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JOANNE BOUCHER teaches politics and feminist theory at the University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She currently researches and has published articles on the impact of new medical imaging technologies on debates about abortion rights.
BETTY FRIEDAN IS UNIVERSALLY REGARDED as one of the founding mothers of feminism's Second Wave. In The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, Friedan aimed to expose the sexist underpinnings of America's post-World War II complacent prosperity. Friedan argued that millions of American housewives found the destiny of mother and housewife which society mapped out for them stifling, repressive and even dehumanizing.
Anna Quindlen, in her introduction to the most recent paperback edition of The Feminine Mystique, proclaims that this book changed her life and that of millions of other women who became engaged in the women's movement and "jettisoned empty hours of endless housework and found work, and meaning, outside of raising their children and feeding their husbands. Out of Friedan's argument that women had been coaxed into selling out their intellect and their ambitions for the paltry price of a new washing machine...came a great wave of change in which women demanded equality and parity under the law and in the workplace." 1
Friedan's self-presentation in The Feminine Mystique is that of a rather naive and apolitical albeit bright and university-educated suburban housewife who stumbles onto a startling discovery -- that America's housewives are, in fact, miserable. 2 Friedan depicts herself as sharing in all the experiences of her fellow housewives. She is one of them and has experienced their plight. 3 However, Friedan also uses another voice in the text, that of the expert, the university-trained researcher and psychologist. This perspective lends her work scientific authority. The combination of the two voices -- the personal and scientific -- gives The Feminine Mystique much of its dramatic force.
However, for all its acclaim and its status as the book that ignited the women's movement, praise for Friedan's Feminine Mystique has never been unqualified. Indeed many feminists have criticized its myopic representation of women. There is hardly a word in The Feminine Mystique that would indicate that American women in the 1950s were dealing with problems other than the trap of suburban domesticity which, after all, was a consequence of economic...