A Macat analysis of Betty Friedan's The feminine mystique
Material type: TextPublication details: London Macat International 2017Description: 107pISBN: 9781912128884Subject(s): Women--Psychology Women--Social conditions United States FeminismDDC classification: 305.420973 Summary: Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique is possibly the best-selling of all the titles analysed in the Macat library, and arguably one of the most important. Yet it was the product of an apparently minor, meaningless assignment. Undertaking to approach former classmates who had attended Smith College with her, 10 years after their graduation, the high-achieving Friedan was astonished to discover that the survey she had undertaken for a magazine feature revealed a high proportion of her contemporaries were suffering from a malaise she had thought was unique to her: profound dissatisfaction at the ‘ideal’ lives they had been living as wives, mothers and homemakers. For Friedan, this discovery stimulated a remarkable burst of creative thinking, as she began to connect the elements of her own life together in new ways. The popular idea that men and women were equal, but different – that men found their greatest fulfilment through work, while women were most fulfilled in the home – stood revealed as a fallacy, and the depression and even despair she and so many other women felt as a result was recast not as a failure to adapt to a role that was the truest expression of femininity, but as the natural product of undertaking repetitive, unfulfilling and unremunerated labor. Friedan's seminal expression of these new ideas redefined an issue central to many women's lives so successfully that it fuelled a movement – the ‘second wave’ feminism of the 1960s and 1970s that fundamentally challenged the legal and social framework underpinning an entire society.Item type | Current library | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode |
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BK | Stack | 305.420973 WHI/M (Browse shelf (Opens below)) | Available | 51833 |
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305.4209546 MAN/L The land I dream of : the story of Kashmir's women | 305.4209724 DEV/C Close encounters of another kind :women and development economics | 305.4209730 REV Revolution in words:Righting women, 1868-1871 | 305.420973 WHI/M A Macat analysis of Betty Friedan's The feminine mystique | 305.42099 EME Emerging issues in development anthropology | 305.4332095483 RAM/R Role of local governments in the empowerment of women in kerala | 305.43610695 KAV/L Lady Doctors; The untold stories of India's First Women in Medicine |
Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique is possibly the best-selling of all the titles analysed in the Macat library, and arguably one of the most important. Yet it was the product of an apparently minor, meaningless assignment. Undertaking to approach former classmates who had attended Smith College with her, 10 years after their graduation, the high-achieving Friedan was astonished to discover that the survey she had undertaken for a magazine feature revealed a high proportion of her contemporaries were suffering from a malaise she had thought was unique to her: profound dissatisfaction at the ‘ideal’ lives they had been living as wives, mothers and homemakers.
For Friedan, this discovery stimulated a remarkable burst of creative thinking, as she began to connect the elements of her own life together in new ways. The popular idea that men and women were equal, but different – that men found their greatest fulfilment through work, while women were most fulfilled in the home – stood revealed as a fallacy, and the depression and even despair she and so many other women felt as a result was recast not as a failure to adapt to a role that was the truest expression of femininity, but as the natural product of undertaking repetitive, unfulfilling and unremunerated labor.
Friedan's seminal expression of these new ideas redefined an issue central to many women's lives so successfully that it fuelled a movement – the ‘second wave’ feminism of the 1960s and 1970s that fundamentally challenged the legal and social framework underpinning an entire society.
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