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A Strange Stirring
The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s
Contributors
Formats and Prices
- On Sale
- Mar 6, 2012
- Page Count
- 256 pages
- Publisher
- Basic Books
- ISBN-13
- 9780465028429
Price
$19.99Price
$25.99 CADFormat
Format:
- Trade Paperback $19.99 $25.99 CAD
- ebook $9.99 $12.99 CAD
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“An illuminating analysis of the book that helped launch the movement that freed women to participate more fully in American society.” —Wall Street Journal
In 1963, Betty Friedan unleashed a storm of controversy with her bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique. In A Strange Stirring, acclaimed historian Stephanie Coontz takes us back to the early 1960s—when women who wanted more out of life than housekeeping were labeled deviant, sexual hypocrisy and economic discrimination were rampant, and husbands controlled almost every aspect of family life.
Using extensive research and moving, personal interviews to examine what Friedan’s book meant to the women and men who read it then, Coontz shows how Friedan stirred thousands of women to realize that their depression and self-doubt reflected not a personal weakness but a political injustice. She also explores what is and is not relevant about Friedan’s message today.
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“An illuminating analysis of the book that helped launch the movement that freed women to participate more fully in American society.”Wall Street Journal
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“A timely contribution .... By considering The Feminine Mystique as one sturdy strand in the complex arguments we’re engaged in to this day, Coontz does Friedan the tremendous favor of pulling her down from heaven and up from hell .... It’s a relief to have the level-headed Coontz providing perspective and taking Friedan’s work and legacy for what it was: stirring, strange, complicated and crucial.”New York Times Book Review
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“A Strange Stirring enriches Coontz’s impressive body of work on American family life .... She continues to deftly make history a personal science, persuading readers to ponder those societal yokes we’ve taken up to wear around our own necks.”Seattle Times
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“A Strange Stirring gives voice to women whose lives were transformed by Friedan’s book, but most compellingly, it sets the historical record straight as far as its impact on families.”Salon.com
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“A useful revisiting of Friedan’s book.”Louis Menand, New Yorker
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“A Strange Stirring is fascinating.”Times (UK)
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“An excellent new social history of the impact of Betty Friedan’s landmark book on American women. . . . Coontz is the rare social historian who knows how to weave meticulous research into a compelling narrative of our not too distant past .... A Strange Stirring is, in many ways, better than the original. Today the problem has been named, and A Strange Stirring offers poignant personal reactions, accessible history and present-day comparisons to give voice to the modern quest for gender equality.”Christine Whelan, Huffington Post
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“Coontz recounts the catalytic effect that The Feminine Mystique had on a great many women. Her book is full of stories of desperate, suffering people who realized they weren’t crazy only when they picked up Friedan’s bestseller .... But The Feminine Mystique is not just an artifact of a benighted era. It still contains important lessons about one of the most important questions of all, which is how to create a meaningful, autonomous life.”Michelle Goldberg, New Republic
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“A fascinating examination of Friedan’s much-misunderstood classic, A Strange Stirring should be required reading for any young woman today who believes that she’s ‘not a feminist.’”Ladies’ Home Journal
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“A compelling critique of the impact of The Feminine Mystique as an impetus for the profound changes brought by the women’s movement in the 1960s and 70s.”Reuters
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“Coontz shows how Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique threw a lifeline to U.S. middle- and upper-class white women constrained by conformity.”Ms. Magazine
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“Excellent, eminently readable .... Coontz’s ‘demystifying’ of both the era and Friedan is an erudite, even-handed look at the explosive feminist undercurrents of the era.”BUST
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“Coontz’s slim volume makes an illuminating companion to the book it examines ....The book is engaging, readable, and brief .... A worthwhile review of the changes wrought by the past half-century.”Dissent
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“For some of us, this is a jolting ‘remember when’; for others, a slice of history forgotten all too soon. For all of us, there remains relevance.”Buffalo News
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“This perceptive and engrossing ... book provides welcome context and background to a still controversial bestseller that changed how women viewed themselves.”Publishers Weekly
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“As women continue to struggle with the effort to balance life and work, Coontz argues that The Feminine Mystique remains as relevant today as when it first appeared. In tracing the roots of current discontents, which Coontz dubs the ‘Supermom Mystique,’ her book is no less required reading than Friedan’s trailblazer.”Booklist
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“Although Friedan claimed credit for initiating the modern feminist movement, Coontz places the book more dispassionately in its historical context as one of many factors working against entrenched gender roles. Still, Coontz demonstrates persuasively that women readers from many backgrounds found relief—some called it life-saving—in knowing that they were not crazy and not alone in their need to find some work independent of their family roles.”Library Journal
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“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
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“This book offers a nuanced perspective on the women’s movement by ending the invisibility of African-American women.”Donna L. Franklin, author of Ensuring Inequality
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“Stephanie Coontz continues to amaze me. In her new book, A Strange Stirring, she chronicles the untold story of some of America’s greatest pioneers. This is a must read for all who care about our country’s growth and maturity.”John Bradshaw, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Healing the Shame That Binds You
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“Stephanie Coontz is not just one of the most important historians in America, she is also a personal hero of mine and a brilliant writer. This book—like all her books before it—has been a marvel and education for me to behold .... I will keep A Strange Stirring in the forefront of my bookshelf forever.”Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
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