Excerpt from The Feminine Mystique
Originally published in 1963; excerpt taken from 1997 reprint.

"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."

Betty Friedan gave voice to the suffering of many American women in her book The Feminine Mystique, in which she documented the damage American society did to women by insisting that the acceptable roles for them were limited to wives and mothers. Betty Friedan was born Betty Naomi Goldstein on February 4, 1921, in Peoria, Illinois, to Harry (a jeweler) and Miriam (Horowitz) Goldstein. Miriam Goldstein, who had worked as a...