Articles
History News Network
In your introduction, you wrote that the book still draws visceral reactions fifty years after its publication. Why?The book was such a giant bestseller in its day, and the title conjured up such vivid images, that people who have never read the book--feminists and anti-feminists alike--often attribute their own assumptions about the womens movement to Friedan. Anti-feminists claim that Friedan espoused self-interested careerism and hated men, neither of which is true. Feminists sometimes…
The Huffington Post
I am a young professor of sociology teaching classes on gender, marriage and social change -- and I have never read Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique." Like many women of my generation, I thought I had. I must have, I told myself. Perhaps in college? No. And it turns out that very few of my well-educated, feminist-leaning friends have either.
Salon
Believe it or not, Betty Friedan was a romantic. The author of the groundbreaking 1960s treatise "The Feminine Mystique" may have detested certain traditional values, but she clung to the fantasy of heterosexual love and marriage -- here's the key -- among equals. In fact, Friedan once said that her tombstone should read: "She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men" -- and yet she had been memorialized by many as anti-…
Philadelphia Inquirer
Stephanie Coontz teaches family history at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and her latest book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, comes out Tuesday
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Opponents of same-sex marriage worry that allowing two men or two women to wed would radically transform a time-honored institution. But they're way too late on that front. Marriage has already been radically transformed - in a way that makes gay marriage not only inevitable, as Vice President Biden described it in an interview late last year, but also quite logical.
The Wall Street Journal, Bookshelf
One reader of 'The Feminine Mystique' said that it 'put the unexplainable distress I was suffering into words.'