The Feminine Mystique sold over three million copies

Person: Betty Friedan
Lived: 1921–2006
Field: Women’s rights
From: American

The story

In the 1950s American popular culture insisted that a woman's fulfilment lay only in being a wife and mother. The average age of marriage was falling, the share of women attending college was declining, and women's magazines, mostly edited by men, portrayed happy housewives and unhappy career women. Betty Friedan, a Smith College graduate and former labour journalist who had been pushed out of her job when she became pregnant, was writing for those same magazines while raising three children.

A survey of her Smith classmates in 1957, and years of interviews and research that followed, convinced her that many women were quietly miserable. She first tried to write an article on the subject, but no magazine would publish it, so she turned it into a book. The Feminine Mystique was published by W. W. Norton on February 19, 1963.

The book named and challenged the postwar ideal of the happy housewife. Friedan showed how women's magazines, advertisers, Freudian psychologists, social scientists and educators had promoted that image, and argued that it stifled women's growth and wasted enormous human potential. She opened with what she called the problem that has no name: the silent question of suburban women, making beds and shopping for groceries, asking themselves whether this was all. She called for women to assert themselves and for equality at work and at home. By describing women's problems as broad and structural rather than personal failings, she has been credited with helping women understand their position in society.

The book was an immediate best-seller, initially selling more than a million copies, and it made Friedan a celebrity. It has sold well over three million copies, has been translated into a dozen languages and still sells thousands of copies a year. In 1976 a New York literary club included it, alongside works by Galileo and Marx, in an exhibition called Books as Troublemakers, devoted to books that stirred millions and changed lives.

Many historians see The Feminine Mystique as the spark for the second wave of the American women's movement. Friedan herself said that the book created consciousness but that change required organization, and within a few years she helped found the National Organization for Women, the National Women's Political Caucus and NARAL.

Why it matters

The Feminine Mystique is widely credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism, opening paths for women into education, careers and public life.

About Betty Friedan

Author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), which named ‘the problem that has no name’, and co-founder and first president of the National Organization for Women.

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Betty Friedan

1921–2006 · Women’s rights

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