The Feminine Mystique by Friedan, Betty - 1963

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1963. First edition of the keystone text of Second Wave Feminism by the "Mother of the Movement." After years spent writing for popular women's magazines, Friedan argued that the ennui of the postwar American housewife stemmed from the "feminine mystique:" a relatively recent model of womanhood being marketed as a timeless ideal. Combining a historian's eye with her training as a psychologist and social scientist, Friedan mapped the changing cultural expectations of the twentieth century, from the active, can-do attitudes encouraged in women before the war to the glorification of the passive, sheltered wife and mother by midcentury. "Powerful forces in this nation must be served by those pretty domestic pictures that stare at us everywhere, forbidding a woman to use her own abilities in the world." An unexpected bestseller, The Feminine Mystique would become the founding text of the Women's Liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. A very good copy, rarely seen in better condition. Octavo, original black cloth spine lettered in gilt, red paper boards, original unclipped red typographic dust jacket, machine-deckled foreedge. Light shelfwear to jacket with a few short closed tears, short tape repair to verso, spine lightly toned.