The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan - Part 1

The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 96

  April 6, 2017 

Book 31 - The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan (1997)
 Part 1 - pages ix-xxxiv and pages 3-32
Reading Time - 1 hour

Alright, finally!! The book came in at the library and it is 400 pages of dense text. I'll do my best to get through it in a timely fashion. There is quite a bit of Foreword, Introduction, Prologue and Preface to work through. The book was originally published in 1963 so this version came out in 1997. It includes some more recent thoughts of Betty Friedan which mirror her other book that I read a couple of weeks ago. But this one is THE book that started it all.

Back in the 1950s, the American housewife was a dream image for a lot of women. Get married, have kids, buy a house in suburbia and live happily ever after. Some of these women were university educated, some were not. But the vision to which a lot of girls aspired was Mrs. Cleaver (Leave it to Beaver). At the same time... there was an unspoken problem. Housewives felt empty, incomplete, tired, angry, depressed. Some doctors called it Housewife Syndrome. In 1960, the problem burst and a lot of different things were blamed... women were over-educated. They needed to have more kids. But... the problem won't be solved by more money, bigger houses or a second car. In fact, those things might make it worse.

This book was written two years before I was born so I'm kind of curious to see what Betty Friedan writes. Will it still apply to me? I see echos of it though. People today are chasing happiness, hoping that bigger houses or a second car will make them happy... but that doesn't do it. Being a stay-at-home, work part-time from home, person... I handle a lot of the Domestic Resource Management issues... At the same time though, I am a writer and a blogger and I feel like I'm making a contribution to the world and growing myself. I am a housewife... but I'm more than that...

While housewives in the 1950s were wondering "Is this all?", I can't say that is my question... so we'll see where this book goes...