1. THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
BETTY FRIEDAN

2. Betty Friedan ( )
A leading figure in the women’s movement in the States
First president of National Organization for Women (NOW) which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men“
1970, organised nationwide Women’s Strike for Equality
1971 established National Women’s Political Caucus
A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the "second wave" of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men“NOW seeks to end sexual discrimination, especially in the workplace, by means of legislative lobbying, litigation, and public demonstrations.
In 1970, after stepping down as NOW's first president, Friedan organized the nationwide Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, the 50th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granting women the right to vote. The national strike was successful beyond expectations in broadening the feminist movement; the march led by Friedan in New York City alone attracted over 50,000 women and men. In 1971, Friedan joined other leading feminists to establish the National Women's Political Caucus.
she founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws but was later critical of the abortion-centered positions of many liberal feminists.
Friedan leading a strike in Manhattan, 1970

3. Betty Friedan
Founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement (1976)
The Second Stage (1981)
The Fountain of Age (1993)
Beyond Gender (1997)
Life So Far (2000)
she founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws but was later critical of the abortion-centered positions of many liberal feminists. In 1980, she believed abortion should be in the context of "'the choice to have children'" She was a staunch supporter of abortion laws and a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution

4. THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE(1963)
The starting point of second wave feminism
attacked the popular notion that women of that time could only find fulfillment through childbearing and homemaking.
women as victims of a false belief system that requires them to find identity and meaning in their lives through their husbands and children- Post World War phenomenon
What is the feminine mystique?
"comfortable concentration camp where they were not free to use their minds"
In 1957, Friedan was asked to conduct a survey of her former Smith College classmates for their 15th anniversary reunion; the results, in which she found that many of them were unhappy with their lives as housewives, prompted her to begin research for The Feminine Mystique, conducting interviews with other suburban housewives, as well as researching psychology, media, and advertising.
Friedan hypothesized that women are victims of a false belief system that requires them to find identity and meaning in their lives through their husbands and children. Such a system causes women to completely lose their identity in that of their family.
Friedan specifically locates this system among post-World War II middle-class suburban communities. She suggests that men returning from war turned to their wives for mothering. At the same time, America's post-war economic boom had led to the development of new technologies that were supposed to make household work less difficult, but that often had the result of making women's work less meaningful and valuable.
The feminine mystique is the false notion that a woman’s “role” in society is to be a wife, mother and housewife - nothing else. The mystique is an artificial idea of femininity that says having a career and/or fulfilling one’s individual potential somehow go against women's pre-ordained role. The mystique is the constant barrage of homemaker-nurturer-mother images that esteem the virtue of keeping house and raising children as essential womanhood, while criticizing the “masculinity” of women who want to do other things, whether along with or instead of the mystique-approved duties.  
This mystique defined female happiness as an involvement in the roles of wife and mother so total that over time, they had become helpless, lost souls confined to a "comfortable concentration camp where they were not free to use their minds"

5. SECOND WAVE FEMINISM(1960s-1980s)
initially called the Women's Liberation Movement
Whereas first-wave feminism focused mainly on suffrage and legal gender equality, second-wave feminism broadened the debate to a wide range of issues: sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights, de facto inequalities, and official legal inequalities.
a battle against violence with proposals for marital rape laws, establishment of rape crisis and battered women's shelters, and changes in custody and divorce law.
largely successful, with the failure of the ratification of the ERA the only major legislative defeat
a delayed reaction against the renewed domesticity of women after World War II … Gloria Steinem
Its major effort was passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the United States Constitution, in which they were defeated by anti-feminists led by Phyllis Schlafly, who argued as an anti-ERA view that the ERA meant women would be drafted into the military.

6. THE PROBLEM THAT HAS NO NAME
“Each suburban wife struggled with it [a sense of dissatisfaction] alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even herself the silent question- ‘Is this all [there is]?’”
Friedan begins The Feminine Mystique with an introduction describing the problem that has no name—the widespread unhappiness of women. Using a practice that becomes common throughout the book, Friedan offers several case studies of unhappy women from around the United States, and she wonders whether this unhappiness is related to the female role of housewife.
Experts wrote for women that their role was to seek fulfilment as wives n mothers.- columns were written on how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed, how to change diapers, how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet meals etc etc They were taught techniques to keep their marriage exciting, to ensure that their husbands don’t die young or that their sons don’t turn into deliquents over and over women heard in voices of tradition and freudian sophiscation that they could desire no destiny than to glory in their on feminity

