Articles

I am a young professor of sociology teaching classes on gender, marriage and social change -- and I have never read Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique." Like many women of my generation, I thought I had. I must have, I told myself. Perhaps in college? No. And it turns out that very few of my well-educated, feminist-leaning friends have either.

Believe it or not, Betty Friedan was a romantic. The author of the groundbreaking 1960s treatise "The Feminine Mystique" may have detested certain traditional values, but she clung to the fantasy of heterosexual love and marriage -- here's the key -- among equals. In fact, Friedan once said that her tombstone should read: "She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men" -- and yet she had been memorialized by many as anti-…

Stephanie Coontz teaches family history at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and her latest book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, comes out Tuesday

Opponents of same-sex marriage worry that allowing two men or two women to wed would radically transform a time-honored institution. But they're way too late on that front. Marriage has already been radically transformed - in a way that makes gay marriage not only inevitable, as Vice President Biden described it in an interview late last year, but also quite logical.

One reader of 'The Feminine Mystique' said that it 'put the unexplainable distress I was suffering into words.'

Though The Feminine Mystique is often cited as a founding text of second-wave feminism, reading it today reveals it to be a brilliant artifact--not a timeless classic. Betty Friedan's lauded and notorious 1963 bestselling book skewers bygone stereotypes of femininity and homemaking with a provocative bluster that verges on camp. Its exaggerations, blind spots, and biases are a turn-off; its narrow scope is disappointing to those hoping for a comprehensive analysis of sexism or a broad agenda…