On this day in 1963, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan was published. This 200 page book has been credited with kicking off the second wave of feminism. But it wasn't without criticism.

The Feminine Mystique focused heavily on the "problem that has no name" faced by white, wealthy housewives. Even though the book was published during the civil rights movement, it didn't address struggles faced by African American women or working class women.

bell hooks wrote of The Feminine Mystique: "She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions."

Friedan has also been criticised for homophobia with the book alluding to the "murky smog" of homosexuality. In her position as an organiser following the publication of the book, she objected to lesbians' demands for representation and coined the phrase "Lavender Menace".

If we dig into Betty Friedan's past, though, we find that she wasn't quite the ordinary American housewife she presented herself as: in the 1940s and 1950s, she was involved in the labour movement and leftist activism.

At university, Friedan was involved in anti-fascist, radical organising. Some of her friends were investigated by the FBI for their radicalism. She later went on to work as a reporter for the left-wing Federated Press and the United Electrical Worker's news publication, UE News.

In her early work, Friedan reported on a wide range of topics, including the "double bars" of discrimination faced by African American women, and issues faced by working class women. These perspectives do not appear in The Feminine Mystique at all.

Friedan downplayed her past. So what happened to the woman who advocated for Black, Latina and working class women? It's unclear.

Perhaps in her later life as a suburban housewife, she became deradicalised in her misery. Or perhaps she downplayed these elements of her past for respectability.

Worth noting, criticism of The Feminine Mystique hasn't just come from a feminist perspective, but also a patriarchal perspective, with a conservative magazine describing it as one of the most harmful books of all time. But to that critical perspective, we say: *fart noises*