Betty Friedan was blamed for killing marital tradition, but
Stephanie Coontz says she helped make families stronger Believe
it or not, Betty Friedan was a romantic. The author of the
groundbreaking 1960s treatise “The Feminine Mystique” may have
detested certain traditional values, but she clung to the
fantasy of heterosexual love and marriage — here’s the key —
among equals. In fact, Friedan once said that her tombstone
should read: “She helped make women feel better about being
women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men” —
and yet she had been memorialized by many as anti-male and anti-
marriage. These are just a few of the untruths that historian
Stephanie Coontz exposes in her new book, “A Strange Stirring:
The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the
1960s.” It is essentially a book about a book — but it’s
actually far more interesting than that sounds. She takes us
back to the 1920s to illustrate the disappointment and yearning
that led to “The Feminine Mystique,” then to