Reading The Feminine Mystique, many women found a recognisable and graphic picture of their own lives - materially comfortable but confined and lacking purpose. In the home, even with maids and the benefits of new domestic technologies, there were the dominating and stifling routines of housework and child-care and outside the home, social life was shaped by the demands of children and husbands. There were indeed satisfactions and rewards in such a life but Friedan, using evidence of her personal encounters with the women themselves and their words to illustrate her case, hones in sharply and dramatically on individuals` problems and the ways in which they are experienced. One runs out of the house, another breaks down in tears, and a further simply sleeps. All `have a hunger that food cannot fill`. Thus, although the issue of middle-class women`s difficulty in finding fulfilment was certainly one, as Friedan acknowledges, for popular discussion in the media - the subject of `a national parlour-game` - it is The Mystique that turns a sociological enquiry into an exciting and urgent journalistic story as the author pursues her investigation - an investigation with a very personal edge - to find the true causes of the `problem that has no name`.
In undertaking this investigation, the author provides an astute and incisive analysis of how key cultural institutions - women`s magazines, advertising and education - create and sustain the `mystique` which shapes women`s ways of seeing the world. Part of the forcefulness of her critique comes from her personal complicity in this ideological work, for as a writer for these magazines, she `can no longer deny my knowledge` of the `terrible implications` of the harmful image she was part of creating. Also powerful are the vividly drawn comparisons she draws - between, for example, the image of a `young and frivolous, almost childlike` woman preoccupied with `food, clothing, cosmetics, furniture` and the political events in the world outside - Castro, new African nations, the negro situation. Or between the magazines of the early 60s, with their romantic boy-meets-girl stories and those of the pre-fifties, in which at least some heroines have an ambition beyond wedded bliss. Such sharply-made contrasts, supported by detailed empirical research and relevant personal experience, make for a persuasive argument that effectively points up for The Mystique`s 1963 readers the superficiality and narrowness of the domestic life they are being invited to embrace.
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