![]() A century earlier, women had fought for higher education now girls went to college to get a husband. Friedan wrote, “The proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1958. Women found themselves pushed out of jobs after soldiers came home from war. Women who’d seen their mothers liberated by suffrage but who found their own lives trapped. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night -she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question- “Is this all?”įriedan was writing about the post–World War II generation of women. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. ![]() ![]() The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. ![]() ![]() Nearly 60 years ago, Betty Friedan wrote about the “problem with no name.” It was as she defined it in her groundbreaking work, The Feminine Mystique, the malaise of a generation of women, women who had home and a family and every modern convenience but who still felt desperately unfulfilled. ![]()
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