“The problem that has no name”

In 1963 American writer Betty Friedan published a book entitled The Feminine Mystique, which aimed to highlight what she termed “the problem that has no name”. This book was to go on to be popularly credited with launching the second wave of the feminist movement. What was this problem that inspired women and men to new social insight and activism, and that spawned the new wave of thought that has developed into contemporary feminism? A white college-educated suburban housewife, Friedan claimed to identify a deep malaise among her female peers, a problem she diagnosed as based in the discrepancy between women's own sense of their needs and potential in life, and the feminine roles of wife and mother to which their society – husbands, doctors, experts, schools, churches, politics and professions – consigned them. Under the terms of the “feminine mystique”, Friedan contended, women were living a lie, embracing a life that constrained and distorted their full potential. Subsequent thinkers have named the problems at the heart of feminism in different ways: oppression, exploitation, subordination, discrimination, inequality and exclusion, sexism, misogyny, chauvinism, patriarchy and phallism. Yet all of these terms circle around a common terrain: that of the restrictions associated with women's social opportunities. Some thinkers put these restrictions down to prevailing dispositions and attitudes, and others to social arrangements; some suggest they are the result of specific constraints, others more systematic problems.