Review: The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am super happy that I read this book. I can understand why it has gotten some criticism, and a book of this nature written in the present day would have to better address intersectionality. There would need to be more attention paid to the issues of women of color, poor women, immigrant women, LGBT women, etc.

That said, as a feminist scholar, I'm glad I read this book. I think it was an important book for the time it was written, and it was brave enough to address the stigma against homosexuality, the faulty theories of sexuality by Sigmund Freud, and capitalism's role of keeping women in our place. There are times when I felt angry while reading the book, on behalf of the women who came before me. But it was a good anger that made me feel even more fired up to be a woman writer in a world that sometimes still discourages women in the arts and female academics.

It's because of books like this and women like Betty Friedan that the Women's March took place on January 21, 2017, and why we will not go backwards. Yes, we have a president who can talk about grabbing women by the pussy, who can mock and bully people including a disabled man, and who can make blatantly racist comments in public and still get away with it enough to be President of the United States of America, which is sad. As someone who was bullied and mistreated as a kid, it truly breaks my heart. But we're not going down without a fight, and we're not allowing him to pass illegal laws that are unfair to our immigrant brothers and sisters, and we're fighting against his attempts to tell women what they can and cannot do with their bodies. It's because of this surge of ultra-conservatism that haven't been around since I was a small child in the 80s that books like this need to be re-read and re-examined.

Thank you, Betty Friedan. If it weren't for women like you, I might have joined a sorority in college even though I didn't really want to, gotten married in my early twenties, and ended up in a job that didn't fulfill me. I doubt I would be a writer and an almost professor who has now written a full draft of my Ph.D., and who has written a middle grades fantasy novel that, while it will probably remain in a drawer forever, paved the way for me to write other books. There was a time when I as a woman wouldn't have been able to do these things, but now I can. More books need to come, and more voices need to be represented in the women's movement. But Betty Friedan's was a voice that started a chorus that will continue to sing. Especially now.

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