The Feminine Mystique: The classic that sparked a feminist revolution

by Betty Friedan

A mother might tell her daughter, spell it out, “Don’t be just a housewife like me.” But that daughter, sensing that her mother was too frustrated to savor the love of her husband and children, might feel: “I will succeed where my mother failed, I will fulfill myself as a woman,” and never read the lesson of her mother’s life.

On closer examination, I found that these girls were so terrified of becoming like their mothers that they could not see themselves at all. They were afraid to grow up.

It is my thesis that as the Victorian culture did not permit women to accept or gratify their basic sexual needs, our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role.

I think women had to suffer this crisis of identity, which began a hundred years ago, and have to suffer it still today, simply to become fully human.