Summary Of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique

Betty Friedan was an author, activist, founder, and first president of The National Organization of Women. Friedan wrote the The Feminine Mystique in 1963, which became her personal manifesto about the inequalities which plagued society during that time. The Feminine Mystique set off an immense magnitude reaction which created the second wave of feminism in the United States of America. The Feminine Mystique is about Friedan’s views on the inequality of women within society and the search for the personal identities of the Americans.

Friedan utilized several unique forms of the modes of persuasion in order to sympathize, empathize, and relate to her intended target audience. Betty Friedan’s intended target audience were her fellow feminists

and individual that strived to find equality and personal identity within their lives. The Feminine Mystique tends to focus on the modes of persuasion in order to appeal to the minds and feelings of her reader. The modes of persuasion include ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos is the appeal to ethics while pathos is the appeal to emotion, and logos is the appeal to logic. As a result, the utilization of the modes of persuasion helped create an understanding between Betty Friedan and her intended target audience which.
In addition to the utilization of the modes of persuasion, Friedan alludes to the idea that the times are changing regarding the concept of personal identity in the beginning of her excerpt.

According to Betty Friedan in paragraph one, “Thinkers of other times put forth the idea that people were, to a great extent defined by the work they did. The work that a man had to do to eat, to stay alive, to meet the physical necessities of this environment, dictated his identity.” Also, throughout paragraphs two, three, and four of The Feminist Mystique, Friedan illustrates the idea of how the ultimate goal of life is not about living long enough to reproduce and raise offspring into adulthood, but rather define an individual’s personal identity that is not associated with their immediate work or personal relations. Using the idea Friedan has introduced, an individual can determine that a person’s identity no longer has a direct correlation with their work, but rather is determined by who the individual is and what their personal aspirations and beliefs

are.
Betty Friedan wrote in paragraph two, “One sees the human significance of work-not merely as the means of biological survival, but as the giver of self and the transcender of self, as the creator of human identity and human evolution.” Friedan utilized logos to appeal with reason and to persuade her audience to witness the concept of personal identity through her viewpoints.

Also, Betty Friedan used logos to drag her reader into her manifesto which led to her illustrating her points by explaining how different individual throughout history have had the same/similar ideology as herself. The famous philosophers/ideologists Friedan included in The Feminine Mystique were Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Erik Erikson which paved the way to building a stronger connection between her audience and her ideas about personal identity throughout the course of time. Friedan also notes how Erik Erikson coined the term the identity crisis which depicts that the lack of self identity can only be cured by finding oneself through the process of losing oneself. Therefore, Friedan applied the use of logos in The Feminine Mystique to further solidify her assumptions about the changing of personal identity throughout time, and to appeal to reason among her

audience.
Another aspect Friedan used in The Feminine Mystique is pathos, the appeal to emotion. Friedan uses pathos throughout her manifesto by elaborating on how women within the last one hundred years needed their husbands to help develop the personal identities associated with the women. In paragraph six of Friedan’s manifesto, she begins to convey her views on the advancement of technology and how women have adopted a role within society which is referred to as the housewife. The sole purpose of housewives became to raise the children while the men went to work and were the financial providers of the household. Thus, Friedan appealed to the emotions of her audience by illustrating the view that women were valued below men, and could not perform anything above raising the children and maintaining the house. In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan proceeds to write about how women had to work in factories alongside men, had to learn a new language, and how to save their money in order to send their offspring to college. Also, in order to alleviate the occupancy issues within the workforce, strong, physically capable women were chosen to work in heavy labor jobs. Therefore, Friedan appealed to her audience’s emotions by illustrating how women were devalued. Thus, throughout this period of change among the social world, women began to share a role in society with men and were able to construct their own personal identities.
In paragraph ten, Friedan relates death to a conventional or a monotonous job. Riedan uses the previous comparison as a metaphor in order to rupture the conventional thoughts of her reader, which results in one throwing one’s life away just bringing home a paycheck. By using phrases such as “forfeit his own life” and “facing of death, ” Friedan effectively embellishes the embodiment of an identity lost society. By experiencing near death circumstances, in a metaphorical sense, an individual will obtain the self-realization that life is not worth living, without purpose, confidence, and assurance.
In conclusion, Betty Friedan presents the reader with a well crafted manifesto on the struggles for women’s personal identities within the time periods of the United States of America. Through a use of convincing ethos, pathos, and logos, Friedan is able to create a compelling manifesto expressing the struggles of women. Friedan reminds that society cannot limit women to just the common housewife, bent on raising her children and conforming to societal normalities. The work an individual does can no longer be the only definition of one’s identity. As time moves forward, humans of both genders must conform and evolve to the next stages of equality, harmony, and non belligerent
beliefs.