Stephanie Coontz's A Strange Stirring

Although The Feminine Mystique is often hailed as the harbinger text of third-wave feminism, Stephanie Coontz is quick in the opening lines of her A Strange Stirring to revoke the piece of its grandiose status, instead affectionately remembering it as a “brilliant artifact— and not a timeless classic.” Published in 2011, Coontz’s A Strange Stirring was written in the challenge of the previously held notion that the feminist movement of the 50s and 60s had come about due to a national “dissatisfaction in domestic life” resulting from the “personal inadequacy” woman had felt during the previous decades. Her challenge to ideas that founded the basis of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique feed her writing as she takes an equally controversial stance to Friedan’s book, raising the question of the validity of Feminine Mystique and its impact on the feminist movement when the piece itself neglected to narrate the struggle of women outside the wealthy and white bubble that could afford to read Friedan's book.
Currently a professor of history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, Coontz has made it her life's work to analyze the way society moves. Her studies and literature, chronicle the history of American families, marriage, and
changes in gender roles as we have moved from the boom of social cultural in the 1920s to the present.(Evergreen) An alumni of UC Berkeley, Coontz spent her college years fighting for the rights of the minority groups she would then write about, along with being an avid member of SLATE , she participated in the civil rights movement and the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.(Evergreen, NPR)
With a degree in American History, she had not only lived through the social change that flourished during the 50s and 60s but also knew the deep impact that would come of it, along with the beginning sparks that fueled it. The roots that she had as an activist along with her interest and work in social history, in which she studied the experiences of ordinary people in the past, guide her strong viewpoint through the text as she vehemently undercuts the glaring and outdated generalizations made by Friedan. Demonstrating her support, but modernized and more inclusive stance on what drove the third-wave of feminism along with it’s wider impact on not just women but on American Society.
While the subject matter within A Strange Stirring initially seems like a rehashed version of the plight of women in society, filled with the same frothy material that gains a written book every decade or so, it is becomes clear within the opening lines of A Strange Stirring that Coontz has one purpose within the book and it isn’t to reiterate how much it sucks to be a woman in American society. Instead, her argument or challenge rather is found in her blatant questioning of the validity of Feminine Mystique and its impact on the feminist movement when it left out so much.
The book is opened with a no frill first chapter title “ The Unliberated 1960s”, quickly Coontz paints a picture of what life was like before Feminine Mystique hit bookstore shelves.
She describes an article published in the Saturday Evening Post in which the typical American woman of the 60s is described, she goes into great detail quoting specific phrases from the article, building up suspense and the world surrounding a piece of literature that she would then spend nine chapters eloquently tearing apart piece by piece. It is here in this first paragraph that it is quickly grasped by the reader that though a grudging respect for Betty Friedan undercuts Coontz’s words there is much that she disagrees
with.
This theme is carried throughout the book as Coontz analyzes the initial impact of the Feminine Mystique on American housewives, before trudging on to discuss the first-wave of feminism in the early 1900s. As the book continues it is clear that her challenge to Friedan's book is warranted. She produces factual evidence as she analyzes the “Price of Privilege” and how this played into the narrow audience that had access to the book, continuing on Coontz goes as far as to dedicate a whole chapter using interviews and personal anecdotes on analyzing the impact of book on the African-American women and working-class women divulging in thinly-veiled words how she felt about such a large group of women being left out something that was taken to represent all American women in 50s and 60s.