The Feminine Mystique

As King was winning tennis championships, a book published in 1963 would spark a movement that changed the lives of women in America and around the world. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique began as a series of interviews the author did in the late 1950s and early 1960s with her fellow graduates of Smith College, one of the most prestigious colleges for women. She found that many were unhappy with the restrictions their roles as wives and mothers put on their lives. Friedan’s book documented…

In my last paper I talked about the role of visual media, particularly photographs, in social movements. I wanted to stay along this theme of media, but a different subunit this time. Media as a whole interests me, from videos, to photographs, blogs etc. Books, though, are not often considered media. Upon inspection, however, in the past they have had as much effect, if not more, as other media forms. Mass marketed books have the ability to prompt critical thinking, by questioning norms and what…

The women’s movement of the 1960s was a movement that should have happened a long time ago. Women have been excluded from the government since the beginning of America even though they were just as important as men were to certain events, like abolition or prohibition. Women are central to society and should have been treated as such from the beginning. The movement took decades to be included in mainstream culture. When it finally was being talked about, the movement accomplished many goals…

sometimes, history needs to repeat itself to get things right. We have gone so much further as a society with not forcing down concepts that categorize people in roles of masculinity or femininity. If a girl wears “masculine” clothing or a boy wears “feminine” clothing, there is less of a gender bias and that is progress. If a girl doesn’t act overly emotional or a boy cries easily, it is no longer a demeaning idea on how they don’t line up to the stereotyped agenda, and that is progress. To be…

This happened after Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, was published. According to Dictionary.com, feminism is “the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men” and “an organized movement for the attainment of such rights for women.” Many voices of…

While Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique captured the all-so-common “housewife syndrome” that plagued women like Friedan all across America, it failed to address the full range of problems that every other woman faced, not only in America but worldwide. And while expecting Friedan to address all groups of women and their individual struggles is impractical, she makes the assumption that the problems detailed in her book apply to all women. In reality, the “problem that has no name” is a…

middle-class was as strong as it had ever been, home ownership was at an all-time high, and more purchasing power allowed for a mass consumption society. However, there was one major underlying problem, one that was coined in Betty Friedan’s, The Feminine Mystique, as ‘the problem that has no name’. The problem of no name, one that can only be understood by the women experiencing it, was the implicit unhappiness of women adhering to the fabricated image of the happy housewife depicted…

In Betty Friedan book “ The Feminine Mystique “ she described the problems that white middle class women faced being denied equality with men. She believed women were being deprived of reaching their full human capacities. Talcott Parson’s a functionalist believed that the nuclear family…

white women of the middle and upper class were not among the skeptics. Rather, they felt a discontent with their lives that they found hard to articulate. Betty Friedan, the author of the book that sparked the second-wave feminist movement, The Feminine Mystique referred to this as “the problem with no name” (Friedan 57). The women affected by this “problem with no name” had the class status analogous to success in America but they lacked agency in it - they…

One woman decided to challenge this long accepted truth that a woman’s place was in the home. Betty Friedan’s publication of her forward thinking book, The Feminine Mystique, sparked a revival of feminist culture that was once so passionate during the early 20th century campaigns for women’s suffrage. The book posed the famous question to women across America: “Is this all?” Readers of the book exposed themselves…