Introduction: ‘Women as Wives and Workers: Marking Fifty Years of The Feminine Mystique’ Special Issue
Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: When Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, few could have predicted the wide-ranging impact it would have and the controversies that would follow it.The sales of Friedan's book were extraordinary.Despite an initial print run of only a few thousand, The Feminine Mystique spent six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and 1.4 million copies of the first paperback printing were sold, with millions more to follow. 1 Five decades later, the book retains iconic status.It now forms part of the canon of second wave feminism, sitting alongside Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, Kate Millet's Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex.Undergraduate students of contemporary American and/or gender history and culture rarely escape it on course syllabi.The book resonated as much with women outside of the US, and Friedan's appeal within the UK coincided with the start of legal reform on issues of contraception and abortion as well as debates on pay equality.More recently, left-wing British broadsheet The Guardian described it as 'the classic feminist work' when inviting readers to participate in a 'pop-up book-club' to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, albeit with the confession that 'to be honest, some of us are just getting around to reading it'. 2 Whether one had read the book or not, there was a sense that the starting point for second wave feminism -rightly or wrongly -was Betty Friedan.The fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication seemed to reinforce that The Feminine Mystique and Friedan's name have come to serve as by-words for feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.The breadth of anniversary press coverage in the Anglo-American world was no doubt in part due to the re-issue of the book in commemorative edition format, with new introductions and afterwords by prominent journalists.3 But there was an energy to the discussion of the book.Much of the coverage suggests ongoing engagement -at a variety of levels -with Friedan's ideas and assertions.As Janet Maslin pointed out in The New York Times, certain parts of the book are 'evergreen' because they are
Source: History of Women in the Americas
Authors: Rachel Ritchie, Helen Glew, Jane Hamlett, Sinead McEneaney, Zoe Thomas
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1760460747