![]() ![]() If the “feminine mystique” reduced a woman’s identity to the categories of wife and mother, then the first step toward liberation would be to envision a woman’s life course as independent from both her husband and her children. With the problem thus named (and the Nazi metaphor apologetically retracted), Friedan volunteered a solution. The trappings were, she argued, traps the middle-class home, a “concentration camp” where women were held captive by a culture that expected them to find fulfillment in their families while secluding themselves from the ambitions of the university and the workplace. Marriage, children, a house in the suburbs full of modern conveniences-all these trappings of success failed to satisfy the deeply human yearnings of women. The opening chapter of her Feminine Mystique is aptly titled, “The Problem That Has No Name.” There Friedan verbalized what countless housewives thought and felt but did not know how to say: the American dream was a disappointment for women. In 1963, Betty Friedan named the problem. ![]()
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