Yet The Feminine Mystique remains important as more than an exercise in 'look how far we've come'. Now, the view that education destroys femininity and that any woman who desires a career is pathological is (thankfully) laughable. As Lionel Shriver writes in her elegant introduction to this new edition, Friedan 'upended western women's vision of what constitutes the good life' and in so doing was one of the most important architects of second wave feminism.įriedan's most significant conclusion, that 'education, and only education, has saved American women from the great dangers of the feminine mystique', struck her contemporaries as dangerously radical. For the most part, Friedan controls her passion and directs it towards clear-eyed and persuasive arguments against the glorification of housewifery. She offers up chilling case studies and heartbreaking testimonies of women infantilised, suppressed and made suicidal by the misery of 'occupation: housewife'. In the most immoderate passage of her seminal 1963 book, she writes: 'The women who grow up wanting to be 'just a housewife', are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own deaths in the concentration camps.' This comparison may be absurd, but given Friedan's findings, it is at least partly understandable. Yet to Betty Friedan the 'life-restricting, future-denying' cult of the housewife that gripped the US was about as funny as the Holocaust.

I n her present incarnation, the 1950s housewife is a bit of a joke: a self-ironising, Cath Kidston-clad figure of kitsch domesticity.

The feminine mystique 1963