en 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 housewives. Friedan writes: It is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women. This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say (Friedan 26).
Friedan indicates that the experts were seeking an answer in the traditional role of women by focusing on one aspect or another of that role, as if women were discontented because some particular element in their traditional role had changed or was no longer being satisfied as once it had been. Friedan rejects this as an answer to the question, of course, and finds instead that the problem was simply that women wanted something more than the traditional role could give them, something more than husband, children, and home.
Much of her information was derived from interviewing women over a period of a decade or more. She finds that women have bene circumscribed in their actions and their aspirations by the nature of the feminine mystique:
The feminine mystique is so powerful that women grow up no longer knowing that they have the desires and capacities the mystique forbids (Friedan 68).
She finds that women are now passing through a period of self-examination constituting an identity crisis. Men have long had such identity crises, but women are expected to know their place, to have had that place so defined by society that there is no need for an examination of self or a search for identity because those answers have been given. What Friedan finds is that women are no longer accepting this traditional role and are finding that without it, they have no identity:
In terms of the old conventions and the new feminine mystique women are not expected to grow up to find out who they are, to choose their human identity. Anatomy is wo...