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  • A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s by Stephanie Coontz
  • Mary A. McMurray
A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. By Stephanie Coontz (New York: Basic Books, 2011. xxiii plus 222 pp. $25.95).

Rarely has a book been as reviled and revered as Betty Friedan's 1963 best seller, The Feminine Mystique. Detractors vilified the book and its author for belittling marriage and motherhood; supporters exalted it for freeing women from the domestic abyss; and still others credited the book with igniting a feminist revolution. Forty-eight years after women (and men) read the book for the first time, The Feminine Mystique remains incendiary for some, while others dismiss Friedan's representation of the 1950s and early 1960s as oversimplified, exaggerated, and misguided.

In her new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, social historian Stephanie Coontz adds a new approach to the significant body of scholarship on Friedan's famous work. Unlike historians Daniel Horowitz and Joanne Meyerowitz who focused on Friedan's leftist, union roots and her methodological flaws, respectively, Coontz focuses primarily on the book's impact on Friedan's intended audience. She argues that the current criticisms and mythology surrounding it obscure the profound impact the book had on its original readers. Coontz's reassessment of The Feminine Mystique reveals that Friedan's intended audience did not find the book "boring and dated," "repetitive and overblown," or limited in scope. Instead, it "unleashed a wave of recognition and relief" in a generation of predominately white middle-class educated women (xii, xix, 18, xi).

Interviews with nearly 200 women inform this study. Respondents claimed time and time again that The Feminine Mystique "transformed their lives, even that it actually 'saved' their lives, or at least their sanity" (xx). Exhaustive research of archived letters to and from Friedan, popular magazines from the era, and current scholarship complements the hundreds of testimonials Coontz collected. The result illuminates the realities of a generation of women who "felt suspended between the constraints of the old sphere of female existence and the [End Page 1068] promise of a future whose outline they could barely make out." Coontz concludes that, "even today, their experiences and anxieties shape the choices modern women debate and the way feminism has been defined both by its supporters and opponents" (xi, xii).

Coontz begins with a cogent contextualization of the world in which Friedan's original readers lived. When The Feminine Mystique hit the shelves, women had not yet been swept up in the liberation that would come to characterize the 1960s; rather, "the laws, practices, and attitudes of 1963 had more in common with those of the first fifty years of the century than what was to come in the next twenty years" (5). Women had no legal protection against marital rape, domestic abuse, or sexual harassment, nor did they have much control over their sexual or reproductive rights. Popular and prescriptive literature heralded housewifery and simultaneously instructed women to spend endless hours in support of the needs of others, rather than their own. Many housewives internalized the contradictory messages they received: Gallup poll respondents paradoxically reported satisfaction with domestic roles, yet apprehensions about daughters following in their footsteps. The consequence of this ambivalence, Coontz argues, primed women for Friedan's message.

Coontz's second chapter explores the ways in which Freidan's message resonated with readers. Friedan appealed to both women's intellect and emotions when arguing that they deserved the opportunity to seek personal fulfillment as much as men. Through this approach, she challenged the culturally-inscribed notion of homemakers as content, self-assured, and secure in their lives. The result was powerful for readers. In a letter to Friedan, a housewife and mother of four raved that Friedan "freed me from such a mass of subconscious and conscious guilt feelings, that I feel, today, as though I had been filled with helium and turned loose!" (27). Even Friedan's detractors "unwittingly confirmed the strength of the ideology she described" by professing fulfillment in their subservience (30...

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