Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War and Modern Feminism (Culture, Politics & the Cold War) - Softcover

"A fascinating and important new book". -- Newsweek Betty Friedan and the Making of "The Feminine Mystique" is... intelligently ambitious but so tendentious you want to throw it across the room.--Judith Shulevitz "The New York Times Book Review " Horowitz's careful reconstruction of Friedan's radical past exposes unexpected continuities between generations of radical thinkers and activists, and forces a reconsideration of the oft-noted class and racial limitations of Friedan's book. His argument -- judiciously framed yet bold in its implications -- is built upon a meticulous piecing together of sometimes fragmentary evidence, and insures that we will never again see Friedan and the movement she came to stand for in quite the same ways.--Lois Palken Rudnick, author of Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture A compelling story. The melding of genres -- biography, expose, historical monograph -- should make the book useful in classrooms and also enhance its readership outside the university.... The book will make a big splash in and out of the historical profession.--Joanne Meyerowitz, editor of Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960" A book that will be read, enjoyed, pondered, and debated. It is literate, broadly grounded in the intellectual and political currents of the era, reflects meticulous and imaginative sleuthing in archival sources, and is written in graceful and accessible prose.--Dorothy Sue Cobble, Rutgers University, New Brunswick An engaging and often arresting narrative, highly effective in portraying the evolution of Friedan's thinking. This book will certainly change common assumptions about the origins of The Feminine Mystique.--Nancy F. Cott, Yale University

This biography of Betty Friedan traces the development of her feminist outlook from her childhood in Illinois to her marriage. Horowitz offers a reading of ""The Feminine Mystique"" and argues that the roots of Friedan's feminism run deeper than she has led us to believe. The links between the ""Popular Front"" of feminism of the ""Old Left"" and the ""New Left"" feminism of the 1960s is delineated, thereby casting doubt on the claims of novelty that many have made about social movements of the 1960s. He illuminates important details by mining everything from her papers while a student as Smith College, to her articles for the labour press. Horowitz advances the historiography with descriptions of women's experiences of left-wing politics and culture in the 1940s and 1950s and by limning Friedan's place within that context.