Hart, with degrees in English literature and creative writing, focuses her published works on literary themes. In this essay, Hart intertwines a discussion of Friedan's work with the narrators and characters found in the short stories of Grace Paley.

Although there has been recent criticism of Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique, there is no doubt, even in the minds of her harshest critics, that her book had such a profound impact on the female population during the 1960s that it has been credited with initiating the second wave of feminism in the United States. In order to better comprehend how The Feminine Mystique had such a profound impact on women of that era, it is important to understand who the mid-twentieth-century American woman was. Although it is impossible to gather information on every female and ask each of them to recall what it was like to...