I just finished reading Stephanie Coontz’s book A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. It is basically a biography of Betty Friedan’s book and the impact it had. Here is a Q-and-A with the author.

I liked the re-examination of the book – she provides a nice historical context of marriage and women’s roles. Her use of interviews with those who read the book during the early 1960s.

What was missing was the role that newspaper’s women’s pages played. Coontz cites women’s magazines and their reviews. According to memos and letters from Friedan’s papers, she requested that her book be reviewed in the women’s pages of newspapers rather than in the book section. This was because she knew she was more likely to get a good review there. Friedan’s mother had been a women’s page editor in Illinois.

The women’s pages of newspapers played a significant role in the popularity of the Feminine Mystique. Yet so much scholarship is devoted to women’s magazines of the 1950s and 1960s.

Please follow and like us:

I just finished reading Stephanie Coontz’s book A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. It is basically a biography of Betty Friedan’s book and the impact it had. Here is a Q-and-A with the author.

I liked the re-examination of the book – she provides a nice historical context of marriage and women’s roles. Her use of interviews with those who read the book during the early 1960s.

What was missing was the role that newspaper’s women’s pages played. Coontz cites women’s magazines and their reviews. According to memos and letters from Friedan’s papers, she requested that her book be reviewed in the women’s pages of newspapers rather than in the book section. This was because she knew she was more likely to get a good review there. Friedan’s mother had been a women’s page editor in Illinois.

The women’s pages of newspapers played a significant role in the popularity of the Feminine Mystique. Yet so much scholarship is devoted to women’s magazines of the 1950s and 1960s.

Please follow and like us: