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In 1963, Betty Friedan unleashed a storm of controversy with her bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique . Hundreds of women wrote to her to say that the book had transformed, even saved, their lives. Nearly half a century later, many women still recall where they were when they first read it. In A Strange Stirring , historian Stephanie Coontz examines the dawn of the 1960s, when the sexual revolution had barely begun, newspapers advertised for \"perky, attractive gal typists,\" but married women were told to stay home, and husbands controlled almost every aspect of family life. Based on exhaustive research and interviews, and challenging both conservative and liberal myths about Friedan, A Strange Stirring brilliantly illuminates how a generation of women came to realize that their dissatisfaction with domestic life didn't't reflect their personal weakness but rather a social and political injustice.

Mothers of Conservatism tells the story of 1950s southern Californian housewives who shaped the grassroots right in the two decades following World War II. Michelle Nickerson describes how red-hunting homemakers mobilized activist networks, institutions, and political consciousness in local education battles, and she introduces a generation of women who developed political styles and practices around their domestic routines. From the conservative movement's origins in the early fifties through the presidential election of 1964, Nickerson documents how women shaped conservatism from the bottom up, out of the fabric of their daily lives and into the agenda of the Republican Party.

Fermaglich discusses the significance of Betty Friedan's claim that the women who adjust as housewives, are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps in her 1963 feminist classic, The Feminine Mystique. Friedan's analogy offers historians an important window into the impact of the Holocaust on American Jewish thinkers and in larger American culture.

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading

This paper will analyze how space as both a physical environment and a social construct affects what Judith Butler calls ‘gender regulations’: how does the intersection of the private and the public influence the development of personal identity? How can these stereotypes be challenged within the confines of structured social and gendered hierarchies? The notion of suburbia as a physical representation of social anxieties and codified behaviours will firstly be introduced. In particular, the paper will look at how a male authoritarian rhetoric that sees happiness as a commodity rejects the idea of individual identity and serves to generate the conventional role of the all-American housewife as the only aspiration for female characters. Through an investigation into the development of different female characters, the paper will then highlight the ways in which adherence to the suburban social norm that regulates gender relationships leads to a renunciation of personhood in favour of conformity and designates the ostracisation of April Wheeler as an outcast. The semiotics of female identity that surrounds the character of April will be examined to show how this ostracisation is not only an external process of separation form society, but becomes an internalised action that leads to a fracture in the female consciousness that can only be overcome through the adoption of an alternative, extra-linguistic semiotics.

In the popular imagination, American women during the time between the end of World War II and the 1960s-the era of the so-called \"feminine mystique\"-were ultraconservative and passive.College Women in the Nuclear Agetakes a fresh look at these women, showing them actively searching for their place in the world while engaging with the larger intellectual and political movements of the times. Drawing from the letters and diaries of young women in the Cold War era, Babette Faehmel seeks to restore their unique voices and to chronicle their collective ambitions. She also explores the shifting roles that higher education played in establishing these hopes and dreams, making the case that the GI Bill served to diminish the ambitions of many American women even as it opened opportunities for many American men. A treasure-trove of original research, the book should stimulate scholarly discussion and captivate any reader interested in the thoughts and lives of American women.

Rebecca Traister reviews \"A Strange Stirring: 'The Feminine Mystique' and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s,\" by Stephanie Coontz, who reexamines the work of Betty Friedan and other second-wave feminists, reclaiming the liberation their work had created for women in modern contexts.

The roots of the postmodernist denigration of the patriarch are traced to the postwar middle class family. The premise of this family was that the father would work and make possible a sphere of family life in which maternal influences, based on a primordial image of the mother, could operate without constraint. But identification with the primordial mother was psychologically insupportable for the mother, who blamed the father and enlisted the son in her antagonism. This deprived the son of the possibility of forming a superego and resulted in his aliention. The daughter raised the antagonism to the level of social program and carried it forward.

Incorporation mystique et subjectivité féminine d’après le Livre d’Angèle de Foligno. Comment qualifier, dans le cadre d’une histoire de la subjectivité, la piété compassionnelle dont témoigne Angèle de Foligno († 1309) dans le Mémorial et les Instructions ? En choisissant trois motifs qui déclinent la figure de l’incorporation mystique (dévotions à l’eucharistie, aux plaies du Christ et aux instruments de la Passion), cette étude met au jour les origines monastiques d’une piété fusionnelle et affective, d’abord élaborée dans un environnement spécifiquement masculin aux XIe-XIIe siècles, puis investie par la dévotion des mulieres religiosae (moniales, béguines, recluses ou tertiaires) à partir du XIIIe siècle. Placée dans une perspective de longue durée, la piété d’identification au Christ et à ses souffrances d’Angèle révèle ainsi une sensibilité religieuse aux référents mixtes, masculins et féminins, mais qui a été infléchie par la position sociale des femmes et leurs aspirations propres dans le champ de la piété. ‪Mystical incorporation and feminine subjectivity in the Book of Angela da Foligno. ‪ Within the context of a history of subjectivity, how can we understand the compassionate piety demonstrated by Angela da Foligno († 1309) in her Memorial and Instructions ? Through an analysis of three figures of mystical incorporation (the devotion to the eucharisty, to Christ’s wounds and to the instruments of Passion), this study reveals the monastic origins of a fusional and affective piety. It was born in a specifically masculine environment in the 11th and 12th century, and then reappropriated in the devotion of mulieres religiosae (nuns, beguines, recluses or tertiaries) from the 13th century onwards. Considered in a long-term perspective, Angela’s piety, which involved identification with Christ and his sufferings, reveals a religious sensibility with mixed gendered references ; this sensibility was shaped by women’s social condition and by their distinctive aspirations to piety.