The Happy Housewife Heroine Analysis

Betty Friedan launches her nonfiction account of the twentieth-century crisis among American women by describing their trouble as so deeply ingrained that few people can see it. She calls the trouble with women’s identity “the problem that has no name” and says it has no name because women are told to believe—and often do believe—that “the problem” doesn’t exist. The problem, as Friedan describes it, is that women are increasingly taught to believe that their existence and happiness is limited to the roles of spouse, mother, and housewife. Because so few women are able to recognize that these roles are limited or that they might be unhappy with them, the problem has “no name.”

She notes that by 1950, the media no longer showed images of women doing anything other than trying to attract men, get married, have babies, or do domestic work. The media presented a distorted image of women’s potential, but women’s behavior revealed they had accepted and even embraced this image. By the late 1950s, women were marrying younger, having more babies, and, if working, working solely to bolster their husbands’ careers rather than finding challenging jobs for their own sake. Friedan interviews women throughout the chapter to provide case
The feminine mystique, is essentially, a glamorized version of the repression of women—and it is perpetuated by male editors back home from war who want women to remain at home, ready to comfort them and too helpless to challenge them. Friedan notes that as magazines perpetuate the image, research shows that women struggle to be happy under it: women strain to be glamorous, try to be happy about owning lots of material goods, or are patronized by magazines that use large type fonts—as if readers are