Betty Friedan and the Making of "The Feminine Mystique": The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Culture, Politics and the Cold War)
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)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)A compelling story. The melding of genres -- biography, exposé, 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)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)Betty Friedan and the Making of "The Feminine Mystique" is... intelligently ambitious but so tendentious you want to throw it across the room.(Judith ShulevitzThe New York Times Book Review)[The Feminine Mystique] now feels both revolutionary and utterly contemporary.... Four decades later, millions of individual transformations later, there is still so much to learn from this book.... Those who think of it as solely a feminist manifesto ought to revisit its pages to get a sense of the magnitude of the research and reporting Friedan undertook.(Anna Quindlen)The book that pulled the trigger on history.(Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock)One of those rare books we are endowed with only once in several decades.(Amitai Etzioni, author of The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society)[A] bridge between conservative and radical elements in feminism, an ardent advocate of harmony and human values.(Esquire)