I learned from reading Dan Horowitz’s marvelous book, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism, that she had misrepresented her own political history, but I could also see for myself that she had misrepresented her indebtedness to others. And I was surprised to hear how limited her proposals for change were.

I thought her focus on educated white women was elitist. I was horrified by Friedan’s uncritical prejudices against homosexuality and her diatribes against permissive parenting. It exaggerated the gains of feminism in the 1920s and the hegemony of the anti-feminist homemaker mythology in the 1950s. So I sat down to read the book and got another surprise: I did not like it. The Feminine Mystique was so talked about, and the title so catchy, in those days before we had words like sexism to describe what we faced, that many women eventually came to believe they’d read it, and used the phrase to describe whatever was bothering them about their situation as women.

I later found that this was true for many women I interviewed. Having a distinct memory of reading it in the 1960s, I thought that would be very interesting.īut I hadn’t gotten very far in the book when I realized, in fact, that I had never read it. Stephanie Coontz: I was approached by an editor at Basic Books who said they were doing a series of biographies, not of individuals but of books, and asked if I’d like to write one on The Feminine Mystique. Her earlier books on the social history of the family include Marriage, A History The Way We Really Are The Way We Never Were and The Social Origins of Private Life.ĪTC: Why did you write this book, and what were your reactions to re-reading Betty’s Friedan’s classic THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE? Dianne Feeley interviewed Stephanie about her new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. STEPHANIE COONTZ TEACHES history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

UNITED KINGDOM: Students Fight the Fees.

Susan Weissman interviews Yoav Peled & Mark LeVine

The feminism mystique