Feminist Fatale

The current issue of US News and World Report is doing a retrospective on major events in the year 1957. Betty Friedan ('42) is profiled because that year she began writing an article in that would later become her book The Feminine Mystique. The article was in response to a popular new book of the day, "Modern Women: The Lost Sex", which suggested American women were overeducated and not properly adjusting to their role as women. To say the least Ms. Friedan set out to prove differently.

Feminist Fatale:Betty Friedan and the book that changed women's lives
The housewife in Grandview, N.Y., was busy doing what so many women were doing in 1957: hustling three kids to school, running the Cub Scout meetings, cooking hamburgers for dinner. When Sputnik flew overhead, Betty Friedan woke up her son and carried him outside to see it tracing its way across the sky.

But Friedan, then 36, still had time to become annoyed over a popular new book, Modern Women: The Lost Sex. The authors, Freudian psychoanalysts, said that American women were over educated and not properly "adjusting to their role as women." Friedan, who had reveled in debates over politics and economics at Smith College, didn't buy it, and she set out to prove that the academic experiences of her fellow alumnae had made them better mothers. "I knew my Smith classmates were doing great things in their own communities, and having a great time, as I was, fixing up their houses, getting their kids educated," she later wrote.

The rest, as they say, is history. Friedan polled her peers about their marriages, their sex lives, their children. Two hundred women responded. The ones who were focused solely on home and family seemed depressed and frustrated. Those with other interests seemed to be enjoying their children and marriages.

Maybe it wasn't education that was making women frustrated, Friedan thought, but the limited role that women were asked to play.

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