Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Betty Friedan was the author of The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, and a prominent feminist writer and activist. She is credited with influencing the start of second-wave feminism, and second-wave feminists fought for reforms like legalizing abortion and birth control, banning marital rape, legalizing no-fault divorce, putting women in leadership positions, and getting more women into the workforce. Friedan participated in activist movements as well and was the National Organization of Women's (NOW) first president.

In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan deconstructs the “mystique” of a woman being fulfilled by housework, motherhood, and marriage. She argues that a woman seeking true fulfillment should want an education and a career. Her writings inspired the second-wave feminist ideology of work as a form of liberation. This argument supported the classist interests of the white, bourgeois women who ran feminist organizations and whom bell hooks directly refutes in this book. As many marginalized and low-income women have always worked, work cannot be inherently liberatory.

While Friedan positively impacted feminism and helped the movement achieve reforms, she was also limited by her personal biases; for example, she decried lesbian feminists as “a lavender menace” and feared that homosexual issues would detract from women’s liberation in general. hooks’s states directly that Friedan’s theories are classist and racist by excluding the majority of women living and working in the United States. In the text, Friedan functions almost as an archetypal figure, representing the limitations of white, bourgeois feminist thought.