The Feminine Mystique

A work of social criticism that grew out of a questionnaire Friedan sent to her Smith College classmates for their fifteenth reunion in 1957. It opens with 'the problem that has no name': the quiet dissatisfaction of educated American housewives who had everything post-war society promised them and still asked whether this was all. Friedan calls the ideal behind it the feminine mystique, the belief that women find fulfilment only in domesticity and motherhood. She traces how women's magazines, popularised Freudian psychology, functionalist social science, education that steered girls towards marriage, and advertisers who saw the housewife as a buyer all reinforced it. In a much-criticised chapter she likens the suburban home to a comfortable concentration camp. Her remedy is serious education, meaningful work and a new life plan for women. Critics, notably bell hooks, objected that the book spoke for white, middle-class, college-educated women while presenting their situation as that of women in general.

It helped launch second-wave feminism in the United States, and it remains a sharp study of how advertising, experts and popular culture can sell people a narrow picture of a good life.