The Feminine Mystique at 50

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Friedan, a freelance writer for women's magazines and a suburban housewife, wrote for a generation of post-World War II women she claimed had bought into the image of the "feminine mystique" and, as a result, suffered from the "problem that has no name." This mystique, reinforced by magazines, advertisements, and popular culture, was "the suburban housewife—the dream image of the young American woman . . . healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home." Friedan argued that this image promised true feminine fulfillment.

Although the context of a white, suburban, middle-class housewife is somewhat distant from mine—I'm a millennial (born between the 1980s and 2004), second-generation Korean American female born in Flushing, New York—I can see why Friedan's work produced such gut-wrenching, polarizing responses. I suppose it also helps that I recently read Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead and could hardly put it down since I felt she was speaking into my situation as a struggling working woman today. Her personal anecdotes of injustices at work for women only brought back my own memories of the prejudice I've experienced being a woman in ministry. After reading Sandberg's book I finally "got" what made The Feminine Mystique the seminal work in igniting the modern feminist movement in America.   Continue at Jessica Hong