A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s
Stephanie Coontz
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 046502842X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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for ads segregated by sex. The New York Times did not abolish gender-segregated ads until 1968. In September 1965, activists in the stewardesses’ union managed to get a hearing before the House Labor subcommittee to protest the airlines’ policy of forcing them to retire when they reached their early thirties, but the legislators failed to take their complaints seriously. Representative James Scheuer, a liberal who by his 1991 retirement supported women’s rights, facetiously asked the complaining
was struck by the sight of her mother, who was not normally much of a reader, “hunched over this paperback, frowning, twin divots between her dark brows.” In a three-page handwritten letter dated October 20, 1963, one woman wrote in response to reading Friedan’s article in LIFE magazine, “Education, I have none of. But every single word you wrote was and always did go round and round in my mind till I absolutely had to stop thinking that way, so sure was I that I was some kind of nut.” “My
high school, and she noticed that this improved her mother’s depression. “I could see that it was very good for her to be working and I admired her for going to work,” she recalls. But Parker had also absorbed the tremendous social disapproval of working mothers, so she chose to “lie on school forms that asked for mother’s occupation. I continued to check the housewife box, because I feared my teacher would judge her poorly.” Friedan blamed these conservative cultural trends on the growing
husband wasn’t really “okay enough,” and she initiated a separation. “When my mother heard we’d separated, she called my husband and told him, ‘If Lillian wants to come back, treat her like a dog in the street. She doesn’t deserve what you’ve given her.’” Fearing that she would not be able to support her child, Lillian agreed to reconcile three months later. She also consented to move from central Los Angeles, where she was a community activist, to the suburbs where her husband worked. For
did not ask her to give up the career she had once thought could preclude marriage. IT HAS OFTEN BEEN CLAIMED THAT THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE MADE women dissatisfied with their marriages. Certainly many women who felt trapped in unhappy marriages credit Friedan with giving them, as Janet C. said, “the courage to decide that the world wouldn’t end if I left my husband.” Sandra G. wrote that in 1953, at age eighteen, she had married the first boy she had sex with, “and he threw that up to me every