The Feminine Mystique

The Stepford Wives and today’s empty feminism

When you think of 1972, what comes to mind? Corduroy flares, President Nixon and the first installment of The Godfather? Or bra-burning, feminist “consciousness-raising” meetings and debates about abortion and birth control? America in the early 1970s was not just a nation of Vietnam War vets and oil crises, but one of significant feminist liberation. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and helped found the National Organization for Women in 1966, and the decade after saw a whole host of similar organizations, such as the Women’s Radical Action Project (WRAP) and the catchily named Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH).