The Feminine Mystique

Social science

First published: 1963
Print length: 452 pagesW.W. Norton, 1997

Pulitzer Prize, 1964

Description

Betty Friedan investigates the widespread unhappiness of materially comfortable American wives in the 1950s and early 1960s, challenging the claim that marriage, sex, children, and domestic work should provide women with complete fulfillment. She names that ideal the feminine mystique and examines how magazines, advertising, education, psychology, and sociology taught women to treat a restricted social role as natural destiny. Her own abandoned psychology career enters an argument that identity cannot flourish through consumption or increasingly elaborate housework. By exposing the institutions that convert dissatisfaction into private shame, Friedan reframes an apparently personal problem as a political and cultural one. The book calls for women to develop their abilities as full human beings rather than disappear inside a prescribed image of femininity.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Direct · Essayistic

Pace

Measured

Tone

Cerebral · Earnest · Irreverent

Structure

Argumentative

Focus

Argument · Ideas · Information

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

FamilyGenderIdentityOppressionTransformationWork

About Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan was an American feminist writer and activist whose work helped bring women’s dissatisfaction with prescribed domestic roles into public debate. In The Feminine Mystique, she combined social criticism, research, case material, and personal experience to examine why material comfort, marriage, and motherhood did not necessarily provide fulfillment. The book became a defining text of the second-wave women’s movement, and Friedan carried its arguments into national organizing. She served as the first president of the National Organization for Women, organized the Women’s Strike for Equality, and helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus. Her career joined analysis of women’s everyday lives with institution-building and mass political action.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: W.W. Norton
Language: English
ISBN: 9780393040494

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