On Betty Friedan’s birthday, revisit Louis Menand on the author of “The Feminine Mystique,” and the power of the books that defined the early years of the women’s liberation movement.
The popular understanding was that the only reason for a marriageable woman to take a job was to find a husband. This was the premise of Rona Jaffe’s bestselling novel “The Best of Everything” , and it was essentially the counsel offered by Helen Gurley Brown in her mega-best-seller “Sex and the Single Girl” —a book that sold two million copies in three weeks.
Or, maybe, two books. Coontz says that Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” “did not get much of a hearing in the mainstream press” when the English translation came out, in 1953. This is inaccurate.
But why a book? Why not a court case, or a boycott, as in the case of the civil-rights movement—something that challenged existing law? There were plenty of laws enforcing the second-tier status of women in 1963. Why was a long and semi-scholarly study by a magazine writer the catalyst for a social change that might have got under way years before? The answer may have something to do not with the status of women but with the status of books.
In 1962, Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring.” It became a No. 1 best-seller, and is often said to have started the movement that led to the ban on DDT and, ultimately, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” came out the same year. It got the attention of the Kennedy Administration, and the discussions it provoked in Washington became the basis for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. And, in 1965, Ralph Nader published “Unsafe at Any Speed.
It may be that in the nineteen-sixties, when television was still muzzling itself, from fear of provoking advertiser displeasure or F.C.C. reaction, books were a more accessible form for social criticism and dissent. It may also be that books were still a little radioactive then, a little dangerous. Friedan’s book came out in the wake of some celebrated censorship trials—“Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Tropic of Cancer,” “Fanny Hill.
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