The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique is a novel written by Betty Friedan analyzing the sadness and depression many American women felt during the 1950’s. Friedan’s research describes the subservient conditions women experienced and labels their mutual disappointment as “the problem with no name.”1 Friedan defines feminine mystique as women’s limited potential through society’s idealized image of the housewife occupation. Linking the unhappiness and emptiness women felt to both social and internal conflict rooted in the feminine mystique. In order to influence her audience Friedan presents her research through a combination of reliable statistics, first-person narratives, and her own experience. Friedan consistently contextualizes her influence through vivid…

The Feminine Mystique was a call for women confined in the housewife trap to forge a revolution. Betty Friedan argues that society had stunted the growth of women, preventing her development through prejudice in education, science, and media outlets. Freidan reasons that the haze that had descended over the middle-classed suburbanites of the 1950’s has stripped women bare of identity with a false promise of fulfilment. Freidan contends for the equality of women, but since her argument is…

Throughout history, society has shaped the lives of individuals by assigning individuals a specific way to be a part of society while deviation is most likely viewed as unacceptable and censured. Betty Friedan in chapter 1 of her novel “The Feminine Mystique” describes society’s assigned role for women and how women sacrificed their desires to fulfil this role and assimilate into society. E.J Graff in his essay “The M/F Boxes” describes how transgendered and intersex individuals suffer…

Joanne Meyerwitz writes as a critic of the The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, in her writings titled Beyond the Feminine Mystique. Meyerwitz mentions that while The Feminine Mystique is important for bringing about feminism out of the nuclear family, the sources that Friedan uses to provide evidence of her claims are not nearly as convincing as one would think. Meyerwitz believes that Friedan, and as such many historians who followed her example, puts too much emphasis on “her version of…

addressed by author and activist, Betty Friedan, with her masterpiece, “The Feminine Mystique”. Published in 1963, Betty amplifies the voice of hundreds of thousands of married women, unsatisfied with what roles they are pressured to play, which was dubbed: “The problem that has no name”. This problem represents a widespread unhappiness of women in marriages. A problem that is powerful enough to relate to women from many time periods and places. Betty writes, “Each suburban wife struggles with…

The two sources I will be evaluating are The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and Home- Grown Radical or Home- Bound Housewife? Rethinking the Origins of the 1960s Feminism through the Life and Work of Betty Friedan by Lori E. Rotskoff. I will be evaluating these sources by looking at the origin, purpose, and content through the lenses of values and limitations. I am going to answer the question, to what extent did The Feminine Mystique lay the ideological foundations for second wave feminism?…

The role of women shifted from a stay at home lifestyle to a more active and involved one. This change showed how Americans were starting to reject social norms and change American from within. The Feminine Mystique, written in 1963 by Betty Friedan, was a very popular book that put on display the public opinion about women’s rights at the time (Evelyn Reed 1964). It was one of the most influential, nonfiction books during the 1960s and continues to have influence to this day. The Feminine…

counterparts. One of feminism's most prominent writers made waves during the sixties by publishing her book: The Feminine Mystique. In the paper, I would like to discuss the life of Betty Friedan. Who she was and what she contributed to the feminist movement as well as what led her to write The Feminine Mystique and why this book is so important to the movement and it’s target audience: women . Women’s Rights leader and Activist, Betty Friedan was born in 1921 to two Russian immigrants in…

When “The Feminine Mystique,” a book written by Betty Friedan, was first distributed to the public, it awoke a battle that women in the 1960s didn’t even know they could fight (“Modern Feminism”). Ever since the feminist movement began, the importance of gender equality has been strongly debated. Even though there are many feminists advocates, there are also a reasonable amount of people who disagree with their ideas, which brings up the issue of why people disagree with feminism. Before…

The Image of a Housewife The summarization of “The Problem That Has No Name,” a chapter from the book The Feminine Mystique written by Betty Friedan. The common themes throughout Friedan’s writing are about the concerns, expectations, and fears of the housewives of the middle twentieth century. Friedan’s writing could provoke thought about how the expectations of housewives in the past have shaped the present and how it will impact future. While the housewives of the middle twentieth century…