The Feminine Mystique Questions and Answers
The Feminine Mystique
What was Friedan's problem in The Feminine Mystique? Doesn't it only apply to a limited group of bored, white, middle...
The problem that Betty Friedan describes in her 1963 work, The Feminine Mystique, is the dissatisfaction of suburban housewives. She found that many of her former classmates had gotten married, had...
The Feminine Mystique
Why is The Feminine Mystique still important and affecting today's society?
The Feminine Mystique is an instrumental text of the second-wave feminist movement. Author Betty Freidan interviewed American housewives about their lack of satisfaction with society's limited...
The Feminine Mystique
Why is there a negative connotation associated with feminism?
When Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, the ideas it contained were explosive in American society. After World War II, women were encouraged to stay home and be...
The Feminine Mystique
Why does Friedan believe that women in America in the 1950s and early 60s, despite the era's prosperity and...
For Friedan, the answer is a complex one. An aspect of it lies in the depiction of women in the media. Friedan makes the argument that there was a fundamental difference in how women were...
The Feminine Mystique
Are there any thoughts on how Betty Friedan's work on the oppression of women can be tied to the oppression of...
This is a very interesting question. There are some points of convergence between Friedan's thoughts and the idea of African- Americans' fight for recognition and freedom. The first area where...
The Feminine Mystique
Using Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and her descriptions of women's lives in middle class suburbs, in what...
Friedan's perception of women in the middle class, especially after the turn of the 20th century and more so in the post–WW II era, led her to conclude that women were expected to place their...
The Feminine Mystique
Which statement about Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique? 1. It argues that femininity should be tied to...
If we examine the four choices, we can pick the right answer. As for 1, The Feminine Mystique does not argue that femininity should be tied to the ability to earn a wage and contribute to the...
The Feminine Mystique
Friedan states that women “got all kinds of advice from the growing armies of marriage and child guidance counselors,...
This quote, of course, is from Betty Friedan's seminal 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, and it refers to the growing number of women who felt confined and limited (to say the least) by the demands...
The Feminine Mystique
What kind of text is The Feminine Mystique? Is it is narrative, argumentative/persuasive, or descriptive?
I think that much of Friedan's work spans all three styles of writing. It might make sense that this is the case. As Friedan is arguing that the socialization process that robs the complexity and...
The Feminine Mystique
Why did women, as Betty Friedan noted in her book, "wenthome again" in the 1950s?
In Friedan's mind, this is the most important element regarding what it means to be a woman. For Friedan, the "feminine mystique" involves a coordinated and deliberate attempt for men in the...
The Feminine Mystique
Are the ideas promoted in the book The Feminine Mystique popular today?
Friedan, perhaps more than any other writer in Second Wave Feminism, is responsible for pushing opens doors that had most decidedly been nailed shut by the revitalized patriarchal society that...
The Feminine Mystique
How did The Feminine Mystique affect the American culture?
One way in which Friedan's work ends up affecting the culture of America is in making a clear case that many American women were not as happy as originally thought. Friedan made the argument that...
The Feminine Mystique
What are some arguments people would have towards/against this book when it was published in 1963?
The Feminine Mystique challenges the prevailing patriarchal ideology that structured American society in the postwar period. Betty Friedan described the frustration of American women whose own...
The Feminine Mystique
Who is the publisher of The Feminist Mystique?
Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique is considered one of the initial forays of the "second wave" of the American women's movement. The co-founder of the National Organization of Women (NOW),...
The Feminine Mystique
What would the authors brief description of "generation" be?
The general definition of a generation are a group of people roughly the same age who live in the same time. Think WWII vets, or hippies, or Gen Xers. For Freidan, this lack of moniker for women...
The Feminine Mystique
What is a functionalist, and why are they so called, as referred to in The Feminine Mystique?
Functional psychology, mentioned by Friedan, is a school of psychology that was a reaction against the prevailing psychological philosophy of structuralism, which approaches analysis of...