![]() But her name is most tied to The Feminine Mystique, the book that pushed her and other discontented housewives into the American consciousness alongside the ongoing Civil Rights Movement. She was a co-founder and the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and helped create both the National Women's Political Caucus and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America. Her contributions, however, remain consequential. ![]() She would be criticized for moderate views amid a changing environment. Black and LGBTQ feminists in the movement were largely absent from the pages of The Feminine Mystique and in her later work as a leading activist, prominent members of the feminist movement would come to clash with her beliefs and her quick temper. While The Feminine Mystique spoke bold truth to white, college-educated, middle-class women, keeping house and raising children and dealing with a lack of fulfillment, it didn’t recognize the circumstances of other women. it’s a very personal series of observations and feelings.” “One of the things that makes The Feminine Mystique resonant is that it’s a very personal story,” says the museum’s Lisa Kathleen Graddy, a curator in the division of political and military history. It was included in the museum’s exhibition titled "The Early Sixties: American Culture," which was co-curated by Mansfield and graphic arts collection curator Joan Boudreau and ran from Apto September 7, 2015.Īt the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery the 1995 Betty Friedan by Alice Matzkin depicts the reformer in a contemplative pose. Mansfield, is secured in the nation’s collections of iconic artifacts. At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, a tattered, well-read copy of The Feminine Mystique, gifted by former museum curator Patricia J. The late Friedan, who died in 2006, would have celebrated her 100th birthday this month. Now a classic, Friedan's book is often credited with kicking off the “second wave” of feminism, which raised critical interest in issues such as workplace equality, birth control and abortion, and women’s education. 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.” Friedan’s powerful treatise appealed to women who were unhappy with their so-called idyllic life, addressing their discontent with the ingrained sexism in society that limited their opportunities. “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. Her indelible first sentences would resonate with generations of women. The landmark bestseller, translated into at least a dozen languages with more than three million copies sold in the author’s lifetime, rebukes the pervasive post-World War II belief that stipulated women would find the greatest fulfillment in the routine of domestic life, performing chores and taking care of children. In the acclaimed 1963 The Feminine Mystique, Friedan tapped into the dissatisfaction of American women. Is it possible to address a “problem that has no name?” For Betty Friedan and the millions of American women who identified with her writing, addressing that problem would prove not only possible, but imperative. ![]()
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