Betty Friedan Feminism

During a college reunion, Friedan surveyed all of her classmates about their lives at home and came to realize that her classmates were not happy being housewives. Betty did not mean to write a whole book on this issue and only wanted to write an article that would be published in a magazine, but no magazine would publish it for her. Immediately after publishing The Feminine Mystique she received a powerful backlash. Many people used the words, “angry,” and “anger,” to describe The Feminine Mystique and Betty Friedan herself. The Feminine Mystique caused what is known to be “The Second Wave of Feminism.” Friedan caused many people to see how, “the other half,” lived. Friedan was influenced immensely by Simon De Beauvoir and her book, Le Deuxiéme
Sexe or, “The Second Sex.” Many people criticized Friedan and The Feminine Mystique and said it was only aimed for white upper-middle class women. A black feminist theorist, Bell Hooks, claims that if you were a non-white woman or a poor woman, you did not exist. Homophobia is also present in The Feminine Mystique, where Friedan describes homosexuality as a, “murky smog,” that was sweeping through the nation and that thought made her terrified. Sigmund Freud’s ideas were becoming very popular at the time of the publication of The Feminine Mystique and Friedan claims that Freud tried to scientifically explain why it was better for women to stay at home than to leave the house and have their own lives. The novel, Daniel Horowitz’s Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique, it is stated that Friedan lied about who she was to seem more relatable to housewives across the United States. She claimed that she was a stay at home mom with four kids, but in actuality was a freelance writer with three kids. She also claims that she was became knowledgeable of the political issues with women through her book, but Horowitz reveals that she was already a radical leftist activist when she was in college.