Planting the seed: Memories of “The Feminine Mystique”

There’s a lot of buzz these days about Stephanie Coontz’s new book A Strong Stirring, an assessment of Betty Friedans’s 1963 manifesto The Feminine Mystique. It’s stirring up some personal memories of my own.

I was not quite fourteen back in 1964 when an English teacher in our Orthodox day school, a young woman with a sweet sad smile, mentioned a new book that she had recently read. It was called The Feminine Mystique and it seemed this book questioned women’s relegation to domestic roles.

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