In 1963 Betty Friedan's best-seller, The Feminine Mystique, argued that women were oppressed by a culture that consistently denied them opportunities outside the domestic sphere. Friedan went on to suggest that women should have the same freedom for self-fulfillment that men possessed. This book reawakened the feminist movement: in 1964 women's groups succeeded in getting the Civil Rights Act to include a section banning discrimination based on gender, two years later Friedan and others founded the National Organization of Women (NOW). By the late 1960s the government required that all institutions receiving federal funds use nondiscriminatory hiring practices, and in the early 1970s affirmative-action laws were in place. In this atmosphere public opinion about women in the workplace began to change. In 1936 a Gallup poll reported that only 18 percent of Americans approved of married women working outside the home; forty...