Walking to the subway from my old apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, I used to regularly see a beat-up Jeep with the following message on its bumper: "Feminism is the radical idea that women are people too." The message typified the over-the-top and oversimplified political views of my neighbors. (These also included "War is not the answer" and "Dennis Kucinich for president.")

Reading Stephanie Coontz's new book A Strange Stirring, I was reminded that the slogan "Women are people too" was actually the title of a 1960 Good Housekeeping article by Betty Friedan—the article that foreshadowed her 1963 bestseller The Feminine Mystique. And while, even in those benighted days, women were not exactly thought of as less than fully human, their status was certainly different. Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State whose name has become synonymous with groundbreaking research on marriage and family, has attempted to give us a better understanding of what Friedan's book meant to women at the time and to determine whether the book has any relevance for women today.

The Feminine Mystique, which sold more than 2 million copies when it came out, described what Friedan called "the problem that has no name." Here is the famous passage in which Friedan introduces the idea and from which Coontz draws her title:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. 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. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. 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?

In the years that followed, women all over the country read The Feminine Mystique and experienced a sense of relief that someone had finally ...

FRANK GROSSHANS (Registered User)

April 17, 2011  4:25pm

What does the first paragraph have to do with the book under review? To start with a gratuitous slam against those who thought that the Iraq war was a bad idea seems highly inappropriate. As for the anti-war bumper stickers, were they really more "over-the-top and oversimplified" than those of the war supporters?

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