However, perhaps Friedan`s most radical critique is of the theory that dominated Sociology`s approach to the study of society - functionalism. According to Talcott Parsons, one of the theory`s leading exponents in the 1950s, the current system of gender division is necessary for a stable society. Girls and women may have to sacrifice education and career but only an adjustment to the `cultural definition of femininity` will guarantee happiness - a conclusion tragically borne out by the fate of Parson`s own daughter who after trying to stray from the expected path to happiness, committed suicide. Although presented as offering an objective and scientific analysis of society and widely influential in the late 1940s and 1950s through college text-books, Friedan exposes functionalism as a fraud - `less a scientific movement than a scientific word-game`, with the description of how things are being conflated with how things should be. As in the case of Freud and Mead, she exposes the damaging weaknesses of a key academic theory of the times, reminding us that The Feminine Mystique belongs to a wider counter-cultural movement in the 1960s, which refuses to accept the unquestioning authority of Science within mid 20th. century Western culture. Here, as in other ways, the book is in tune with the emerging spirit of the age.
Friedan`s intellectual courage is matched by the sense of urgency she conveys – an urgency missing, for example, from Simone de Beauvoir`s scholarly The Second Sex (1952), which Friedan said `made me want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head`. From the cinematic, horror-novel opening - `The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women... Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slip-cover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay besides her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: “Is this all?” - she enables the reader to gaze behind the seemingly reassuring surface of American suburban life at the oppressive reality of women`s lives. Yet, at the same time, in spite of the negative portrait she paints of these lives and in spite of her recognition of the power of the forces ranged against her argument, Friedan shares the early 1960s` counter-cultural belief - a belief derived from her activist past when she had flirted with the Communist Party and written for Union newspapers - that society could be significantly improved.
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