Feminism Through the Life Cycle

Inthe introductionto the Tenth Anniversary Edition of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan wrote, “It’s frightening when you’re starting on a new road that no one has been on before. You don’t know how far it’s going to take you until you look back and realize how far, how very far you’ve gone.” 1 Indeed. Forty […]

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Beneath the Feminine Mystique:

Some Other Problems That Have No Name In 1963, Betty friedan named the problem. The opening chapter of her Feminine Mystique is aptly titled, “The Problem That Has No Name.” There Friedan verbalized what countless housewives thought and felt but did not know how to say: the American dream was a disappointment for women. Marriage, […]

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The New Feminism at 50:

Women Alone Fifty years ago Betty Friedan galvanized a movement by chronicling the angst of married women who felt trapped in middle-class suburban American motherhood and packaging it as The Feminine Mystique. Her genius was in conceptualizing that sense of ennui and alienation as “the problem without a name.” The “problem” actually had a name […]

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Alone, Alone, Alone:

The Ultimate Social Meaning of Friedan’s Sovereign-Self Feminism Radiant with the hopes kindled in The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan concludes her landmark feminist manifesto with an optimistic question about the beckoning future: “Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? . . . It has barely begun, the search […]

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Stable Souls Who Marry, Wild Egotists Who Divorce

At a time when national marriage rates are astonishingly low and national divorce rates remain distressingly high, Americans might learn something from a new Finnish study about the personal characteristics of those young people most likely to make enduring marriages and about the contrasting personal characteristics of those most likely to divorce. Conducted by a […]

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Divorcing Parents, Psychologically Suffering Children

Parental divorce seriously hurts American children, some progressives have argued, only because the United States is politically backward compared to advanced social democracies, such as, say, Sweden. But that line of thinking loses plausibility when assessed against the results of a new study of parental divorce in that very land of the progressives’ hearts’ desires. […]

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Fortifying Words, Corrosive Numbers

What makes young people open to the idea of divorce? What makes them resistant to that idea? Psychologist Daniel R. Stalder of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater offers illuminating answers to these questions in a new study of how “cognitive dissonance” affects marital thinking. “Cognitive dissonance,” Stalder explains, “is a psychological discom-fort created by an inconsistency […]

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Disillusioned in the Ivy League

Sex and God at Yale Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad Nathan Harden Thomas Dunne Books, 2012; 320 pages, $25.99 Nathan Harden’sstoryof being admitted to Yale is an unconventional one. Harden grew up in various states across the South and began dreaming of Yale at ten years old. When he was in […]

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The End of Men?

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women Hanna Rosin Riverhead Books, 2012; 320 pages, $27.95 Despite the title of Hanna Rosin’s book, The End of Men is clearly written from the standpoint of women. Men as a sex are languishing: they do not complete college, are not working full-time jobs, and, with the […]

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