In an excerpt from her book, “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan defines the unhappiness of women during the 1950s as “the problem that has no name.” She identifies “the problem that has no name” as upper-middle-class suburban women. experiencing dissatisfaction with their lives and an inarticulate yearning for something more besides her housekeeping duties. She blames an idealized media image of femininity, a social construct that tells women that their role in life is to trap a man, support a man, have children, and put needs first. of the husband and children.

According to Friedan, women have been encouraged to limit themselves to a very narrow definition of “true” womanhood, abandoning education and career aspirations in the process by experts who wrote books, columns, and books told to women. women during that time that their most important role on the planet was going to be wives and mothers. The role of a “real” woman was to have no interest in politics, higher education, and careers, and these experts taught women to sympathize with women who had the gall to want a life beyond the cult of the true. femininity.

If women expressed dissatisfaction with their enchanted lives, experts blamed their feelings on the higher education they received before becoming a homemaker. During the 1950s, underwear advertisers marketed girls as young as ten who sold fake-butt bras to help them catch boyfriends, and American girls began marrying in high school. America’s birth rate during this time skyrocketed and college-educated women made careers by having children. The image of the beautiful and generous suburban housewife was accepted as the norm and women went crazy, sometimes literally, to achieve this goal.

Friedan ultimately concluded that “the problem that has no name” is not a loss of femininity, too much education, or the demands of domesticity, but an upheaval of rebellion from millions of women who were fed up with pretending they were happy with their lives. and that solving this problem would be the key to the future of American culture.