Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War) [Hardcover]

Daniel Horowitz (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1558491686 | ISBN-13: 978-1558491687 | Publication Date: November 1998

Drawing on an impressive body of new research - including Friedan's own papers - Horowitz traces the development of Friedan's feminist outlook from her childhood in Peoria, Illinois, through her wartime years at Smith College and Berkeley, to her decade-long career as a writer for two of the period's most radical labor journals, the Federated Press and the United Electrical Workers' UE News. He further shows that even after she married and began to raise a family, Friedan continued during the 1950s to write and work on behalf of a wide range of progressive social causes. By resituating Friedan within a broader cultural context, and by offering a fresh reading of The Feminine Mystique against that background, Horowitz not only overturns conventional ideas about "second-wave" feminism but also reveals long submerged links to its past.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Betty Friedan and the Making of "The Feminine Mystique" is ... intelligently ambitious but so tendentious you want to throw it across the room. -- The New York Times Book Review, Judith Shulevitz

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press (November 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558491686
• ISBN-13: 978-1558491687
• Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #733,291 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Explores the "missing past" for Betty Friedan, January 24, 1999

By 

Peter W. Sage (Medford, OR USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War) (Hardcover)

In this very readable book, Daniel Horowitz examines Betty Friedan's political and intellectual origins and finds good reason to question the widely held understanding that The Feminine Mystique was written out of the perspective and consciousness of a typical surburban housewife.

Professor Horowitz explores the life and thought of the young Bettye Goldstein as an undergraduate at Smith, and then as a labor journalist in the early and mid 1940's, and reveals her origins as a committed social critic and advocate with labor-left origins.

Professor Horowitz treats his subject gently and with respect. Betty Friedan disagrees with Horowitz's analysis, and this tension adds to the fun.

19 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Facinating insight on a pivotal figure in American feminism, April 6, 2002

By 

Robin Orlowski "political activist" (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Betty Friedan and the Making of "The Feminine Mystique": The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Paperback)

In a clear-eyed yet obviously compassionate examination of Betty Friedan, the "mother" of modern American feminism,Horowitz reveals that his subject was far more worldly and politically concious than she indicated in her 1963 ground breaker.

Although some of today's generation-- whether feminists or not--may scratch heads and wonder why an intellegent articulate woman would intentionally disguise so much of her being while urging other women not to do the same, Friedan had no choice. In a nation somewhat tempered by fresh reccollection of the horrors of McCarthyism, red-baiting and subsequent discreditation of those tarred with the label still ran rampant.

Understanding that her grim findings would never receive the light of day in a culture still gushy-eyed over the assumption that every housewife was automatically happy or that option was the only choice for women, she had to employ crafty PR strategies to make the book appealing for original publication and promotion. Her "new idenity" made her a far more appealing media source than a "radical labor activist" since it allowed her to avoid being blamed for her own stigmatization as one of those supposedly unnatural career women whose unhappiness must be self-inflicted.

As a member of third-wave feminism, I profess to having little initial interest in Friedan or her methodology. Because I lived in a world where with comparatively many more choices/rights, was aware of her own internal predjuduces towards intra-feminist movement diversity and antagonism towards Gloria Steinem, I usually wrote off Friedan as an anachronism who although important, was somebody I could not relate to directly. Since I was not married and was childless, I could not see myself in the pages.

After this book, I not only can see why she repackaged herself, but realized that I would do exactly the same thing in her position. I still disagree with Friedan on her minimialization of other feminist leaders, but have a new appreciation of her work and relevance.

4 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Betty the Bolshie?, April 18, 2008

By 

anarchteacher (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Betty Friedan and the Making of "The Feminine Mystique": The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Paperback)

Founding mother of the Women's Liberation Movement, Betty Friedan, author of the Feminine Mystique, was a long-time CPUSA apparatchik and never the typical suburban bourgeois housewife she posed as.