A 50th-anniversary edition of the trailblazing book that changed women’s lives, with a new introduction by Gail Collins. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic—these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire. This 50th–anniversary edition features an afterword by best-selling author Anna Quindlen as well as a new introduction by Gail Collins.
Betty Friedan (1921–2006), a transformational leader of the women’s movement, founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) and authored many works, including The Second Stage, The Fountain of Age, and Life So Far.
Gail Collins, the best-selling author of When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, is a national columnist for the New York Times. She lives in New York City.
Anna Quindlen is an award-winning columnist and novelist. She left journalism in 1995 to write fiction full time and has published three bestsellers. She lives in New York City.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Anne Quindlen Twenty Years After Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition Preface and Acknowledgments 1 The Problem That Has No Name 2 The Happy Housewife Heroine 3 The Crisis in Woman's Identity 4 The Passionate Journey 5 The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud 6 The Functional Freeze, the Feminine Protest, and Margaret Mead 7 The Sex-Directed Educators 8 The Mistaken Choice 9 The Sexual Sell 10 Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available 11 The Sex-Seekers 12 Progressive Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp 13 The Forfeited Self 14 A New Life Plan for Women Epilogue Thoughts on Becoming a Grandmother Notes Index
What People are Saying About This
Anna Quindlen
[The Feminine Mystique] now feels both revolutionary and utterly contemporary. . . . Four decades later, millions of individual transformations later, there is still so much to learn from this book. . . . Those who think of it as solely a feminist manifesto ought to revisit its pages to get a sense of the magnitude of the research and reporting Friedan undertook.
Amitai Etzioni
One of those rare books we are endowed wIth only once in several decades, a volume that launched a major social movement....Betty Friedan is a liberator of women and men. — (Amitai Etzioni, author of The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society)
Alvin Toffler
The book that puled the trigger on history. Future Shock)
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