The Feminine Mystique
- New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1963
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1963. First Edition. First Printing, one of 3,000 copies. Octavo (21.75cm); second state binding in grayish-green paper-covered boards and blue cloth backstrip, with titles stamped in gilt on spine; dustjacket; [6],7-410,[6]pp. Some mild surface wear and a very faint indentation to rear cover, trivial wear to upper right corner of front board, else a clean, Near Fine copy. In the second state dustjacket, with Virgilia Peterson quote on front panel, seven blurbs on rear panel, and right margin of front flap measuring 9/16"; unclipped (priced $5.95), with light wear to extremities, and a few tiny tears and attendant creases (two of them with tiny tape mends on verso); Very Good+, notably absent the usual fading to the spine, which here is still a rich red.
Well-preserved copy of this cornerstone work by Friedan (1921-2006), a book widely credited for launching second wave feminism in the United States. Friedan discusses "the problem that has no name" - a widespread sense of dissatisfaction among women in the U.S. during the 1950s and 60s. Sensing this unhappiness in her own life prompted her to compile an extensive questionnaire, which she used to survey her classmates from Smith College 15 years after graduation. "The answers given by 200 women to those intimate open-ended questions made me realize that what was wrong could not be related to education in the way it was then believed to be. The problems and satisfaction of their lives, and mine, and the way our education contributed to them, simply did not fit the image of the modern American woman as she was written about in women's magazines, studied and analyzed in classrooms and clinics, praised and damned in a ceaseless barrage of words ever since the end of World War II. There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique" (p.9). The book sold more than a million copies within the first year of publication, and has since been noted by the U.S. Department of Labor as one of the "Books that Shaped Work in America." 84089.
Well-preserved copy of this cornerstone work by Friedan (1921-2006), a book widely credited for launching second wave feminism in the United States. Friedan discusses "the problem that has no name" - a widespread sense of dissatisfaction among women in the U.S. during the 1950s and 60s. Sensing this unhappiness in her own life prompted her to compile an extensive questionnaire, which she used to survey her classmates from Smith College 15 years after graduation. "The answers given by 200 women to those intimate open-ended questions made me realize that what was wrong could not be related to education in the way it was then believed to be. The problems and satisfaction of their lives, and mine, and the way our education contributed to them, simply did not fit the image of the modern American woman as she was written about in women's magazines, studied and analyzed in classrooms and clinics, praised and damned in a ceaseless barrage of words ever since the end of World War II. There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique" (p.9). The book sold more than a million copies within the first year of publication, and has since been noted by the U.S. Department of Labor as one of the "Books that Shaped Work in America." 84089.