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The Impact Of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique

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Introduction The 1960s was a time of regression: the age at which many women married and few attended college. Post-war culture solidified that women belonged in the home, taking care of their children and husband, and many believed the same. Betty Friedan graduated Smith college with a bachelor’s degree in 1942. After birthing her second child, Friedan was fired from her current job and turned to domesticity to take care of her children instead of looking for another place to work. She was dissatisfied with herself and the role she was playing in her home and wondered if other women in her situation had felt the same way. Later on, Friedan surveyed the young women that were attending Smith college at the time. Her research and results formed …show more content…

Betty Friedan pushed for equal pay, unsexualized ads, maternity leave and childcare centers: women and men could both work outside the home. As an impact of that, The Feminine Mystique made the women’s rate of election into office increase due to the desire to get out of the house. Women began to vote more than men. Friedan’s book became a manifesto of change which inspired women’s activism and helped get women the right to vote. In the thoughts of Betty Friedan in her Feminine Mystique, “The key to the trap is, of course, education. The Feminine Mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique”. Education had played a big part in opening up women’s roles outside of domesticity. She created a society in which women wanted to live in. Women had found this new society appealing so they had begun to endorse women’s activism and fought against their suffrages by taking on jobs that men typically held, gaining an education, and taking a stand to end female

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