Summary Of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique

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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 …show more content…

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 …show more content…

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

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