The Feminine Mystique
Housewife discontent diagnosed
*The Feminine Mystique* is a 1963 book by Betty Friedan that challenged the postwar American ideal of fulfilled domesticity for women.
Friedan identified "the problem that has no name"—the widespread unhappiness of educated middle-class housewives who felt trapped by expectations that marriage and motherhood should be enough.
The book is credited with sparking second-wave feminism in the United States.
- housewifeHome-focused married woman
- suburbanOf residential outskirts
- 1963Mid-twentieth century date
- second waveRecurring spike after lull
- domesticityLife centered around home
Betty Friedan · suburban housewife · boredom · identity · college educated · suffocation · motherhood · discontent · liberation · consciousness · consciousness raising · sisterhood · patriarchy · equality · glass ceiling · housework · trapped · awakening
- feminismgender equality, women's rights, patriarchy, women's liberation, sisterhood
- American BooksTo Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, Catch-22, Walden
- Reform Writingmuckraking, exposés, investigative reports, slave narratives, manifestos
- women's writingVirginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath
- essaysessay, personal essay, formal essay, Self-Reliance, critical essays
- Great BooksMeditations, Leviathan, The Prince, Utopia, Walden
feminine, mystique, female, feminism, feminist, femininity, feminineness, effeminate, mystical