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

similar government program to subsidize tuition and books—“even, if necessary, some household help”—for women who had taken time away from work or education to raise children and then wanted to go back to school and prepare themselves for a profession?
    “The whole concept of women’s education would be regeared from four-year college to a life plan under which a woman could continue her education, without conflict with her marriage, her husband and her children.” For women who had not been able to attend college before marriage and childbearing, she suggested that society subsidize a summer immersion program designed to make it possible for them to succeed in future studies.

    The Feminine Mystique contained no call for women to band together to improve their legal and political rights. Instead, it urged women, as individuals, to reject the debilitating myth that their sole purpose and happiness in life came from being a wife and mother, and to develop a life plan that would give meaning to the years after their children left home. For all its differences with George Gallup’s description of housewives in the Saturday Evening Post , The Feminine Mystique ended with a similar recommendation, although Friedan encouraged women to develop their additional goals early in life and not put them aside entirely even when the children were young. And she rejected the prevailing view that women who did want to work or pursue education throughout their lives would be harming their marriage or their children.
    Nowhere does the book advocate that most women pursue full-time careers or even suggest that women ask their husbands to help them with child care and housework if they went to school or took a job. In fact, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many feminists criticized the book for failing to confront male privilege in the home.
    There is no male-bashing anywhere in The Feminine Mystique . Friedan actually placed more blame on women than on men for the prevalence of the mystique, which she called their “mistaken choice,” and she wrote repeatedly that women would become better wives and mothers if they developed interests beyond the home. Indeed, Friedan once suggested that her tombstone should read: “She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men.”
    Friedan simply urged women to pursue an education and develop a life plan that would give meaning to the years after the children left home. That her book spurred such outrage in some quarters and such relief in others is testimony to how much many women still needed it, despite the changes already occurring in American society.
    Toward its end, The Feminine Mystique does contain a few quotes that seem stunningly dismissive of the work of full-time housewives. In Chapter 10, Friedan comments that in decades past, “certain institutions concerned with the mentally retarded discovered that housework was
peculiarly suited to the capacities of feeble-minded girls,” adding acerbically that in those days “housework was much more difficult” than it is now. And in Chapter 12 she describes the suburban home as “a comfortable concentration camp,” claiming that women who had grown up wanting only to be a housewife were as much in danger of losing their identity and humanity “as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps.”
    Still, any serious reader would understand that these quotes are hyperbole, because Friedan says repeatedly that women were not coerced into their constricted lives, but rather chose them. And after these inflammatory statements, she quickly concedes that the suburban home “is not a concentration camp, nor are American housewives on their way to the gas chamber.” All she is really saying, she assures her readers, is that many housewives “are in a trap, and to escape they must . . . live their own lives again according to a self-chosen purpose. They must