More than anything, it made me want to talk to my grandmother who was born in 1932 and was raising my mother and her other six children during the 1960s. I can see how reading it in the 1960s would be eye-opening and life-changing, but I didn’t find it relevant anymore and had to look at it as a historical piece more than anything. I’m very removed from the generation that suffered under the mystique which made this book seem antiquated while reading it. The idyllic ‘Leave it to Beaver’ perception of women and the housewife mentality is something I have no personal connection to and that my mother had no personal connection too. The fact that this was published in 1963 was glaringly obvious. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire. 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.

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. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic-these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique.

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