Autographed Books

Item Description

Betty Friedan Autographed Set both The Feminine Mystique and The Second Stage are in good to fair condition.  Both are authographed by Betty Friedan.

The Feminine Mystique published on February 19, 1963 by W.W. Norton was written by Betty Friedan and is widely credited with sparking the beginning of second-wave feminism in the United States.

In 1957, Friedan was asked to conduct a survey of her former  Smith College  classmates for their 15th anniversary reunion; the results, in which she found that many of them were unhappy with their lives as housewives, prompted her to begin research for The Feminine Mystique, conducting interviews with other suburban housewives, as well as researching psychology, media, and advertising. She originally intended to publish an article on the topic, not a book, but no magazine would publish her article.

During the year of 1964, The Feminine Mystique became the bestselling nonfiction book with over one million copies sold. In this book, Friedan challenged the widely-shared belief in 1950s that "fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949-- the housewife-mother." Hard cover, 380 pages, 1964. 

The Second Stage published in 1981 is eerily prescient and timely, a reminder that much of what is called new thinking in feminism has been eloquently observed and argued before. Warning the women’s movement against dissolving into factionalism, male-bashing, and preoccupation with sexual and identity politics rather than bottom-line political and economic inequalities, Friedan argues that once past the initial phases of describing and working against political and economic injustices, the women’s movement should focus on working with men to remake private and public arrangements that work against full lives with children for women and men both. Friedan’s agenda to preserve families is far more radical than it appears, for she argues that a truly equitable preservation of marriage and family may require a reorganization of many aspects of conventional middle-class life, from the greater use of flex time and job-sharing, to company-sponsored daycare, to new home designs to permit communal housekeeping and cooking arrangements. Called "utopian" fifteen years ago, when it seemed unbelievable that women had enough power in the workplace to make effective demands, or that men would join them, some of these visions are slowly but steadily coming to pass even now. The problem Friedan identifies is as real now as it was years ago: "how to live the equality we fought for," and continue to fight for, with "the family as new feminist frontier." She writes not only for women’s liberation but for human liberation. Hardcover, 344 pages , 1981 

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