This wonderful new book explains why, despite some of the weaknesses in Betty Friedan's myth-busting classic of the 1950s, it stirred up women of all classes and helped to change the world.
A new book explains why Betty Friedan might have paved the way for equal marriages by blowing the roof off the feminine mystique.
On February 4, 1997, when English au pair Louise Woodward fractured the skull of her 8-month-old charge, Matthew Eappen causing his death five days later she unleashed a storm of outrage. One of the targets was Deborah Eappen, the child's mother, who had returned to work as an ophthalmologist (albeit part time) after her son's birth.
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 believe the book was more influential and radical than it actually was.
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.
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
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-male and anti-marriage.
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.
One reader of 'The Feminine Mystique' said that it 'put the unexplainable distress I was suffering into words.'
Though The Feminine Mystique is often cited as a founding text of second-wave feminism, reading it today reveals it to be a brilliant artifact--not a timeless classic. Betty Friedan's lauded and notorious 1963 bestselling book skewers bygone stereotypes of femininity and homemaking with a provocative bluster that verges on camp. Its exaggerations, blind spots, and biases are a turn-off; its narrow scope is disappointing to those hoping for a comprehensive analysis of sexism or a broad agenda for social justice.