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Hundreds of women wrote to her to say that the book had transformed, even saved, their lives. Nearly half a century later, many women still recall where they were when they first read it. In A Strange Stirring, historian Stephanie Coontz examines the dawn of the s, when the sexual revolution had barely begun, newspapers advertised for "perky, attractive gal typists," but married women were.

The book that sparked a feminist revolution, now with a new introduction by Gaby Hinsliff. Why should women accept this picture of a half-life, instead of a share in the whole of human destiny? Can we actually consider The Feminine Mystique «the revolutionary manifesto of women's liberation», as it was by many defined?

Feminist thinking has grown and developed enormously since Issues of working class women and women of color — African-American, Native-American, Asian-American, and Hispanic women — were raised by their own movements. Differences erupted. The criticism that she developed remained within a mainstream context, which gave visibility to a few privileged women. Moreover, in The Feminine Mystique Friedan still kept in high regard the institutions of marriage, motherhood and family, not considering other possible choices.

After the publication of The feminine Mystique, the American Historian Gerda Lerner wrote to Friedan to congratulate, regretting however for the focus on white middle-class women, remembering how this narrow perspective had been for a long time one of the limits of the suffragist movement; the working women, especially black, could not be ignored because of their number, economic strength and double experience of oppression.

What Friedan had instead done, was marginalizing a foreground reality in full political ferment. While much of white America retreated to the suburbs, conformed to the consumer, corporate way of life, and avoided political activism at time when anti-Communist crusaders could easily destroy the lives of political dissenters, black America was busy marshaling the most important grass-roots political movement of the century.

According to bell hooks21 and Angela Davis22 — the two leading exponents of black feminism — Friedan ignored the existence of all non-white and poor women, representing paradigmatically the more general tendency of western white liberal conservative feminism — perceived by African-American women and by the new radical feminists as extremely racist, classist and heterosexist. One issue she never raised, for example, was the question of why women alone should have been held responsible for housework and child care, perpetuating in this way a lasting stereotype.

Johnson, to include women in his affirmative action policies, endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment and made reform of abortion laws a national priority. NOW concentrated on destroying obstacles that defined women as different in rights or abilities from men: integration, not separation, and reform, not revolution, were its goals. The name — National Organization for Women — expressed a commitment to recruit both men and women who shared a belief in gender equality. If male-dominated institutions and values were the problem, women must develop their own institutions — reflecting their owns values — and make these the cornerstone independence.

The new feminists would demand access to professional occupations and skilled jobs, protest low wages, and work for pay equity.

They would reject the double standard that had plagued their mothers and would claim their rights to reproductive choice and legal abortion. It might not have been as profound as The Second Sex or as radical as the stream of articles and pamphlets that a few years later would pour from the mimeograph machines of the women's liberation movement. But for millions of American women it was as profound and as radical as it needed to be».

Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty. Kerber, A. Horowitz offers a reading of The Feminine Mystique and argues that the roots of Friedan's feminism run deeper than she has led us to believe. Some letters, conversely, criticise Freidan for suggesting that "any capable woman who did not throw herself wholeheartedly into a career was derelict". Amongst these letters there are also associated newspaper and magazine clippings, lecture notes, and thesis extracts.

The popular idea that men and women were equal, but different--that men found their greatest fulfilment through work, while women were most fulfilled in the home--stood revealed as a fallacy, and the depression and even despair she and so many other women felt as a result was recast not as a failure to adapt to a role that was the truest expression of femininity, but as the natural product of undertaking repetitive, unfulfilling and unremunerated labor.

Popular Books. The Becoming by Nora Roberts. Download for offline reading, highlight, bookmark or take notes while you read The Feminine Mystique 50th Anniversary Edition. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives.

Betty Friedan - Author.