The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan · 1963
"Is this all?" Friedan named "the problem that has no name" (the suffocating domestic imprisonment of educated American women in the 1950s) and ignited second-wave feminism. NOW was founded directly in response. A book that reshaped postwar America.
The case against
Friedan's housewife is white, suburban, college-educated, and bored; women who cleaned other people's houses don't appear. Add the chapter comparing the home to a comfortable concentration camp, some ugly passages on homosexuality, and a core argument restated for a hundred pages past its proof, and you have a founding document that reads like one.
Non-Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
