The Feminine Mystique was so talked about, and the title so catchy, in those days before we had words like sexism to describe what we faced, that many women eventually came to believe they’d read it, and used the phrase to describe whatever was bothering them about their situation as women. I later found that this was true for many women I interviewed. Having a distinct memory of reading it in the 1960s, I thought that would be very interesting.īut I hadn’t gotten very far in the book when I realized, in fact, that I had never read it. Stephanie Coontz: I was approached by an editor at Basic Books who said they were doing a series of biographies, not of individuals but of books, and asked if I’d like to write one on The Feminine Mystique. Her earlier books on the social history of the family include Marriage, A History The Way We Really Are The Way We Never Were and The Social Origins of Private Life.ĪTC: Why did you write this book, and what were your reactions to re-reading Betty’s Friedan’s classic THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE? Dianne Feeley interviewed Stephanie about her new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. STEPHANIE COONTZ TEACHES history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. UNITED KINGDOM: Students Fight the Fees.Susan Weissman interviews Yoav Peled & Mark LeVine
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