Betty Friedan, Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett and the 1960s’ Challenge to the Suburban Era Mystique of Security and Order

Abstract

The paper examines and compares some of the 1960s’ most representative expressions of social critique: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Richard Sennett’s The Uses of Disorder, in an attempt to demonstrate how each of those intellectuals, social critics and visionaries, in their own distinct way, called for a radical departure from the established notions of the social and spatial order amidst the growing public fears of insecurity stimulated by the rising crime rate, the spread of racism and xenophobia, and the continuing “white flight” to the suburbs.