A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

Stephanie Coontz

Language: English

Pages: 256

ISBN: 046502842X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In 1963, Betty Friedan unleashed a storm of controversy with her bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique. Women wrote to her by the hundreds to say that the book had transformed, even saved, their lives. Nearly half a century later, many women still recall where they were and what they were doing when they first read the book. In A Strange Stirring, prominent historian of women and marriage Stephanie Coontz strips away the myths, examining what The Feminine Mystique actually said, and which groups of women were affected. Coontz takes us back to the early 1960s – the age of Mad Men – when the sexual revolution was barely nascent, middle class wives stayed at home, and husbands retained legal control over almost every aspect of family life. Based on extensive research in the magazines and popular culture of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, as well as interviews with women and men who read The Feminine Mystique shortly after its publication, A Strange Stirring brilliantly illuminates how Friedan’s book emboldened a generation of women to realize that their boredom and dissatisfaction stemmed from political injustice rather than personal weakness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

another left the deathbed of his wife, an ardent suffragist, to cast his vote for her cause. The Roaring Twenties were indeed heady times. But Friedan exaggerated the extent of women’s gains. Equal rights may have been increasingly accepted in the abstract, but in practice acceptance of female independence did not gain much traction in the 1920s. Opponents of gender equality shifted tactics and changed their rhetoric, arguing that while the women’s movement had led to necessary reforms, it had

view of most psychiatrists and the writers who popularized their works, “momism”—whether it took the form of overly strict or overly indulgent behavior—was the cause of almost every social ill. It produced sissies, murderers, and homosexuals. It even produced Nazism. Had Adolf Hitler’s mother not coddled her son as a child, claimed medical author Amram Scheinfeld in a November 1945 Ladies’ Home Journal article, “history might have taken another course.” The title of the article posed a question

husband wasn’t really “okay enough,” and she initiated a separation. “When my mother heard we’d separated, she called my husband and told him, ‘If Lillian wants to come back, treat her like a dog in the street. She doesn’t deserve what you’ve given her.’” Fearing that she would not be able to support her child, Lillian agreed to reconcile three months later. She also consented to move from central Los Angeles, where she was a community activist, to the suburbs where her husband worked. For

but simply taking their mothers’ advice a little further than their moms had perhaps anticipated. Other young women had so fully absorbed the postwar rhetoric about equality and self-fulfillment that they reacted with shock and indignation when they discovered there were unspoken exceptions when it came to women. As a girl, Sherry Bogartz grew up playing baseball with her brothers in an old cow pasture by her parents’ chicken farm. She was furious when she found out they could join Little League

when 41 percent of mothers and 35 percent of fathers in dual-earner households with children under eighteen reported either some or a lot of work-family conflict. By 2008, there had been a slight rise in the percentage of mothers reporting such conflict, from 41 percent to 45 percent, but the number of fathers complaining about it had soared to 59 percent. As men’s dissatisfaction with the demands of the career mystique has grown, so has their willingness to challenge it. In 1977, only 12

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