedan's
analysis does not apply productively to women of other economic classes.
The book has been the subject of controversy. Authors such as bell hooks have complained the
book does not address the lives of poor white women or women of color. hooks argues the
feminist movement is dominated by white, upper and middle class interests and perspectives,
though claiming to speak for all women. For instance, when Friedan and others argue that women
need to leave the domestic sphere and get jobs, hooks says lower-class women have always had to
work and domestic life is a luxury for them.
Historian Daniel Horowitz has argued that the origin of The Feminine Mystique was not, as
Friedan later claimed, the sudden realization of the "woman problem" by a naïve suburban
housewife. Instead, Friedan's feminism was rooted in her extensive involvement with radical
[2]
politics and labor journalism beginning in the 1940s.
The Feminine Mystique was listed at #7 in conservative magazine Human Events' Ten Most
Harmful Books of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
References
↑ Betty Friedan, Who Ignited Cause in 'Feminine Mystique,' Dies at 85 - The New York Times,
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The Feminine Mystique - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
February 5, 2006.
↑ Horowitz, Daniel. "Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union
Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America." American Quarterly, Volume 48, Number 1,
March 1996, pp. 1-42
See also
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History of feminism
External links
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C-SPAN American Writers profile on the book.
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[3] Betty Friedan and the Radical Past of Liberal Feminism by Joanne Boucher
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique"
Categories: 1963 books | Feminism books | History of the United States (1945–1964)
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This page was last modified 04:19, 14 December 2006.
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