Sometimes out of date, but at times her description of 1950s America stands exactly for today’s America in 2025, point-blank.   I skimmed and skipped parts of it.  I believe that when this book was published it was a society-changer.

I read it mostly as an amazed onlooker – I was raised with almost none of the described restrictions on my life goals, almost none of the described pressure to do only “feminine” things.  Intellect and learning was highly prized in my family, and there was no notion that I would be less a female for pursuing them.  Home cooking was also highly prized and both my father and my mother demonstrated the delights of cooking.  But I greatly fear my country , for all the strides we have made, has now entered a very dark time for women.

I think by the time I reached adulthood, Friedan and others had already implemented change for women in this country.  And yet, at my first corporate job in 1985, I was usually the only woman in a room full of 30+ men, all of them with a more powerful and more lucrative job than I had.  Those men, the same age as me (in my 20s) would sometimes assume I was only there to make photocopies for them.  Make your own photocopies!  The misogyny has always been there.  Perhaps it had faded to the background, but it looks like it has the power now.

The problem that Friedan calls “feminine mystique” is the lack of positive self-identity among a large swath of American women, most specifically housewives (but the unstated subtext in the book implies  “white middle-class women”) of the 1950s and early 1960s. “A sense of emptiness, non-existence, nothingness”.   

Friedan details how this feminine mystique comes from advertisers, capitalism’s need to always create more consumption, the faulty popularization of Freud’s grossly mistaken ideas, Margaret Mead, and more.

The section where Friedan discusses homosexuality is abhorrently wrong, and mars the whole book.  NO.  I had to skim this part because I was so disgusted by it, so forgive me if I’m actually misinterpreting what she said.  She seems to blame homosexuality (as if it is a problem that requires blame) on the way some mothers (no mention of fathers) raised their sons (and the emphasis is vastly on homosexual men) is what made them gay.  No, no, no.

But most of the book is spot on and, sadly, still applies today.  It was truly painful to read the afterwords, written 10 to 35 years later, which detail all the gains women made, and how the right to an abortion was assured.  In the 1997 afterword Friedan wrote: “New birth-control technology even beyond RU486, as well as the evolving national consensus, will soon make the whole issue of abortion obsolete.”  As of this writing, Jan 31, 2025, the access to those drugs is severely threatened nationwide, even despite a fairly wide national consensus that access to abortion should be available.

What is going to become of us now? 

It was interesting and put forward many interesting points but I found that it talked much more about being an American housewife rather than feminism in general. The frequency of ancedotes and quotes gives the writing a disjointed feeling and made it more difficult for me to get into it. It could easily be more concise and less wordy