7. The Problem That has no name
“taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents”
By the 1950s the average marriage age for women in america dropped to 20.
14 million girls were engaged by 17.
Proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47 percent in 1920 to 35 percent in 1958
A new degree was instituted for the wives-”Ph.T” (Putting Husband Through)
Women during world war
Some women in their 40s and 50s looked nostalgically at the careers they had given up while most of the young women had no careers whatsoever on their agendas. Their primary concern was to find a husband and have children.
. By the 1950s the average marriage age for women in america dropped tp 20 and continued to drop into the teen. 14 million girls were engaged by 17. proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47 percent in 1920 tp 35 percent in 1958 A century earlier women had fought for higher education : now girls went to college to get a husband. By mid 50s 60% dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid that too much education would be a marriage bar. College built dormitories for “married students” but the students were almost always the husbands. A new degree was instituted for the wives-”Ph.T” (Putting Husband Through)

8. The Problem That Has No Name
Simon de Beauvoir
“I feel like I don’t exist” “who am I?” “I don’t feel alive”
“If she tried to tell her husband, he didn’t understand what she was talking about. She did not really understand it herself. For over 15 years women in America found it harder to talk about this problem than about sex. Even the psychoanalysts had no name for it”
American women as bound by chains of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, not easily seen and not easily shaken off
Critic on beauvoir- she obviously didn’t know what life was all about. Besides it was about french women. America has no women problems.
Words such as career and emanicipation were considered to be embarrasing
No longer ignore the voice that says I want something more than my husband, my children and my home”

9. THE HAPPY HOUSEWIFE HEROINE
This image--created by the women's magazines, by advertisements, television, movies,novels, columns and books by experts on marriage and the family, child psychology, sexual adjustment and by the popularizers of sociology and psychoanalysis--shapes women's lives today and mirrors their dreams.
1960’s Ladies Home Journal, McCall's, Good Housekeeping, Woman's Home Companion
the only pursuit, the only goal a woman is permitted is the pursuit of a man. In the magazine image women do no work except housework and work to keep their bodies beautiful and to get and keep a man.
Her experience at a Magazine Writers’ Meeting
Advertisers and women's magazines manipulated women into believing they could achieve fulfillment by using the latest model vacuum cleaner, bleaching their clothes a purer white, or using instant cake mixes as an outlet for creativity. They should be happily content to live in the world of the bedroom and the kitchen surrounded by their husbands and babies. Some psychiatrists suggested that any woman who was not satisfied being a wife and mother was emotionally maladjusted. Friedan's book  told women that the only way to realize their potential as individuals and gain the personal identification essential to healthy family life was through meaningful careers.
In the early 1960's McCall'shas been the fastest growing of the women'smagazines. Its contents are a fairly accurate representation of the image of the
American woman presented, and in part created, by the large-circulation magazines – article on baldness in women caused by too much brushing, a short story abt how a teenager who doesn't go to college gets a man away from a bright college girl, about babies, on how to over come inferiotity complex , how to get a second husband etc

10. THE HAPPY HOUSEWIFE HEROINE
Heroines in Women Magazines – either is the stereotype to begin with or ends up being the stereotype. ( 1930s “New Women” Vs 1950s)
"I don't want to put you in a garden behind a wall," the hero says. "I want you to walk with me hand in hand, and together we could accomplish whatever we wanted to("A Dream to Share," Redbook,January, 1939).
The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity. It says that the great mistake of Western culture, through most of its history, has been the undervaluation of this femininity
Fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after the housewife-mother. By the end of 1949, only one out of three heroines in the women's magazines was a career woman--and she was shown in the act of renouncing her career and discovering that what she really wanted to be was a housewife
1930s- stories abt women running away from home when forced to marry etc. Often, there was a conflict between some commitment to her work and the man.But the moral, in 1939, was that if she kept her commitment to herself, she did not lose the man, if he was the right man
The New Woman heroines were the ideal of yesterday's housewives; they reflected the dreams, mirrored the yearning for identity and the sense of possibility that existed for women then. And if women could not have these dreams for themselves, they wanted their daughters to have them.
"Femininity Begins at Home,“ ," "Have Babies While You're Young, " "How to Snare a Male," "Should I Stop Work When We Marry?" "Are You Training Your
Daughter to be a Wife?" "Careers at Home," "Do Women Have to Talk So Much?" "Why GI's Prefer Those German Girls ," "What Women Can Learn from
Mother Eve," "Really a Man's World, Politics," "How to Hold On to a Happy Marriage," "Don't Be Afraid to Marry Young," "The Doctor Talks about Breast-
Feeding," "Our Baby Was Born at Home," "Cooking to Me is Poetry

11. THE CRISIS IN WOMEN’S IDENTITY
Friedan remembers her own decision to conform to society's expectations by giving up her promising career to raise children and finds that other young women still struggle with this decision. Many women drop out of school early to marry, afraid that if they wait too long or become too educated, they will not be able to attract a husband. Unfortunately, many women do not find fulfilment in the narrow roles of wife and mother and then fear something is wrong with themselves.

