The Problem That Had No Name

What was it about Friedan’s book that struck such a chord (and a nerve)? Though Coontz [author of A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960] takes Friedan to task for exaggerating the feminist sympathies of the prewar era and the backlash of the postwar period, she concedes that there was something uniquely stultifying to women about the time that Friedan describes. In the past, women had never been expected to enjoy their lot; everyone knew that life was full of burdens and suffering. Now, at least for upwardly mobile, middleclass white women, life was objectively better in material ways, and technology eased the burdens that once made running a household a truly formidable (and sometimes creative) enterprise. The life of the modern housewife was extolled as the epitome of female fulfillment.