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.

The Feminine Mystique came about after Betty 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 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 cause 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 for several reasons. bell hooks and others have pointed to the fact that the book does not address the lives of poor white women and women of color. hooks argues that the feminist movement, though claiming to speak for all women, is dominated by white, upper/middle class interests and perspectives. For instance, when Friedan and others argue that women need to leave the domestic sphere and get jobs, bell hooks points out that lower-class women have always had to work; domestic life is, for them, a luxury.

Some of the New York literati during the 1960s accused Friedan of plagiarizing Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. The Feminine Mystique has also drawn criticism due to the fact that Friedan did not acknowledge the fact, which is now known to the public, that she was experiencing repeated physical abuse at the hands of her then husband.

Betty Friedan died at her home of congestive heart failure on February 4, 2006.

External link

• C-SPAN American Writers profile on the book.

• [1] Betty Friedan and the Radical Past of Liberal Feminism by Joanne Boucher