The Feminine Mystique
Landmark, groundbreaking, classic―these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire.
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5recommend
14mentions
14people
2011–2025years
36% recommend57% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- great book on this topic is friedan's feminine mystique (1963). She wrote about the spiritual crisis affecting a generation of young women who were more likely to be 'homemakers' than their mothers. worth reading at least the intro IMO for anyone who feels dissatisfied with their work / life / contribution
not sure how yang made this his topic. my sense of his random walk is 'had a job at yahoo' -> future of work -> UBI -> numbers guy -> times square -> ?
really miss the andrew yang policy bot on twitter though
- > great book on this topic is friedan's feminine mystique (1963)
Another is “The Will To Love: Men, Masculinity, and Change” by bell hooks (2004)
There aren’t a lot of authors that I feel get it right about issues relating to men and masculinity. Bell hooks is one of the few.
> not sure how yang made this his topic. my sense of his random walk is 'had a job at yahoo' -> future of work -> UBI -> numbers guy -> times square -> ?
I live in NYC and spend a lot of time online, so we got kinda saturated with Yang during the last year because he was in the mayoral race. As far as I can tell, he’s a passionate self-promoter, and engages on a shallow level with tons of different topics as some kind of cynical way to promote his brand. If he were at least more skilled at it I would respect him more, but he’s made so many obvious PR blunders and it’s obvious he doesn’t listen to advisors. He pokes around at sensitive topics like race and sexism, but as far as I can tell it’s so he can stay in the news, because he rarely has anything interesting to say on those subjects.
It seems like a random walk because he’s doing whatever will get him in the news online.
- Two that did it for me:
- The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt. Really deepened my understanding of how Western and other cultures think about moral and ethical issues.
- The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan. It's a feminist book that is very non-ideological, and helped me, as someone born in the 80's, appreciate some very real and practical issues that feminism has helped us address.
- I assume the author is the Betty Friedan. This would be about 5 years before she wrote The Feminine Mystique, easily one of the most influential books in modern history.
It's kind of fascinating to see her here at 37, working in obscurity, knocking out fairly pedestrian writing assignments, when in just a few years she's going to change the world.
- This is what I thought about posting. I've read a lot of books this year (45 books totaling 22,000 pages), the most important being: History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Silent Spring, The Feminine Mystique, The Grapes of Wrath, The Price of Inequality, The Happiness Hypothesis.
But, out of all that (which I had to go look up on my Goodreads), HPMOR is what came to mind, both an engaging story, thought provoking ideas, and a lot of pages to work with :).
- This reminds me a lot of what was described in the book "The Feminine Mystique." There, they defined a “problem that has no name” that was the sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction experienced by women who, by all external measures, were living the ideal life: successful, comfortable, with all needs met by their husbands.
Both cases show how following an externally provided script, even one that reliably produces “good” outcomes, can lead to a hollowed-out sense of self
