n were relatively content:
For example, if in return for being a man's property a woman receives economic security, a full emotional life centering around husband and children, and an opportunity to express her capacities in the management of her home, she has little cause for discontent.
While this statement is arguable in the way it assumes that women are not discontented under such circumstances, it is clear that for most of history women were expected to be content with this sort of life and were trained for that purpose. Clearly, circumstances of family life have changed in the modern era. Industry has been taken out of the home, and large families are no longer economically possible or socially desired. The home is no longer the center of the husband's life, and for the traditional wife there is only a narrowing of interests and possibilities for development: "Increasingly, the woman finds herself without an occupation and with an unsatisfactory emotional life." The change in sex roles that can be discerned in society is closely tied with changes in the structure of the family. Sociologists recognize that women have roles in the family and roles in public life, and they find that "the relative status of women in family life is more difficult to measure than their status in public affairs."
The role changes for women after World War II developed gradually and seemingly unnoticed for a long time. Betty Friedan wrote about the issue in the early 1960s and noted how many women were expressing discontent without knowing the source, beginning in the late 1940s. These women felt that something was missing in their lives without knowing what it was, and many of them sought psychiatric help to discover the source of their problem. Women were then given advice by an army of marriage and child-guidance counselors, psychotherapists, and armchair psychologists, all trying to show women how to adjust to their role as...