Celebrating the Publication of Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique – 50 years later
Please join the Women’s Studies Advisory Council (WOSAC)
for a gathering of remembrance, reminiscences, and friendship
Sunday, February 17, 2013 – 2 p.m.- 4 p.m.
(Brief program at 2:30. . .refreshments & reminiscences)
At The Women’s Commission building – 240 N. Court
(1 block south of El Charro; SE corner of Council & Court)
RSVP: Leigh Spencer, [email protected], 621-5656
Publication of "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan • February 17, 1963
The publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, on February 17, 1963, is often
cited as the founding moment of second-wave feminism. The book highlighted Friedan's
view of a coercive and pervasive post-World War II ideology of female domesticity that
stifled middle-class women's opportunities to be anything but homemakers.
A survey she conducted of her Smith College classmates indicated that many felt depressed
even though they supposedly enjoyed ideal lives with husbands, homes, and children.
Enlarging her inquiry, Friedan found that what she called "the problem that has no name"
was common among women far beyond the educated East Coast elite. In The Feminine
Mystique, she showed how women's magazines, advertising, Freudian psychologists, and
educators reflected and perpetuated a domestic ideal that left many women deeply
unhappy. In suppressing women's personal growth, Friedan argued, society lost a vast
reservoir of human potential.
Friedan's book is credited with sparking second-wave feminism by directing women's attention to the broad social basis
of their problems, stirring many to political and social activism. Although Friedan faced some negative reactions, she also
received hundreds of letters from women who said that The Feminine Mystique had changed their lives. Since 1963, the
book has sold over 2M copies and has been translated into a dozen languages. Thousands of copies are still sold
annually.
Friedan went on to help found the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Abortion Rights Action League
(NARAL), and the National Women's Political Caucus. She taught at colleges and universities from coast to coast, and
published in magazines from The New Republic to Ladies' Home Journal. Her more recent work, including the 1993 book
Fountain of Age, addresses what Friedan called the "age mystique." Friedan died at home in Washington, D.C. on
February 4, 2006, her 85th birthday.