Friedan intensified her argument by braiding it with one of many personal admissions: a slave to the feminine mystique, she had made her own sacrifices for “the dream of love”, and become frustrated. “I feel empty,” declared this first generation of desperate housewives. In a society famously dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness”, Friedan reported that American women had lost their smiles. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – ‘Is this all?’” Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. “The problem,” begins Friedan’s narrative, “lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. Compared to the other classic postwar statement of feminism, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, Friedan speaks quite practically to the concerns of middle-class American housewives, but mainly about the independent woman’s life in house and home. Still, it retains a polemical undertow that’s plainly designed to shift the minds of her readers. Today, The Feminine Mystique seems far from freaky, at times even staid verging on reactionary. Indeed, in common with many American women of the early 1960s, she “thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor.

After five years research and hard work in the New York Public Library, she continued to see herself as the prisoner of “that mystique, which kept us passive”. Within three years of the book’s publication, Friedan had sold more than 3m copies.įriedan herself professed puzzlement about what it was she had identified, right up to publication. Thirteen foreign language translations followed. Rarely has a title in this series flown off the shelves as this did, selling 300,000 copies within the first year. Or, as Alvin Toffler put it, hers was a book “that pulled the trigger on history”. “I have never experienced anything as powerful, truly mystical, as the forces that seemed to take me over when I was writing The Feminine Mystique”, she wrote later, in an almost perfect summary of that peculiar literary phenomenon, the zeitgeist book.Īs the critic Jay Parini has written, Friedan’s work “almost single-handedly ignited a revolutionary phase that has deeply affected the lives of countless American women and men”. But what?” Gradually, “from somewhere deep within me”, a project that was now becoming a book began to take shape. By now, she was sure she was “on the track of something. When Friedan discovered that many of her former classmates were unhappy with their lives as women in society she pitched an article based on the questionnaire to McCall’s magazine, which “turned the piece down in horror”.

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