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

begin to grow.”
    That message—that they could and should begin to grow—was what most of the women who read the book cover to cover took away. Nine of the women interviewed for this book still had their original copies of The Feminine Mystique and allowed me to go through their yellow, dog-eared pages. Not one had underlined any of the acerbic quotes in the book, and few even remembered her saying these things.
    Friedan was not looking for an audience of militants. She wanted to reach beyond the academics, career women, feminists, and leftists who had already questioned the feminine mystique in the 1940s and 1950s, although without calling it by that name, to women who were not yet aware of the sources of their unhappiness. And she managed to strike a chord in the kind of woman who knew at some level that her aspirations for life went beyond the recipes and homemaking hints in women’s magazines but who hesitated, out of guilt or self-doubt, to acknowledge those other needs and desires. The question is, why were so many women in that position in an era when so many social changes were already under way?

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    After the First Feminist Wave: Women from the 1920s to the 1940s
    MANY DIFFERENT WOMEN RECOGNIZED THEMSELVES IN FRIEDAN’S PORTRAIT of Americans brainwashed by the feminine mystique. Some were “ordinary housewives” or their daughters, who had never known a family that was not organized on the male breadwinner-female homemaker model and had never been exposed to the kind of social criticism they encountered in Friedan’s work. They often wrote to Friedan that until they read her book, they had never imagined any alternative to the lives women were living. Others were self-described “spinsters,” “divorcees,” or “neurotic malcontents” who said they had always thought of themselves as “freaks” because they didn’t fit the norm.
    But many women I interviewed reported having gone through a puzzling evolution—or devolution—in their lives. They had attended college, worked at jobs they enjoyed, or been raised in families that supported women’s aspirations for education and equal rights. Over and over, women described having been honors students, community activists, political organizers, or competent “working girls” before they married and had children. But somewhere during the late 1940s or the 1950s, they had abandoned any dream of resuming their former pursuits and lost the sense that they had anything to contribute to the world aside from being wives and mothers.
    Friedan argued that this collective loss of confidence and aspiration was part of a major transformation that occurred after World War II, when a social sea change wiped out the memory of what feminism had
accomplished in the early twentieth century. One of her first tasks in the book was to remind women of what they had done in the past.
    From the 1850s through the 1920s, Friedan explained, women had struggled to gain access to education, win the right to vote, and break down other barriers preventing them from entering the public world of work and politics. “The ones who fought that battle won more than empty paper rights,” she wrote. “They cast off the shadow of contempt and self-contempt that had degraded women for centuries,” finding a new confidence in their own capabilities.
    Friedan described the “sense of possibility” that women felt in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The public was captivated by daring pilots Amelia Earhart and Elinor Smith Sullivan and by female athletes such as nineteen-year-old Gertrude Ederle, who not only was the first woman to swim the English Channel but also did it faster than any of the five men who had previously made it across. The “spirited career girls” of those decades—from such widely admired real-life women to the feisty heroines portrayed in films by Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell—were celebrated in popular culture, including by women’s magazines.
    But after