The genesis of the so-called ‘second wave’ of feminism is well known. Although multifaceted and fragmented, feminist groups in Britain and the United States sought collectively to gain equal rights and privileges with men and to draw attention to myriad ways in which women continued to be oppressed by a patriarchal society. Betty Friedan's seminal text The Feminist Mystique, first published in 1963, is widely held as the inspiration that revitalized the feminist movement. At the centre of Friedan's thesis was a critique of the popular notion that truly ‘feminine’ women could gain complete fulfilment from the domestic role. Friedan noted that ‘millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands good-bye in front of the picture window’. Friedan of course, was by no means the first to confront the stifling confinement of marriage and motherhood. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for example, described her descent into despair in her autobiographical journal The Yellow Wallpaper, published in 1892. In this narrative, she wrote about her experience of nervous depression and the way in which she was prescribed enforced passivity and ‘forbidden to work’ until she was well again.