The Feminine Mystique
"Is this all?" Friedan named "the problem that has no name" (the suffocating domestic imprisonment of educated American women in the 1950s) and ignited second-wave feminism. NOW was founded directly in response. A book that reshaped postwar America.
The mystique is “well described and established by the end of the second chapter,” and the remaining four hundred pages elaborate a diagnosis already made, one reader calling the book “a sandwich made of incredible bread with really tasteless pastrami in the middle” and “quite a struggle to get through.” Where a solution should be, “her call to action was a bit weak.” It speaks only to white, college-educated, comfortable women and treats that as the universal female condition, and the “diatribes against homosexuals were repellent” rather than merely dated. What is left is “a ceaseless parade of facts, figures, percentages,” and younger readers report the suburban scenario now reads as remote history.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
