Feminine Mystique, The.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., (1963).
8vo, 378 pp.; + Notes and Index; blue cloth spine stamped in gold and drab paper of boards (variant binding); jacket’s spine slightly sunned; closed 4” tear from bottom edge through quote and author’s name, with no loss of text; thumbnail-sized closed tear at top edge; short tears at head of spine; two other 1/2” closed edge tears; rubbed at back panel.
First edition. Signed by Betty Friedan. Betty Friedan (1921- ) virtually created the modern women’s movement with the publication of The Feminine Mystique. The book holds that American women, particularly educated, middle-class women, had been taught to derive their self worth solely as mothers and wives and systematically denied professional careers. The book evolved out of a 1957 survey Friedan conducted among Smith classmates in which she noted the disparity between the level of education of the women and what they were doing with their lives. Popular magazines of the time celebrated women as ideal mothers and helpmates; they showed women creating the perfect meal, the perfectly-kept house and rearing perfectly-dressed children—a picture of satisfying domesticity. Friedan labeled this view of women 'the feminine mystique', and shredded the idea that women only existed as extensions of husband and children and the notion that a woman with professional aspirations thwarted into a life as an unpaid housekeeper had a healthy and benign affect on her family. As Deborah Felder writes: “No written work in the history of feminist thought has sounded the clarion call for change in the status of women with as much reverberating success... The women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s effectively began with this book’s publication and ready absorption into the hearts and minds of American women.” Three years after the publication of Mystique, Friedan co-founded The National Organization for Women and became its first president.
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