Transcription
A year ago, this woman heaved a brick through the rose-colored picture window of the American Suburban Bungalow and invited the resident housewife to take a clear look at the outside world.
This book has sold more than 50,000 copies in the hard cover edition, and 700,000 have been published in paperback. In 1963, a writer named Betty Friedan published *The Feminine Mystique*, her scathing expose of the happy homemaker myth.
*The Feminine Mystique* has made us feel it's unfeminine to use our rights, to really want equality, to want to take part in the decisions of the world. In politics, "career woman" almost became a dirty word.
Betty Friedan had given up the chance for an academic career to become a homemaker and part-time journalist in the 1950s. Feeling there was something missing in her own life, she wondered if other women felt the same way. She decided to interview her old classmates at Smith prior to a reunion. In doing that, she surfaced a deep sense of malaise among women who had very fine educations and then felt that they really didn't have choices, that there were no avenues for their talents, and were caught in some profound way.
A woman today, uh, has been made to feel freakish and alone and guilty if simply she wants to be, uh, more than, uh, her husband's wife, her children's mother. She really wants to use her abilities in society. And everybody read *The Feminine Mystique*, and of course, we all had mothers who suffered from the problem that has no name. They didn't know what was wrong. Why were they not satisfied by the three children and the perfect house?
Up until that time, I was thinking that I was just different. A lot of my girlfriends were getting married straight out of college, and I was thinking, "I don't want to do that at all." But reading that book let me know that there were masses of women who felt differently, and that it was stunning.
But to the women content with their traditional roles, *The Feminine Mystique* felt like a slap in the face. I first read *The Feminine Mystique* in the winter of 1964. I felt personally judged. All these things that women at home can do, which are extremely worthwhile to society, were dismissed as dilettantism and unworthy of any respect.
However it was received, Betty Friedan's book was certainly timely, as Women's Rights was beginning to surface as a national issue.