"The pendulum of modern American social history has a tendency to swing wide..."
Betty Friedan speaking at a political rally in New York, 1971.
Friedan's work shattered the idealistic vision of the 1950's housewife. With the publishing of The Feminine Mystique, "for the first time since the women's suffrage movement ended successfully with the passage of the nineteenth amendment granting women the right to vote, women gathered together on a large scale to work for equal rights with men, a concept that at the time was nothing less than revolutionary."