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A Strange Stirring

'The Feminine Mystique' and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

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A Strange Stirring

By: Stephanie Coontz
Narrated by: Diane Cardea
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About this listen

In 1963, Betty Friedan unleashed a storm of controversy with her best-selling book The Feminine Mystique. Hundreds of women wrote to her to say that the book had transformed, even saved, their lives. Nearly half a century later, many women still recall where they were when they first read it.

In A Strange Stirring, historian Stephanie Coontz examines the dawn of the 1960s, when the sexual revolution had barely begun, newspapers advertised for “perky, attractive gal typists”, but married women were told to stay home, and husbands controlled almost every aspect of family life. Based on exhaustive research and interviews, and challenging both conservative and liberal myths about Friedan, A Strange Stirring brilliantly illuminates how a generation of women came to realize that their dissatisfaction with domestic life didn’t reflect their personal weakness but rather a social and political injustice.

©2011 Stephanie Coontz (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
Americas Gender Studies Social Sciences United States Discrimination Equality Social justice Civil rights Socialism Capitalism

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Critic reviews

"A sharp revisiting of the generation that was floored by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), and how the book is still relevant today…. A valuable education for women and men." (Kirkus Reviews)
"I am awed by the scope of this research, of this thinking, and I am struck once more by how much there is learned (and taught) about the slow, stubborn advancement of women in America over the last one hundred years. I will keep A Strange Stirring in the forefront of my bookshelf forever." (Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love)
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