A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. By Stephanie Coontz (New York: Basic Books, 2011. xxiii plus 222 pp. $25.95)

Abstract

Rarely has a book been as reviled and revered as Betty Friedan's 1963 best seller, The Feminine Mystique. Detractors vilified the book and its author for belittling marriage and motherhood; supporters exalted it for freeing women from the domestic abyss; and still others credited the book with igniting a feminist revolution. Forty-eight years after women (and men) read the book for the first time, The Feminine Mystique remains incendiary for some, while others dismiss Friedan's representation of the 1950s and early 1960s as oversimplified, exaggerated, and misguided. In her new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, social historian Stephanie Coontz adds a new approach to the significant body of scholarship on Friedan's famous work. Unlike historians Daniel Horowitz and Joanne Meyerowitz who focused on Friedan's leftist, union roots and her methodological flaws, respectively, Coontz focuses primarily on the book's impact on Friedan's intended audience. She argues that the current criticisms and mythology surrounding it obscure the profound impact the book had on its original readers. Coontz's reassessment of The Feminine Mystique reveals that Friedan's intended audience did not find the book “boring and dated,” “repetitive and overblown,” or limited in scope. Instead, it “unleashed a wave of recognition and relief” in a generation of predominately white middle-class educated women (xii, xix, 18, xi).