boost I needed, to know I am important to myself and my children and not just a diaper changer.`
Looking back, in interviews conducted by Stephanie Coontz ( A Strange Stirring, 2011), at their reading of The Feminine Mystique, numerous women recall their strong reactions to the book - `I felt like she`d looked into my heart and put into words the feelings I`d been afraid to admit.` Or, `Betty Friedan ... put the unexplainable distress I was suffering into words.` For a few, the book was life-changing, leading or confirming a change of direction - `... it was a revelation. It was like having a pain and finally your doctor tells you, your pain actually has a source. You aren`t imagining it`.
Such intensely felt personal testimony is strong evidence of why Friedan`s book should be viewed as making a major contribution to the development of 1960s culture. However, as well as directly influencing individuals` attitude and lives, its publication placed Friedan at the forefront of an emerging women`s movement - a movement that gained a national organisation in 1966 when activists were blocked from openly criticising the Johnson administration`s failure to enforce the recently passed law against sexual discrimination in employment . Who else better to lead such an organisation to fight for female rights in a similar way to the NAACP`s fight for the civil rights of black people, than the famous author, Betty Friedan? The National Organization for Women (NOW), or a similar body, may have started without Friedan but she certainly provided a powerful and magnetic centre around which feminist activists could gather and make the case, through words and action, for full equality with men.
What then caused The Feminine Mystique to have such an impact? Perhaps paradoxically, it is the fact of the book`s unoriginality that partially accounts for its influence. Friedan is writing on a terrain that is already prepared by an earlier tradition of pre-war feminism, of which Friedan as a labour activist, was herself a part, and by a series of studies and popular articles that had focused on or more aspects of the multiple inequalities women of post-Second World War society had to endure. In other words, many readers of the early Sixties were already familiar, at least to an extent, with the book`s line of attack. They may have been provoked and challenged by the radical nature and directness of Friedan`s arguments but they already partially shared her frame of reference and sense of injustice.
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