But a “ third wave” of feminists were soon needed to search in vain for what activists like Friedan had made them free for. The old “mystique” of traditional femininity was said to give way to a new freedom. Friedan’s book is said to have sparked the “second wave” of feminism that led by the early 1980s to a new American economy dependent upon two adults instead of one per household toiling away in a cubicle, or standing all day on the floor of a retail store, or teaching other people’s children (often in order to pay a stranger look after their own). In 1963, Betty Friedan published her influential book The Feminine Mystique, inventing a term to describe the languor born of unfulfilled desires among American women, whose primary duties consisted in keeping their homes and raising their children.
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