[EPUB][PDF] Strange Stirring

Rarely has a book been as reviled and revered as Betty Friedan’s 1963 best seller, The Feminine Mystique. Detractors vilified the book and its author for belittling marriage and motherhood; supporters exalted it for freeing women from the domestic abyss; and still others credited the book with igniting a feminist revolution. Forty-eight years after women (and men) read the book for the first time, The Feminine Mystique remains incendiary for some, while others dismiss Friedan’s representation of the 1950s and early 1960s as oversimplified, exaggerated, and misguided.

In her new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, social historian Stephanie Coontz adds a new approach to the significant body of scholarship on Friedan’s famous work. Unlike historians Daniel Horowitz and Joanne Meyerowitz…

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