The Feminine Mystique, By Betty Friedan

Overall, Betty Friedan was a writer and women’s rights activist. After graduating “summa cum laude from Smith College in 1942” and completing her one year fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley for Psychology, Friedan “moved to New York to become a labor reporter.” She married and “after having her first child, she continued working;” however, she lost her job after she became pregnant with her second child and became a housewife. She became restless and eventually started freelancing articles for magazines.2 Friedan helped create and co-found multiple women’s organizations, such as the “National Organization for Women (NOW), National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL Pro-Choice America), and the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC).” Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique because she wanted to know if other housewives felt the way she did after she lost her job and Friedan also said that she wanted to refute claims from a book called Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, that “said [that] too much education was making American women frustrated in their roles as women, and they would readjust to their role as women.” 3

Friedan said that American women suffered from “a problem with no

Friedan describes a situation in which there were mothers having coffee and one of the mothers referenced “the problem, and they all knew” what she was talking about.4 She describes that they “began, hesitantly, to talk about it.” Friedan said that it was not considered correct to talk about issues like that because men talked about the important issues while women were supposed to talk about their families, cooking tips, etc. Since they thought they were alone in having this kind of feeling, it was reassuring for women to know that in actuality they were not alone, in which Friedan shows this by saying that “two of the women cried in sheer