Thus, like many Friedan admirers, I might choose purchase it 50th anniversary of the Feminine Mystique only binge-learning my means compliment of most of the reverent commemoration-breezing within the blissful assertion more all retrospective’s required “caveat” paragraph designed to encourage clients one to, better, yes, it did (supposedly) keeps their flaws.
But you one to from the ages since the its guide, most other theorists and scholars, feminist and you can if not, have demonstrated grave challenge into the legacy of your Feminine Mystique, regarding the scope, its inspirations, and its own texts to people-challenge you to definitely have earned much more than you to short, painless paragraph’s worth of idea.
Relevant Tale
Like most beloved, much-learnt text, secular otherwise sacred, The feminine Mystique deserves to be discover vitally so you can getting knew completely. Very, lest we get too rosy remembering the new triumph of one’s Women Mystique, let’s opinion for the further detail among those bubble-exploding, parade-raining criticisms. According to the latter thinkers and you will philosophers, Betty Friedan’s 1963 publication was a courageous text message with a noble objective, but.
In 1984, black feminist theorist bell hooks produced her very own publication, Of Margin so you can Heart, having an effective searing indictment of one’s Feminine Mystique: Regardless if Friedan’s guide got produced exactly what was given birth to also known as the next-trend feminist course, it worried about just what was not an effective common lady state but alternatively problems experienced merely from the light, upper- and you can center-classification moms and dads and you will wives. Considering hooks, Friedan had written myopically, like lady regarding almost every other races and you may classes-people that, she contended, were most victimized by sexist oppression-simply did not exists.
4 Huge Issues with The female Mystique
hooks are by no means the first one to have difficulty that have Friedan’s white-girl-dilemmas worldview. But the girl birth associated with the version of issue ranks extremely withering. (Stress is my own personal, during the.)
Friedan’s popular words, “the trouble that no name,” have a tendency to cited to describe the condition of women in this society, in fact regarded brand new predicament from a select gang of college or university-educated, middle- and you may upper-classification, married light ladies-housewives 
. Whenever Friedan typed The female Mystique, several-third of the many ladies were throughout the employees. Many female longed become housewives, simply females which have spare time and money could possibly profile its identities on the model of the feminine mystique.
. From her early creating, it seems that Friedan never pondered perhaps the plight out-of college-experienced light housewives try an acceptable site point which so you can gauge the perception out-of sexism otherwise sexist oppression to your lifestyle of women in the Western area. Nor did she move beyond her very own lifetime sense to obtain a broadened position with the lifetime of females throughout the United Claims. I state which not to ever discredit the lady performs. It stays a useful talk of one’s feeling out-of sexist discrimination for the a choose set of girls. Examined of a different sort of perspective, it can be seen as an instance study of narcissism, insensitivity, sentimentality, and you can thinking-extravagance, and this are at the height when Friedan, for the a chapter called “Progressive Dehumanization,” produces an evaluation within psychological results of separation toward white housewives plus the effect away from confinement towards thinking-notion of inmates inside the Nazi quantity camps.