Speakers:Two notable scholars will look back at Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and consider whether movement toward equality has persisted or stalled since the book was published in 1963. What has changed in roles at home and at work? How has law figured in the balance? Do we have new mystiques today?
The Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, which houses the extensive papers of Betty Friedan and the records of the National Organization for Women, is sponsoring this event to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Feminine Mystique.
Stephanie Coontz teaches at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and serves as the director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonpartisan association of family researchers and practitioners. Her most recent book is A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.
Ariela Dubler, the George Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History at Columbia Law School, writes and teaches in the areas of constitutional law, family law, and legal history. She is currently writing a book, "The Parental Difficulty," about the ways that the law has contributed to our understandings of mothers' and fathers' roles at home and at work.
Nancy F. Cott, the Pforzheimer Family Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library and the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of History at Harvard, will introduce the event and the panelists.
An exhibit of selected items from the Friedan papers will be on view in the library during a reception following the speakers' panel. The exhibit, It Changed My Life: The Feminine Mystique at Fifty, emphasizes the writing and reception of The Feminine Mystique, and it also honors the 50th anniversary of the 1963 Report of the President's Commission on the Status of Women.
This event is free and open to the public. More information here.
