betty friedan the problem that has no name

It’s an outline of where we’re coming from in regards to gender inequality in the US, and Friedan lets the facts do the work in persuading readers to join the cause. This is a nonfiction book with a lot of statistics, dates, names, etc. “Just what was this problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say, ‘I feel empty somehow… incomplete.’ Or she would say, ‘I feel as if I don’t exist.’ “ As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slip-cover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to even ask herself the silent question: ‘Is this all?’ “ Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. In two essays, “The Problem That Has No Name” and “The Passionate Journey,” Friedan outlines the first wave of feminism that culminated in women’s right to vote in 1920, and the second wave around 1960 when women begin to rise together again to win destinies as more than subservient childbearers. Friedan pulls sources together to make a case for the harm being done to women across the nation as society tells them over and over in every way that their place is in the household, as a wife and mother and nothing more.

Even before there is a name or a clear way to describe the problem that women were experiencing with losing their identities in marriage, the stirrings could be seen in statistics, hospitalizations, statements of complaint, and more. Unless you like these? Here’s one more to help the decision process in the meantime.Ībout the book: Betty Friedan was a publishing feminist in the 1950’s/60’s who captures the discontent of the American housewife in that period. I’ve already ordered 6 more that should be arriving any day now, but I think I’ll either try to read them more sparingly or start reviewing them in my monthly wrap-ups so my regular posts aren’t inundated with all these short modern classic reviews.

I bought 6 right away when the collection was released, and I’ve just finished reading the sixth: Betty Friedan’s The Problem That Has No Name. I have reached the end of my first wave of Penguin Moderns.

Betty friedan the problem that has no name