Poquette has a bachelor's degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette discusses the types of research that Friedan used in The Feminine Mystique to support her argument that women have been repressed to the point of losing their identities and capacity for sexual fulfillment.

In 1963, Betty Friedan made history when she published The Feminine Mystique. She knew that what she was writing was revolutionary, since the genesis of the book, the results from a questionnaire to her fellow alumni, had produced such a negative reaction from various women's magazines when she tried to sell the results as an article in 1957. As Friedan notes in her introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of The Feminine Mystique, "the then male publisher of McCall's . . . turned the piece down in horror, despite underground efforts of female editors. The male McCall's editors said it couldn't...