Summary: The Perfect Housewife

As the 1960s raged on, women were beyond tired of fifty five hours a week of mindless chores such as cooking, ironing their husbands shirts and keeping the house spotless. Many housewives felt as if they were losing their personalities.

Books like Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care gave advice on how women should raise their children, nonetheless it was written by a man who would barely be the caretaker of his own children, and “Home Economic” books, which many of them were also written by men, gave high school girls and women starting their own families tips on how to be the perfect housewife.

Women also got the idea imprinted that they needed to conform to the “perfect housewife” model because this is how women were portrayed in films and

De Beauvoir wrote that male-centered ideology was accepted as the norm and the fact that women were capable of menstruation and getting pregnant does not make them the “second sex.”

The new feminism movement called for forward thinking and radical women who were empowered to make change despite their “second class citizenship” status determined by men, and women who also demanded drastic changes and took drastic steps. Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique which was published in 1963. It became a best-seller and was eventually translated into 13 languages. In her book she protested mainstream media’s portrayals of women, arguing that shaping women into housewives hindered their possibilities and wasted talent and potential. Friedan would later be nicknamed the “Mother of Second Wave Feminism.”

At the time her book was published Friedan was a typical suburban housewife. During her 15th college reunion in 1957 she conducted a survey primarily focusing on the education and satisfaction of her fellow female and male college