12. Other Main Ideas
Criticizes Freud who wrote, "I believe that all reforming action in law and education would break down in front of the fact that, long before the age at which a man can earn a position in society, Nature has determined woman's destiny through beauty, charm, and sweetness. Law and custom have much to give women that has been withheld from them, but the position of women will surely be what it is: in youth an adored darling and in mature years a loved wife.“
Penis envy
the popularity of Freud's work and ideas elevated the "feminine mystique" of female fulfilment in housewifery into a "scientific religion" that most women were not educated enough to criticize
She also analyzed Freudian analysis and the ways women were blamed for their own unhappiness and lack of fulfillment. The prevailing narrative told them they simply weren’t living up to the mystique’s standards.
Friedan, who had a degree in psychology, criticizes Sigmund Freud (whose ideas were very influential in America at the time of her book's publication). She notes that Freud saw women as childlike and as destined to be housewives. Friedan also points out that Freud's unproven concept of "penis envy" had been used to label women who wanted careers as neurotic, and that the popularity of Freud's work and ideas elevated the "feminine mystique" of female fulfillment in housewifery into a "scientific religion" that most women were not educated enough to criticize
Freudian theory about penis: in Freudian psychoanalysis, the theory that some girls' and women's psychological problems stem from a sense of deprivation about not having a penis. Very few psychologists now accept this concept.

13. Other Main Ideas
Criticizes functionalism - Institutions were studied in terms of their function in society, and women were confined to their sexual biological roles as housewives and mothers as well as being told that doing otherwise would upset the social balance.
Advertising – putting forth a false sense of ‘career’ as a housewife.
Friedan criticizes functionalism, which attempted to make the social sciences more credible by studying the institutions of society as if they were parts of a social body, as in biology. Institutions were studied in terms of their function in society, and women were confined to their sexual biological roles as housewives and mothers as well as being told that doing otherwise would upset the social balance. Friedan points out that this is unproven and that Margaret Mead, a prominent functionalist, had a flourishing career as an anthropologist.[

14. Other Main Ideas
many children have lost interest in life or emotional growth, attributing the change to the mother's own lack of fulfilment, a side effect of the feminine mystique.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
Friedan discusses the fact that many children have lost interest in life or emotional growth, attributing the change to the mother's own lack of fulfillment, a side effect of the feminine mystique. When the mother lacks a self, Friedan notes, she often tries to live through her children, causing the children to lose their own sense of themselves as separate human beings with their own lives
Friedan discusses Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and notes that women have been trapped at the basic, physiological level, expected to find their identity through their sexual role alone. Friedan says that women need meaningful work just as men do to achieve self-actualization, the highest level on the hierarchy of needs

15. CRITICISMS
Racist and Classist - In 1984, black feminist theorist Bell Hooks in her book, From Margin to Center
Founded on a Lie - Daniel Horowitz ,Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique 1998
It’s homophobic book Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis, Rachel Bowlby
'the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene’
“Lavender Menace”- 1960s Friedan
it focused on what wasn't a universal female problem but rather a problem endured only by white, upper- and middle-class mothers and wives. According to hooks, Friedan had written myopically, as though women of other races and classes—those who, she argued, were most victimized by sexist oppression—simply didn't exist. She didn’t talk about who would be called in to take care of the babies once these middle class women were out lookin for careers. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women.
She wasn’t who said she was. She had a career. In 1963 and the years afterward, Friedan had claimed that she "came to political consciousness out of a disillusionment with her life as a suburban housewife," and in so doing, she promoted The Feminine Mystique by marketing its authenticity. But Betty Friedan was not a simple housewife driven to action by her own feelings of domestic captivity. Rather, she was a seasoned radical with years of experience in leftist politics. The federated Press, The UE News, was a freelance journalist.
gives eloquent voice to the concern that Friedan's book is not just heteronormative but at times even downright homophobic. Friedan even went on to coin the phrase "Lavender Menace" in the late 1960s in reference to the threat that lesbian feminists supposedly posed to NOW and to the feminist movement as a whole But in 1977, she acknowledged her error at a women's conference in Houston by pledging support for lesbian rights.

16. Conclusion
“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.” ― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
When Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was first published in the United States in 1963, it exploded into American consciousness. Since its first publication, critics and popular readers have been sharply divided on their assessment of the work. However, one fact is certain: The Feminine Mystique sparked a national debate about women's roles and in time was recognized as one of the central works of the modern women's movement.